![]() I thought, ‘This could be amazing.’ That was the springboard for the whole narrative, really.” As for all the business with the motorcycle racers who chase Harket and Bailey, that was inspired by some visuals he remembered from TV 21, a British comic he read as a child. “An image kind of jumped out of this drawn hand, reaching out of a comic book into the real world,” he says. ![]() Inspired by the rotoscope possibilities, Barron began devising a story concept and immediately was struck by a visual idea. It would end up requiring four months to get the work done. Barron was told he could take as much as he liked. He came to Barron with the idea to produce a second “Take on Me” video to accompany a revamped version of the single, and suggested that Barron work with a pair of animators, Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger, who had some experience in rotoscope.Īyeroff also gave Barron something that was rare for music-video directors to have back then: time. But Jeff Ayeroff, an executive at Warner Records who often offered Barron video gigs, was convinced that A-ha could become a thing. “It was a budget designed to really do something spectacular.”īy 1985, “Take on Me” had already been released as a single and a more standard music video, neither of which captured public imagination. “We very rarely got that kind of budget,” he said. Steve Barron, who directed many prominent videos in the 1980s, including Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” and Madonna’s “Burning Up,” was responsible for directing both of the classic musical shorts. During a phone call from Bucharest, Romania, where the Irish-British filmmaker is currently directing the upcoming BBC co-production of Around the World in 80 Days, he recalled that the production budgets on the videos were identical: 100,000 pounds. Here’s how brand new: Luxo, Jr., the game-changing 3-D animation short that first established the capabilities of Pixar Animation Studios, was unveiled on August 17, 1986, a little more than two weeks before that year’s VMAs. These tools were basically brand new at the time. “Money for Nothing” was largely created using a Bosch FGS-4000, one of the earliest computer-graphics systems, and Paintbox, a program that allowed creators to manipulate and color images with a stylus pen. “Take On Me” relied on a style of animation that dates back to the early 20th century: rotoscoping, which involves tracing live-action images and rendering them to look like literal moving sketches or drawings. With regard to animation technique, the two videos sat at opposite ends of the spectrum. ![]() Animated sequences also could be found in other major nominees, including “What You Need” by INXS and “Road to Nowhere” by Talking Heads, whose stop-motion-style section would inspire a subsequent music video masterpiece, Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.” But “Take On Me” and “Money for Nothing” were the standouts. ![]() “Take On Me” earned 8 nominations and won six awards, while “Money for Nothing” received 11 nominations and won two Moon Men, including the big prize, Video of the Year. The two videos demonstrate how creative and technologically ambitious videos had become halfway through the decade, a fact reflected the following year at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, where the two were the most nominated videos of the night. The other was “Money for Nothing,” the Dire Straits MTV diss track that brought the two complaining blue-collar workers from the song to 3-D animated life. One was “Take On Me,” the A-ha video in which a woman (actress Bunty Bailey) gets yanked out of a café by lead singer Morten Harket and into a black-and-white animated realm where they fall in love and get chased by bad guys. In 1985, two groundbreaking works of animation could be viewed, sometimes in the same hour, on MTV. ![]() “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straights and “Take On Me” by A-ha. ![]()
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