The Beatles

THE BEATLES are a great example to focus on when studying music videos in terms of development, what makes a good and bad video, and the transition from film to video. When the Beatles were getting big, there was a significant rise of proliferation in the number of televisions sold, especially when colour TV was introduced in the early/mid 1970s.



The Beatles released 'A Hard Days Night' in 1964- a feature length film lasting 87 minutes. This film was in black and white, but still attracted a wide audience and gave the Beatles a cheeky, 'jack-the-lad' image that they wanted to display to the public. They released their album 'A hard days night' at the same time, and this gave the idea they were completely in control of their image, a very good marketing strategy (people would watch the film, then buy the album or vise versa)

1963/4 was the years of Beatle Mania, and due to new technology, 85million people watched their first American TV appearance. A pre-recorded performance was shown on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. The fact that such a large number of people watched the show, it emphasizes the true power of the media, as shortly after the Beatles held the top 5 positions in the US chart.

'THE BEATLES ARE MORE POPULAR THAN JESUS' - JOHN LENNON

The band started to follow conventions in their films, for example in their 1966 video for 'Paperback Writer'

• Use of close-ups
• Band performance
• MES relating to instruments
• Musical equipment
• Montage editing

In 1967, due to new satellite technology over  400million people watched 'All You Need Is Love'. Videos are now made for the sole purpose of selling the artist and promoting them, which sure worked for the Beatles. 

A key example of a badly made video is 'Hello Goodbye'. There is a significant lack of camera shots, with lots of wasted space. Although conventional close-ups are used its the only effective camera shot. There are key messages running throughout the video though, with John Lennon's body language being prominent. He is pointing at the audience, which is always been associated with Elvis. It could be implying that they're now more well known than him. 

BOXING DAY 1967- THE BEATLES MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR- a film for TV. The magical mystery tour  was made for BBC1 and shown in black and white, Millions of people watched it, but it did not come off well, due to fact it relied upon the colour to get the full effect, but the BBC was not yet in colour TV. The plot had absolutely nothing to do with the Beatles as a band, but was still promoting them and their music. One of the songs within the film 'I am The Walrus' has a very psychedelic video, and the song was actually banned for incorporating the word 'knickers'. However, at the end of the song you can clearly hear the words 'everybody smoke pot' being chanted, but the critics did not pick up on this. This shows the fact that the Beatles still had some sort of say in how their music was presented, but truly reflects their personas,