Alright let's start with the obvious information as always… Take on Me is a song by the Norwegian synthpop band A-ha released in 1985, everyone who has heard of this song also knows about the award winning video that went with it, where pencil-sketch styled rotoscoping (A method that I mentioned awhile back in my post about A Scanner Darkly) was combined with live-action, approximately 3000 frames were rotoscoped, which took about 16 weeks to complete.
Featuring a romatic fantasy narrative, Take on Me's music video to me was one of the best depictions of Escapism, in a romanticized manner that is, where a girl is practically able to move between two worlds, and falls in love with a fictional character and lives happily ever after with him… or so they think (Hint hint, watch The Shine Always Shines on TV's music video).
The rotoscoping method was able to create more fluid movements that allowed the characters to realistically move about in the comic world as they do in the real world, making it seem as both worlds were connecting and merging in some way, causing more confusion to the main character by the dilemma she is in.
Steve Barron was the director for this music video, an Irish film director, film producer and of course a music video director, he is also best known for directing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film in 1990 and Coneheads in 1993, and also the music video for Michael Jackson's Billie Jean.
Michael Patterson is an experimental film artist, teacher and a commercial film director specializing in TV spots and music videos. Currently he teaches animation at the Division of Animation and Digital Arts at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, his best known character is MC Skat Kat (Errm…) that was used in Paula Abdul's Opposites Attract music video.
I will be writing about horror/halloween-related animations tomorrow onwards, so hope you guys are looking forward to that!
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