History of Music Videos - Influential Videos

Most of the influential videos have cost a lot of money to make. The most expensive video of all time was the video for Michael and Janet Jackson's Scream which was released in 1995. However another Michael Jackson is probably known as the best music video of all time. Released in 1983 Michael Jackson's Thriller lasts for 14 minutes and is regarded as the best video of all time in a period where technology wasn't groundbreaking. It even features as number 1 on MTV's best videos of all time. The purpose of the video is to promote the artists and most videos do it just like that. In our video we would like to promote the artist frequently and by creating a performance, our video will conform to the conventions of a normal video. On the other hand there are exceptions to normal videos. The video for 'Under Pressure' by Queen and David Bowie runs through video clips showing people under pressure without a band performance. Computer animation in the 1980s was just taking off and techniques have been used in the popular songs 'Money for Nothing' by Dire Straits and 'Take on Me' by A-ha. In 'Money for Nothing' groundbreaking computer generated animation techniques made the video very popular. In fact this video was the second animation video to appear on MTV. Peter Gabriel also used stop motion animation techniques with help from Aardman to produce the video for 'Sledgehammer'. This proved to be successful and won 9 MTV music video awards. Today many artists upload their videos on Youtube and the popularity is determined by how many people have viewed that song. Lady Gaga has one of the most viewed videos on Youtube with 'Bad Romance' which has over 300 million views. Eminem is another artist who is popular on Youtube.