It is sometimes easy to forget the importance of color in music videos. Yes color is something singularly important and I think it was an important element in creating the music video up to the mid nineties. It possibly lost its importance when the era of the big dance hits of the nineties went. However what is to be noted is how music videos were able to use color. It may be linked to the whole fantastic and seductive quality of the music video but this is not the main reason. However what is to be noted is the use of color in the production of the video. Color is especially important in the production of the videos for the big dance hits of the early to mid nineties and it is to these videos that I refer.
Yes you have costume and setting and these are important. However color also has its place. It is wrong to say that it is at the forefront of the video because it is a different type of element to setting and costume . For costume and setting have color but the music video itself has color..it has color characteristics. Yes color is something that is very much linked into the whole creation of the video.
The director can use lighting and color to heighten the setting. Costume is part of setting so if the performer is wearing leather, this is part of the setting. Then you can accent the setting through color lighting and give the video a color look. Yes lighting is important...and the color of light. You could say that we create the color of the setting and the interior.
I think that this latter point was understood as important in the creation of the music video up to the mid nineties. It disappeared when the music video became more sexualized and glamorized. Yes color is something elemental...and it is the color of light..the flash...It is not just costume. Sometimes now color is directly linked to costume but in the past color was directly linked to the setting and the whole production of the video. You could say that it was linked to the actual cinematography. Maybe you can call it the colorization of music videos.
Color is accent...it is stress..and it is cinema...There is color movement and color development and these are areas that can be studied in themselves. However the choice of setting is important including costume/clothing as part of this setting but it is difficult to be certain that the setting comes first. This is because color is so fundamentally important.
It is the eighties and nineties that I am referring to. We can go back to the eighties and nineties to see a world of dance creation and color creation. It is elemental and simple...but pure...and raw..and then sophisticated. In some way it is strange that it was music videos which were able to use the power of color in this way. What is important too is how costume and clothing were a part of the setting. Yes the unique thing about some nineties music videos including the dance hits of the early nineties was their understanding of setting; the way they made setting something compact. And out of this so-called setting exploded a whole mix of color or elements like clothing and objects emphasized through the medium of color.