Richmix lecture

As an educational visit our class went to a lecture put on by media establishment Richmix, it is a centre for up and coming people in every aspect of media, there is a stage and three cinema screens, the biggest of these screens hosted the lecture, where we learnt of how music videos originated and developed through the decades. 

The first ever music videos were experiments from artists who played with the idea of combining moving image and music. An example of this is from Len Lye's "The Colourbox" 

This early video progressed into a new invention, the soundie which was a step up from the Jukebox, it had a television screen which plays a video that goes along with the song, this video is usually a performance and these are now seen as collectable and vintage.

These soundies developed further into a colour version, the scopitone, which was very popular throughout France. The videos shown soon developed a narrative as the creators wished to be more creative and come up with something different.

Now in the 70's, The Beatles pioneered a movement, this was the idea of a short promotional film to accompany a new album. This can be seen in their video promoting 'A Hard Day's Night'

In the 70's many bands followed in the footsteps of The Beatles, these usually involved high amounts of performance rather than the rather conceptual/narrative ideas coming from The Beatles, The Beatles were very psychedelically orientated in their prime, leading to the production of the very peculiar video for their song "Strawberry Fields Forever"

By 1981 there had been a specific channel on cable television completely devoted to the music video, notably MTV, this turned out to be a big hit, drastically improving the rate in development of the music video. However there was a considerable difference in music style on the channel, there were not any black acts on the channel until Michael Jackson became a global star.


Through many sub-genres, from Michael Jackson to motown to Sugarhill Gang rap, this rap quickly developed into a mainstream boom of rap music, and with that, MTV split into several devoted channels for different genres and even developed into something far from a music video channel, showing programmes instead.


I learnt a lot from this session, many thing surprised me and some things I already had an idea of but the convention far strengthened my knowledge.