History of Music Videos

Music videos represent a crucial part in the music industry. A music video also gives a chance for artists to impress the audience with a querky and/or expensive video, as well as show off looks and dances.

One of the first videos made was 'Strawberry Fields' by The Beatles.  It was filmed on 30 January 1967 in Knole Park in Sevenoaks, and directed by Peter Goldmann.

After watching this video, I noticed a lot differences to current music videos in comparison to this, and this shows how much ideas and technology has moved on since the making of this video. The first thing I noticed was about the video was the quality of the image. The colour isn't of particularly good quality, but the quality is just good enough to see what is going on in the video. However, as I have mentioned in other posts, videos are getting more and more of a 'vintage' theme and are using effects to make the film look 'old fashioned' such as camera quality. I think the biggest difference in current music videos to this one is the technology used. I assume this video was lit naturally (day light) and in the nigh time scene it isn't ver visable at all. Also, the video only took 2 days to film, where as more recent videos take a much longer time to film. There is a very limited amount of props in this video, the main props seem to be the piano and the car, but these props don't appear for alengthy amount of time.. Most videos now have loads of props and they feature throughout the music video.  There are also not very many scene changes, whereas music videos now commonly have multiple locations and scenes. Coloured filters are used at the end of the video, and these are very rarely used, most videos want to have the best quality and locations. Also, music has changed alot since then and things are becoming more artificial and futuristic, so artists want to produce a video that matches the music they make. One of the main differences I noticed was that, at the end of the video it just stops, rather than uses something like a fade.
However, there are some features in the video that are still used now. For example the use of editing techniques like cross disolves, jump cuts and fades. Stop motion animation is used sometimes and it gives the same 'vintage' effect. Something that I thought was effective in this video was the reverse effects and this is used often aswell.



This video used similar effects to the Beatles music video. It used the reverse effect throughout the video similarly to 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. It also uses slow motion and this video also just cuts at the end. This isn't done very often but here it is. There are not very many scene changes, there appears to just be locations including; the house, the road and the park like area. The video also uses pans up and down, like the previous video.
Overall, although technology has moved on and better images are being produced, I don't think that the way we film now compared to previous years has changed a great deal. Some ideas have been developed and special effects are alot more accessible now than they were then, but similar camera angles and editing techniques are still being used. I think that more artists want to give there video a more classic theme, but others still like their video to be modern and futuristic.