Vivian Leigh
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It has the look of any British synth pop video you might see on MTV in the 1980s.
High contrast lighting, graphic wipes, glamorous melancholy.
If you blinked, you might think you were watching a Kajagoogoo music video.
In order to keep things within budget, producers needed to get creative.
They'd borrow a friend's apartment to shoot in or work out deals with actors trying to get footage for a demo reel or stack shoots on top of each other so they could reuse the same sets and crews for multiple videos.
He says that it wasn't exactly a glamorous life in the beginning.
But despite the slog of it all, Nori was really grateful for an opportunity like this.
Learning how to shoot a film is incredibly expensive and Pioneer was basically subsidizing the whole process.
Nori directed a ton of videos for Pioneer and he was always experimenting with technique.
His videos always had different types of color grading or frame rates or transitions.
He took advantage of those three minutes of Laserdisc space to create something interesting.
After the break, the rise and inevitable fall of the karaoke video golden age.
By the early 1990s, Pioneer's marketing exec, Neil Altnew, says that the company was doing exactly what they had hoped.
They were selling a ton of these karaoke laser discs, and they were making a lot of money.
But Neil says that he actually doesn't think the karaoke videos were part of the success of Laserdiscs.
If anything, the videos were kind of an afterthought.
His take is that Laserdiscs were flying off the shelves because they were just a good product.
Like for one, Pioneer was able to license an incredible library of music.