Music videos are the combination of rhythmic sound and a short film. They could also be defined as visual interpretations of musical performances. The videos are made as promotional material for the music within the video, or possibly a certain album or tour of the music artist. Many view music videos as a work of art themselves, each video being unique to match the song being played.
The first instance of “visual music” would be the abstract animated films by “Oskar Fischinger”, a German Filmmaker. He animated simple shapes to move with music being played, and that paved the way for music videos. The next type of “visual music” we would see was the sing along videos from Max Fleischer. He would put the lyrics of the song on the video, and animate a bouncing ball to show videos what to sing and when.
While these examples of “visual music” paved the way for the future, many believe the first music video was done by The Beatles in 1965 with their video “Help!”. This video brought on many others from artists like Queen, Michael Jackson, and the first aired music video on MTV by Radiohead. Since then, as technology has grown, music videos have improves as well.
Music videos are not just done by filming, they are created with all kinds of technology. The first music video with claymation and stop-motion animation is “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel in 1986. The video gained lots of attention since it had lots of different styles within it. The video “Take On Me” by a-ha blended live action people with rotoscoping illustrations, which had never been done before. Other music videos are completely animated, like for the Gorillaz.
Artists are taking technology a step further within their music videos. The band Bjork (FIX) are among one of the first bands to have a 360-degree music video which can be viewed within virtual reality headsets. Radiohead created a music video for their song “House of Cards” by using lasers rotating 360 degrees to create a data map of the scene and themselves.
Music videos also have plenty of room for improvement. The music industry has turned from being audio, to audio visual, and finally visual audio (Hu, 2019). If an artist does not create some kind of visual to accompany their music, it could get lost amongst the waves of music flooding the world. In order to keep up with the world, artists could live stream their videos, or begin to personalize the experience by localizing the videos for certain areas.