The History of Computer-Animated Music Videos

Before the advent of MTV, nobody really knew what to do with music videos.

Labels would commission promotional films for one-off showings, like Queen’s iconic clip for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but there was no real strategy at play.

This led to artists conducting bold and wild experiments, like the 1978 video for Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ “Accidents Will Happen.” The majority of the video is animated traditionally, with ink and paint, and it still looks incredible today.

But it’s a short segment at the end that puts it at the start of this list.

Directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton commandeered a university computer and had it draw out a green-on-black vector monitor image of Costello singing, then redraw it rotated several times.

They filmed it right off the screen with a Bolex 16mm camera, making it the very first computer-generated moving image in a music video.

Artist Rebecca Allen was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1970s when she became interested in computers.

Allen started taking classes at MIT, becoming sort of an artist in residence at the computer lab.

Record impresario Chris Blackwell introduced her to photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who had recorded an oddball “self-help album” called Dancing for Mental Health under the alias Will Powers.

Goldsmith wanted a cutting-edge video, and Allen agreed, but she demanded complete creative control.

Writing animation software from scratch, she produced two visionary clips for Goldsmith, both of which were released in 1983.

“Smile” is the more interesting of the two, featuring polygonal characters dancing along with digitally filtered and altered live-action footage, but both were miles ahead of what anybody else was doing.

Ric Ocasek’s retro-New Wave band was one of the most durable hitmakers of the 1980s, but it’s fair to say that the group wasn’t exactly a bunch of lookers.

That’s probably the best explanation for why their album covers featured pin-up girl paintings instead of group shots.

But in the dawning era of music videos, they needed to compete.

And animation was the answer.

Effects company Charlex had come to record company Arista’s attention following a series of TV ads for the National Enquirer.

They brought a new tool to the world of music videos: the Quantel Paintbox, the first commercial unit that allowed artists to draw and composite directly on top of video footage.

Originally designed for TV news and weather programs, the Paintbox was quickly finding favor among a new generation of artists, letting them isolate and move images in layers quickly and easily.

The final video for the 1984 hit “You Might Think” features a model being alternately harassed and serenaded by the band composited into candy-colored sets with primitive 3D objects.

The clip would become the first music video added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The majority of Duran Duran’s music video for “The Reflex” is the band in their big-haired prime playing a concert, interspersed with footage of dancers shot as silhouettes over primary colored backgrounds.

But near the end of the clip, the video screen above the stage unleashes a huge waterfall onto the audience. 

I talked to numerous video artists who worked during this period and they agree that the wave of water is a purely digital effect, painted on a system like the Quantel Paintbox and chroma-keyed over the performance footage.

“The Reflex” was prescient in showing how directors would soon be turning to CGI solutions to create special effects that would be impossible in real time. 

What many people wrongly consider the beginning of computer animation in music videos was the clip for British rock band Dire Straits’ 1985 single “Money For Nothing.” The song was a mid-tempo rocker sung from the perspective of a blue-collar worker, but the video—directed by Steve Barron, who lensed A-Ha’s iconic “Take On Me” video the same year—was wildly innovative.

In addition to bright flourishes of animation over the band performing live, segments featuring two 3D-animated characters dazzled viewers.

Barron’s studio used a Bosch FGS4000 to model and animate the characters and the Quantel Paintbox to do the compositing.

Even the concert elements were digitally altered to add squiggles of color, but the real conversation piece was the two low-poly workmen, which were the first 3D-animated characters in a three-dimensional environment.

“Money For Nothing” won Video of the Year at MTV’s third annual VMAs.

CBS Records was eager to get the first-ever solo album from Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, and part of the deal was a sizable budget for music videos to promote She’s The Boss.

The clip for the single “Hard Woman” was, in 1985, one of the most expensive music videos ever produced, in part because of its advanced technology.

Animators John Whitney Jr.

and Gary Demos, along with ex-Disney animator Bill Kroyer, used a Cray X-MP supercomputer.

At the time, there were only six units in operation, with five being permanently in the employ of the US government and the defense industry. 

They used this computer to create a Southwestern adobe house for a pair of pastel-lined CGI figures to dance through, with Jagger’s visage composited into a flying diamond.

Even though it came out the same year as “Money For Nothing,” “Hard Woman” is a much more ambitious clip that really pushes the nascent computer graphics envelope.

German pioneers Kraftwerk were ahead of the curve on just about every aspect of modern music, so it’s no surprise that they commissioned digital replicas of their faces in 1983.

Unfortunately for the band’s place in the history books, the polygonal Kraftwerk didn’t make their public debut until 1986’s “Musique Non Stop.”

Rebecca Allen created 3D models of the band members based on mannequin heads they had sculpted and shipped to her.

She then took polygonal models she had previously used for an NFL project and attached the digital Kraftwerk heads to them.

The resulting 3D models were used for the album art, promotional materials and the video, which also features Allen’s singing voice. 

The early ‘90s were a period of transition for the rock music industry, as the hair bands that dominated the 1980s rapidly fell out of fashion.

One of the last holdouts was Def Leppard, the British metal band that had just lost principal songwriter Steve Clark to a drug overdose in 1991.

The group started transitioning to a hookier, more pop-oriented sound, and an animated music video was a great way to push that change.

Steve Barron helmed the music video for “Let’s Get Rocked” off the Adrenalized album, which used the successful formula of interspersing footage of the band with the adventures of an animated 3D character.

Def Leppard’s cartoon mascot was a denim vest-wearing suburban kid named Flynn who got into all sorts of trouble.

The performance footage was also notable, as the live-action band was composited over a completely digital Union Jack-styled stage.

1991 was a banner year for the technique of digitally “morphing” one image into another.

It was a signature effect of the villainous T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but just a few months after that film hit the big screen, the King of Pop employed it in one of his most ambitious and audacious videos.

Michael Jackson was already well known for his expensive, cinematic clips, and “Black Or White” was directed by John Landis and premiered simultaneously on BET, MTV, VH1, and Fox.

The video is chock-full of MJ’s trademark indulgence, but it’s the bit at the end that lands it on this list. 

A host of people of various ethnicities are shown from the shoulders up, dancing as they seamlessly morph into each other.

The effect was produced by Pacific Data Images, a California-based firm that would eventually be acquired by Dreamworks.

Synth-pop was in many ways the perfect genre for computer-generated videos.

The musicians weren’t doing anything particularly interesting on stage, and the music was often non-narrative.

So when director Howard Greenhalgh began his long collaboration with English duo the Pet Shop Boys, he developed a visual vocabulary for the band that was heavy on abstraction.

Inspired by video games, Greenhalgh crafted videos full of geometric shapes and textures.

As technology advanced, his films would keep pace with the new software while still maintaining a very particular aesthetic, and for over a decade the band’s image was inextricably linked with his visuals.

The clip for “Liberation” would show up a few years later in CyberWorld, a 2000 showcase of animated segments upscaled to take advantage of 3D IMAX technology.

Seattle grunge band Soundgarden had little interest in the content of their music videos—they’d show up, pretend to play, and go home.

But the clip for spacey dirge “Black Hole Sun” rocketed them to the mass market courtesy of Howard Greenhalgh.

Greenhalgh wasn’t typically associated with muscular hard rock, but the song hooked him.

He immediately got an idea—a distorted suburban dystopia, inspired by the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

The techniques used by Greenhalgh in this clip were a complete 180 from his Pet Shop Boys work.

Those videos presented an antiseptic, completely CGI world of smooth curves and enticing textures.

For Soundgarden, he used a variation of the morphing technique seen in “Black Or White” to pinch and stretch the grins of live actors, transforming them into horrific moving caricatures.

One interesting note about “Black Hole Sun” is that two versions of the video aired.

A&M decided to add a number of additional visual effects, including a computer-generated black hole, and MTV replaced it in the lineup after about a month.

Icelandic singer Bjork is well known for pushing the envelope sonically and visually, and one of her breakthroughs in the video space came with the Chris Cunningham-directed clip for “All Is Full Of Love” in 1999.

This icy ballad is the soundtrack to an eerie sequence of a robotic Bjork being assembled in a factory, only to be joined by an identical android for a surreal make-out session.

The fusion of live footage of Bjork’s face, real props, and computer-generated imagery paved the way for the modern era of CGI in videos—as a tool that could let directors create any scene they could imagine at a fraction of the practical effects budget.

The 21st century would see computer graphics become ubiquitous, with the pace of innovation slowing considerably. 

From this point forward, nearly every video will have some kind of computer effects, so we’re only going to talk about a few notable examples from the next 20 years or so.

Scottish singer Robbie Williams saw controversy with this 2000 video, which employed both practical effects and computer graphics to create an unforgettable effect.

The clip for “Rock D.J.” starts off fairly conventionally, with hot ladies and a singing Williams, but it soon takes a particularly intense twist.

First Robbie strips off his shirt, then his pants, then his underwear, and finally his skin, leaving him a glistening, bloody figure.

The clip continues to escalate in Mortal Kombat-esque fashion with Williams peeling all of the flesh off of his singing skull and hurling gibbets of human meat onto the roller-skating females. By the end, nothing is left but a bloody skeleton.

British director Vaughn Arnell has been making videos since the 1980s, but this was one of his most memorable clips, ably showing how directors were now comfortable mixing digital effects with real footage.

The evolution of 3D character animation led to the creation of pop stars who simply did not exist.

In 2003, Swedish animator Erik Wernquist came across a weird sound on the internet and modeled a bizarre gray creature he called “The Annoying Thing” to accompany it.

The creation quickly went viral in Europe and was renamed “Crazy Frog.”

A few years later, the character “recorded” a take on a theme from the Daxdi Cop soundtrack, using the original sound as a vocal track.

Wernquist’s studio was hired to make a full-length video around the tune, and he became the first computer-animated character to have a chart hit.

The clip has been viewed more than 2 billion times, making it one of the most popular videos ever uploaded to YouTube.   

When Atlanta rapper/singer CeeLo Green’s 2010 single “F*ck You” started to pick up steam in August, his label knew that a video would be the best way to keep that momentum going.

But Green wasn’t available to film a clip right away, so his management team took another option: they animated a “kinetic typography” treatment, where the song’s lyrics appeared and moved...

Before the advent of MTV, nobody really knew what to do with music videos.

Labels would commission promotional films for one-off showings, like Queen’s iconic clip for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but there was no real strategy at play.

This led to artists conducting bold and wild experiments, like the 1978 video for Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ “Accidents Will Happen.” The majority of the video is animated traditionally, with ink and paint, and it still looks incredible today.

But it’s a short segment at the end that puts it at the start of this list.

Directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton commandeered a university computer and had it draw out a green-on-black vector monitor image of Costello singing, then redraw it rotated several times.

They filmed it right off the screen with a Bolex 16mm camera, making it the very first computer-generated moving image in a music video.

Artist Rebecca Allen was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1970s when she became interested in computers.

Allen started taking classes at MIT, becoming sort of an artist in residence at the computer lab.

Record impresario Chris Blackwell introduced her to photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who had recorded an oddball “self-help album” called Dancing for Mental Health under the alias Will Powers.

Goldsmith wanted a cutting-edge video, and Allen agreed, but she demanded complete creative control.

Writing animation software from scratch, she produced two visionary clips for Goldsmith, both of which were released in 1983.

“Smile” is the more interesting of the two, featuring polygonal characters dancing along with digitally filtered and altered live-action footage, but both were miles ahead of what anybody else was doing.

Ric Ocasek’s retro-New Wave band was one of the most durable hitmakers of the 1980s, but it’s fair to say that the group wasn’t exactly a bunch of lookers.

That’s probably the best explanation for why their album covers featured pin-up girl paintings instead of group shots.

But in the dawning era of music videos, they needed to compete.

And animation was the answer.

Effects company Charlex had come to record company Arista’s attention following a series of TV ads for the National Enquirer.

They brought a new tool to the world of music videos: the Quantel Paintbox, the first commercial unit that allowed artists to draw and composite directly on top of video footage.

Originally designed for TV news and weather programs, the Paintbox was quickly finding favor among a new generation of artists, letting them isolate and move images in layers quickly and easily.

The final video for the 1984 hit “You Might Think” features a model being alternately harassed and serenaded by the band composited into candy-colored sets with primitive 3D objects.

The clip would become the first music video added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The majority of Duran Duran’s music video for “The Reflex” is the band in their big-haired prime playing a concert, interspersed with footage of dancers shot as silhouettes over primary colored backgrounds.

But near the end of the clip, the video screen above the stage unleashes a huge waterfall onto the audience. 

I talked to numerous video artists who worked during this period and they agree that the wave of water is a purely digital effect, painted on a system like the Quantel Paintbox and chroma-keyed over the performance footage.

“The Reflex” was prescient in showing how directors would soon be turning to CGI solutions to create special effects that would be impossible in real time. 

What many people wrongly consider the beginning of computer animation in music videos was the clip for British rock band Dire Straits’ 1985 single “Money For Nothing.” The song was a mid-tempo rocker sung from the perspective of a blue-collar worker, but the video—directed by Steve Barron, who lensed A-Ha’s iconic “Take On Me” video the same year—was wildly innovative.

In addition to bright flourishes of animation over the band performing live, segments featuring two 3D-animated characters dazzled viewers.

Barron’s studio used a Bosch FGS4000 to model and animate the characters and the Quantel Paintbox to do the compositing.

Even the concert elements were digitally altered to add squiggles of color, but the real conversation piece was the two low-poly workmen, which were the first 3D-animated characters in a three-dimensional environment.

“Money For Nothing” won Video of the Year at MTV’s third annual VMAs.

CBS Records was eager to get the first-ever solo album from Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, and part of the deal was a sizable budget for music videos to promote She’s The Boss.

The clip for the single “Hard Woman” was, in 1985, one of the most expensive music videos ever produced, in part because of its advanced technology.

Animators John Whitney Jr.

and Gary Demos, along with ex-Disney animator Bill Kroyer, used a Cray X-MP supercomputer.

At the time, there were only six units in operation, with five being permanently in the employ of the US government and the defense industry. 

They used this computer to create a Southwestern adobe house for a pair of pastel-lined CGI figures to dance through, with Jagger’s visage composited into a flying diamond.

Even though it came out the same year as “Money For Nothing,” “Hard Woman” is a much more ambitious clip that really pushes the nascent computer graphics envelope.

German pioneers Kraftwerk were ahead of the curve on just about every aspect of modern music, so it’s no surprise that they commissioned digital replicas of their faces in 1983.

Unfortunately for the band’s place in the history books, the polygonal Kraftwerk didn’t make their public debut until 1986’s “Musique Non Stop.”

Rebecca Allen created 3D models of the band members based on mannequin heads they had sculpted and shipped to her.

She then took polygonal models she had previously used for an NFL project and attached the digital Kraftwerk heads to them.

The resulting 3D models were used for the album art, promotional materials and the video, which also features Allen’s singing voice. 

The early ‘90s were a period of transition for the rock music industry, as the hair bands that dominated the 1980s rapidly fell out of fashion.

One of the last holdouts was Def Leppard, the British metal band that had just lost principal songwriter Steve Clark to a drug overdose in 1991.

The group started transitioning to a hookier, more pop-oriented sound, and an animated music video was a great way to push that change.

Steve Barron helmed the music video for “Let’s Get Rocked” off the Adrenalized album, which used the successful formula of interspersing footage of the band with the adventures of an animated 3D character.

Def Leppard’s cartoon mascot was a denim vest-wearing suburban kid named Flynn who got into all sorts of trouble.

The performance footage was also notable, as the live-action band was composited over a completely digital Union Jack-styled stage.

1991 was a banner year for the technique of digitally “morphing” one image into another.

It was a signature effect of the villainous T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but just a few months after that film hit the big screen, the King of Pop employed it in one of his most ambitious and audacious videos.

Michael Jackson was already well known for his expensive, cinematic clips, and “Black Or White” was directed by John Landis and premiered simultaneously on BET, MTV, VH1, and Fox.

The video is chock-full of MJ’s trademark indulgence, but it’s the bit at the end that lands it on this list. 

A host of people of various ethnicities are shown from the shoulders up, dancing as they seamlessly morph into each other.

The effect was produced by Pacific Data Images, a California-based firm that would eventually be acquired by Dreamworks.

Synth-pop was in many ways the perfect genre for computer-generated videos.

The musicians weren’t doing anything particularly interesting on stage, and the music was often non-narrative.

So when director Howard Greenhalgh began his long collaboration with English duo the Pet Shop Boys, he developed a visual vocabulary for the band that was heavy on abstraction.

Inspired by video games, Greenhalgh crafted videos full of geometric shapes and textures.

As technology advanced, his films would keep pace with the new software while still maintaining a very particular aesthetic, and for over a decade the band’s image was inextricably linked with his visuals.

The clip for “Liberation” would show up a few years later in CyberWorld, a 2000 showcase of animated segments upscaled to take advantage of 3D IMAX technology.

Seattle grunge band Soundgarden had little interest in the content of their music videos—they’d show up, pretend to play, and go home.

But the clip for spacey dirge “Black Hole Sun” rocketed them to the mass market courtesy of Howard Greenhalgh.

Greenhalgh wasn’t typically associated with muscular hard rock, but the song hooked him.

He immediately got an idea—a distorted suburban dystopia, inspired by the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

The techniques used by Greenhalgh in this clip were a complete 180 from his Pet Shop Boys work.

Those videos presented an antiseptic, completely CGI world of smooth curves and enticing textures.

For Soundgarden, he used a variation of the morphing technique seen in “Black Or White” to pinch and stretch the grins of live actors, transforming them into horrific moving caricatures.

One interesting note about “Black Hole Sun” is that two versions of the video aired.

A&M decided to add a number of additional visual effects, including a computer-generated black hole, and MTV replaced it in the lineup after about a month.

Icelandic singer Bjork is well known for pushing the envelope sonically and visually, and one of her breakthroughs in the video space came with the Chris Cunningham-directed clip for “All Is Full Of Love” in 1999.

This icy ballad is the soundtrack to an eerie sequence of a robotic Bjork being assembled in a factory, only to be joined by an identical android for a surreal make-out session.

The fusion of live footage of Bjork’s face, real props, and computer-generated imagery paved the way for the modern era of CGI in videos—as a tool that could let directors create any scene they could imagine at a fraction of the practical effects budget.

The 21st century would see computer graphics become ubiquitous, with the pace of innovation slowing considerably. 

From this point forward, nearly every video will have some kind of computer effects, so we’re only going to talk about a few notable examples from the next 20 years or so.

Scottish singer Robbie Williams saw controversy with this 2000 video, which employed both practical effects and computer graphics to create an unforgettable effect.

The clip for “Rock D.J.” starts off fairly conventionally, with hot ladies and a singing Williams, but it soon takes a particularly intense twist.

First Robbie strips off his shirt, then his pants, then his underwear, and finally his skin, leaving him a glistening, bloody figure.

The clip continues to escalate in Mortal Kombat-esque fashion with Williams peeling all of the flesh off of his singing skull and hurling gibbets of human meat onto the roller-skating females. By the end, nothing is left but a bloody skeleton.

British director Vaughn Arnell has been making videos since the 1980s, but this was one of his most memorable clips, ably showing how directors were now comfortable mixing digital effects with real footage.

The evolution of 3D character animation led to the creation of pop stars who simply did not exist.

In 2003, Swedish animator Erik Wernquist came across a weird sound on the internet and modeled a bizarre gray creature he called “The Annoying Thing” to accompany it.

The creation quickly went viral in Europe and was renamed “Crazy Frog.”

A few years later, the character “recorded” a take on a theme from the Daxdi Cop soundtrack, using the original sound as a vocal track.

Wernquist’s studio was hired to make a full-length video around the tune, and he became the first computer-animated character to have a chart hit.

The clip has been viewed more than 2 billion times, making it one of the most popular videos ever uploaded to YouTube.   

When Atlanta rapper/singer CeeLo Green’s 2010 single “F*ck You” started to pick up steam in August, his label knew that a video would be the best way to keep that momentum going.

But Green wasn’t available to film a clip right away, so his management team took another option: they animated a “kinetic typography” treatment, where the song’s lyrics appeared and moved...