Video created by Annabel ("AJ") Jankel and Rocky Morton of Cucumber Studios, London. They had previously worked on commercials and title sequences, moving increasingly into music videos (later for Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, etc.)
Jankel and Morton were co-creators of the fictional AI personality first seen in Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future (1985). Headroom was deliberately created to be, in the words of Morton, "very sterile, arrogant, Western personification of the middle-class, male TV host". The couple went on to direct the feature films DOA (1988) and Super Mario Bros. (1993) plus numerous other titles. AJ Jankel has won many awards for her work.
For "Accidents Will Happen" they had no access to video, but instead sent a photographer to get a 35mm still sequence (shot on motor drive). This was rotoscoped and combined with cel animation. The final sequence was filmed off a computer screen with a Bolex 16mm camera, at an (anonymous) university architecture department. This is considered to be the first computer-generated moving image in a music video.
Info from Animation World Network here.
Saturday, 9 April 2022
"Accidents Will Happen" (1979, Jankel and Morton) for Elvis Costello
Thursday, 3 February 2022
"Take On Me" (dir. Steve Barron, 1985) music video for A-Ha
This is actually the second video made to advertise "Take on Me", after the first attempt failed to chart the band A-Ha. It took 16 long weeks to hand draw 3,000 frames, using the technique of rotoscoping, which involves drawing over live-action footage. The result is one of the most iconic music videos in history, with over 1.2 billion views on YouTube.
Wednesday, 2 February 2022
The Lord of the Rings (dir. Ralph Bakshi, 1978)
This sequence from the film shows the strange combination of rotoscoping (drawing over live action) and more conventional cel animation. The film had a long, convoluted history with various scripts and directions considered. Bakshi had always seen it as an animation, since the effects of the time would have rendered a live-action approach "tacky". Though this was supposed to be the first of two films to cover the written trilogy, there was never a serious attempt to create the second part, even though the film was a financial success.