Special Effects from Music Video History
Take on Me - A-ha This music video impressed me the most. It tells the story of a cartoon character who falls in love with a woman in a diner who's reading the comic book he appears in. It was done by hand using a technique called rotoscoping. Eventually you project the video on a screen or rotoscope and trace the image. It is done frame by frame. For this particular video around 3000 drawings were made. It took 16 weeks to complete them. I think for a video of its time, it uses innovative technology that portrays a lot of skill and dedication, and therefore impressed me the most. The three dimensional feature of the hand appearing out of the comic book was the most impressive feature in my opinion, or the transition between comic drawings and real life within a single frame.