There are no special effects. This is one of the best music videos of all time. It became 6 MTV music awards and 2 other nominations. It took many months to draw over the real film material so all this comic effects are Handmade. Morten Harket, the vocalist of a-ha is one of the best singers in the music scene with his 5 octaves vocal range (and he was and still is one of the most handsome men existing 😊)
@@drigerdranzer7514 You're right. It took months to draw over more than 10.000 frames, but they have created a masterpiece. Back then it was something never done and never seen before.
The entire video was filmed in real person then 2 artists took 4 months to hand sketch over 10000 pictures and then they were spliced into the regular film. Amazing for the time-1985. This video won several Grammys as well as other music and video awards. Prince later used the same tech in his video for Raspberry Beret!
That technology had been around for decades before the 80s. It was invented in the 1910s-1920s. It is just a very time-consuming, so traditional animation was preferred. Still a great video though.
The keyboard riff was written by Magne and Pal when they were 14 years old and still at school in Morway. The used to play it with the band they had at school called Bridges but the song was called the juicy fruit song you can find it on youtube if interested. The band members are called Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, guitarist, chief songwriter also plays keyboards and drums. Morten Harket lead vocals Alsoplays guitar, piano, drums, and occasionally co-writes for A-HA and lastly Magne Mags Furuholmen lead keyboards, also plays guitar, drums and songwrites for A-HA. Take care 😘 ❤️🇳🇴❤️A-HA FOREVER❤️🇳🇴❤️ 🥇🥇🥇 🎸🎹🎤 🫠🥰🏴
Just to be clear though it wasn't the tech that blew our minds but the creative use of existing techniques. Rotoscoping had been done before since the 1930s in many animations to make movements more natural (tracing Disney cartoon characters over live actors in motion) but this style of deliberate sketchlike comic drawings for live action music video is brilliant. I vaguely remember seeing the exact effect used before Take On Me but the closest example I can think of is the movie "Tron" (a Disney film) from 2 years earlier.
And just imagine, in 77 the back motorcycle villain was in the bar in Star Wars saying "My friend doesn't like you..." I liked the song and listened to it on the radio alot, but never wore neon.
This video was considered to be cutting edge for the times. It won several awards from MTV . The song was an okay song for the time but the video really made it more than what it was. I’m not saying I didn’t like it but it was a typical pop song of the 80’s by an obscure group that no one was familiar with. The video really helped the song. It’s just one of the things that really defined the 80’s. All you had to have was a catchy song, and a really great video and your Star. We’ll never be that way again.
It's referred to as rotoscope animation. Back t hey used to painstakingly trace over live action footage frame by frame. The modern process can be done easily in editing software.
I know you/she didn’t say this in this video but she has before and so have other reactors about the darkness, scary, or deadpan faces, lyrics, etc in 80’s videos. What people who didn’t live through it don’t realize is that in the late 70’s/early 80’s was crushing economy and dying industries destroying cities, bringing despair and a cold war going on. Then when the economy got better we all feared nuclear war. This jubilance/emo/upbeat angst combination was our way of coping with it all…
Just imagine in 85 , I'm in my 20s and this was like one of the first music videos on what was MTV ..... This blew our minds !!!! The band was from Norway ... this was their big hit.
Great video and song! Love this band then and now❤ If you want I suggest to you a lot of their beautiful songs : The sun always shines on tv, Manhattan skyline, Summer moved on ( live in Vallhall or for Ending on a high note 2010), Minor Earth Major Sky, Forever not Yours...
Not sus. We did have the tech back then to make this video. I remember when this video came out. It was all over MTV. Our 80s minds were officially blown. Back then MTV was a great channel with all the bands trying to turn out the best videos. Music videos back then were not just vehicles to promote the artist they were art in & of themselves and producers & graphics artists churned out all this concept art. A lot was mediocre but some shining examples of excellence broke through the noise & defined the decade. Like this one.
But not a-ha who are not one hit wonders… and who didn’t split, but had many other hits over several decades, 11 studio albums, 2 Guinness World records, and a James Bond theme to their name. They have now sold over 100 million records and are still performing live to sellout audiences on every continent, last world tour only ended in July 2022…last album True North released October 2022.
Many of them, like a-ha, were wrongly considered one-hit wonders in the U.S., even when they had two or more hits in the U.S. (a-ha had two top-40 hits in the U.S.) and tons of hits elsewhere.
