The Start Of Music Videos

The ability to express lyrics from songs into videos was introduced around the 20's. Cinemas were the inspiration for music videos, people saw this as another way to showcase their talent. Music videos are what they are today because of technology and how dedication and the work that has gone into them. Lyrics now have an emotional twist to them because of the things that maybe used in the videos, the words used by the artist are now put in to action, this allows the artist to express themselves and their songs a lot more. 

The Early Stages

One of the first music videos to be made was Mamie Smith's 'Harlem Blues', this was made a video in 1935, so you can imagine how different it was to the videos we know watch, not only is the videos back then black & white it also did not have that much going on in it. 

One of the first ever videos that was aired on one of the worlds best music television shows (MTV) was The Buggles - 'Video killed the radio star'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs - This was the actually video published because the URL to the music video could not be embedded. 

Technical Codes 

In the 90's a number of technical codes became more common:

• The most common was the editing that was associated with the music promo, it had now become fast cut montages.
• Split screen, colourisation had now become common used effects. 
• No representational techniques, in which the music artist is never shown.  

Modern music videos are now different because of the use of editing and recording processes, the videos are also helped by the development of a number of effects such as green & blue screens.

The video below shows the good use of editing processes, it allows the audience to engage in some sort with the video. What I mean by this is that the audience find it interesting to look at because it is telling a story of some sort. This video has some comic book like twist to it which definitely targeted his target audience of 16+ 

A ha - Take me on 

The advent of HQ colour videotape recorders and video cameras has enabled many pop acts to produce promotional videos fast and relatively cheap compared to the high costs of using film. Justin Bieber recently directed his own video featuring the lovely, good looking Nicki Minaj. The artist used some useful techniques which bring me back to AS media studies, he used the handheld technique, he was able to show his POV and able to move the camera freely to make the audience believe they are involved in the music video. 

 Justin Bieber ft Nicki Minaj - Beauty and a beat