1,720,990 research outputs found
Music videos in the British screen industries and screen heritage: From innovation to curation. Introduction
Full text linkIn December 2019, Rolling Stone magazine ran a piece on the best videos of the year which began by asking, “What even counts as a music video now?” (Shaffer). Vevo, Tiktok and Instagram TV have blurred the lines. Videos can be an hour long. They can be events on YouTube Premiere. They can be virtual reality. The idea that the world of the earliest creators of pop promos was simple in comparison to today subtends this dossier. In 2015, I was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant to investigate the history of music videos in Britain since 1966. At the end of the grant, I curated a collection of the most significant of those videos into a limited-edition box set (Power). Selecting them involved very detailed discussions with our interviewees and industry consultants about just what a “music video”—known as a “promo” until the mid 1980s—is. The term “music video” arose in the 1980s. It was used in record labels to describe visual products mastered on physical videotapes for television broadcast. In fact, almost all of those products were shot on celluloid (16mm or 35mm) until digital technologies allowed HD to become the norm in the 2000s. For the purposes of this dossier, I define music videos and pop promos as a type of musical short film for mass audiences commissioned and released by record labels (usually) at the same time as the release of a synchronised audio “single”; the shorts comprise a copyrighted synchronised picture and audio track in which a percentage of the royalties accrue to the recording artist and/or record label. This dossier is a collection of core materials emerging from the AHRC project
Conservation and curation: theoretical and practical issues in the making of a national collection of British music videos 1966–2016
Full text linkThis article identifies and examines the research methods involved in curating a national collection of British music videos for the British Film Institute and British Library in relation to existing scholarship about the role of the curator, the function of canons in the humanities, and the concept of a hierarchy of screen arts. It outlines the process by which a theoretical definition of “landmarks” guided the selection of works alongside a commitment to include a regionally and socially diverse selection of videos to reflect the variations in film style of different music genres. The article also assesses the existing condition of British music video archives: rushes, masters, as well as documents and digital files, and the issues presenting academics and students wishing to study them. It identifies the fact that music video exists in the gaps between two disciplines and industries (popular music studies / the music industry and film and television studies / the screen industries) as an additional challenge to curators of the cultural form, alongside complex matters of licensing and formats
How long is a good story? Compressed narratives in British screen advertising since 1955
No full textThe sixty second commercial has held a privileged status with the British television advertising industry since 1955. Recent scholarship in the useful film paradigm offers a promising starting point to analyse the design craft of the industry, as does scholarship on early advertising film. But in order to fully understand the evolution of this privileged status it is necessary to understand the conflicts that drive the different sectional parts of the tripartite supply chain and the organisations that regulate the design such as the Advertising Producers’ Association and Design and Art Direction Awards. It is also necessary to understand the use of certain devices film directors use in this compressed narrative form. Textual density is a primary one. Narrative in screen advertising remains under-researched. This article examines a range of commercials from the 1960s to the 2020s which utilise these devices to engage audiences in stories that sell brands, demonstrating some of the varied and transmedial way that narrative works across different categories of product and multi-media campaigns
Dancing and dreaming: “Fifty Years of British Music Video” in Havana
Full text linkThis report reflects on a follow-on initiative from the AHRC-funded project “Fifty Years of British Music Video” designed to explore a collaboration between Cuba’s dance, film, and music cultures to create non-performance-based dance videos. Facilitated by service company Island Pictures, we worked with a young director, Giselle Garcia Castro, dancers at Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, and leading Cuban rap artist Telmary. The result was a single-shot video for Telmary’s “Soy el Verso” (2018), filmed in the dance studio, based on an improvisation guided by Giselle, and inspired by the José Martí poem in the song. The video fulfilled PI Caston’s ambition to break down the barrier between “dance film” and “music video” by building the choreography from the lyrics and making it the centre of the exercise. It endorsed Caston’s conceptual aim to encourage practitioners to identify and articulate their own narrative and iconography. The team also produced a fifteen-minute documentary of the process including interviews with filmmakers, teachers and students. The project demonstrated that academic collaboration with artistic communities can stimulate new creative practices and economic development. It also showed how creative industries researchers can use networks established by institutions such as the British Council and British Embassies to exchange media practice
Dossier: Screen Advertising. Introduction
No full textThe purpose of this dossier is to ask, “What is screen advertising and what relevance, if any, does it have for film and television studies?” Both are large and complex questions, but the second is perhaps the bolder and, therefore, a question that will remain unanswered. It invokes a larger conversation about the nature of film studies in the academy since it emerged within the paradigm of literary studies in Britain and the USA in the 1970s. To answer these questions, the dossier presents interviews with three influential figures from screen advertising production, two reports about advertising archives and an article about the industry in Britain since 1955
Kick, bollocks and scramble: an examination of power and creative decision making in the production process during the golden era of British music videos 1995-2001
Full text linkIn the golden era of British music video production 1995 – 2001 the responsibilities of a feature film producer were shared by the producer, executive producer, director and video commissioner. The author examines the roles of each, and argues that Pardo’s framework (2010 for evaluating the creative contribution of producers obscures the direct budgetary power of producers in this particular sector. She argues that more empirical research should be conducted on the role of the producer in sectors of the British screen industry other than feature films and television
The Fine Art of Commercial Freedom: British Music Videos and Film Culture
Full text linkAn outline and analysis of the British music video industry and its impact on film culture in the 1990s and 2000s
Celluloid saviours: angels and reform politics in Hollywood film
No full textIn 'Celluloid Saviours', the author analyses a corpus of US films dating from the silent era that she calls film blanc. In these fantasy films, a guardian spirit with extraordinary powers suspends the ordinary, known laws of time and space, and a main character reforms himself or herself in life-changing ways. The author argues that the historical pattern of film blanc relates to the rise and fall of liberal and reform thought in US politics, specifically to conceptions of human nature as a tabula rasa.
This conception is evident both in the early feature films featuring angels such as Chaplin's 'The Kid' and much later examples such as the 1980s box office hit, 'Trading Places'. She argues that this narrative tradition runs from Hollywood's beginnings to the present day and is foreshadowed in the English ghost stories of Charles Dickens. The classic era of film blanc is epitomised in the enduringly popular film, 'It's a Wonderful Life'. More recent examples of narrative form analysed by Caston include 'The Truman Show' and 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'
Commercial break: British advertising on screen
No full textIn this report, I describe the development of British screen advertising as represented in the BFI National Archive, address several key questions about the BFI’s advertising holdings, discuss the BFI’s strategic digitisation projects, Unlocking Film Heritage and Heritage 2022, and, finally, share areas of research and topics within advertising that are ripe for exploration as possible academic partnerships
Interview: Sophie Muller
Full text linkSince her early videos for Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics, Sophie Muller has grown to be one of the most prominent pop music video directors in the world. She has shot over three hundred music videos through her prolific and celebrated career. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Grammy, multiple MTV and CMT awards, a Brit Award, a Music Week Award, and the MVPA Director of the Year Award. Muller’s extensive body of work includes music videos for Rihanna, Radiohead, Gwen Stefani, Beyoncé, Bjork, Coldplay, Bebe Rexha, P!nk, The Cure, Kings of Leon, Nelly Furtado, Maroon 5, Alicia Keys, The Killers, Morrisey, Blur and Beck. She has also shot stills campaigns and album covers for artist including Sade, Sophie Ellis Bextor and Gwen Stefani, and art-directed live tours, concert films and commercials
- …
