Video whizz kids

Press, 4 June 1982, Page 11

Video whizz kids

From

KEN COATES

in London

Pop promotion video films. Britain’s fastest-growing boom industry, are creating a new aristocracj’ of wealthy young film-makers. They were still at school when the technology first emerged. Now, with fat commissions from record companies to build up artists with visual imagery — and so boost sales — they are the new whizz-kids.

They are young, self-made men and women who could be the movie-makers of tomorrow.

“Promos.” as the promotion video films are called in; the music business, are imaginative and spectacular — cunningly geared to the teen-aged TV audience they are aimed at. One recent video film cost $62,000 to make, and its sole

purpose is to promote a new single before it is forgotten, but not before it has sold as many discs as possible. In’the days of the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers it was mainly radio that got records into the charts.

But as the power ,of TV grew, and the world discovered video, the radio has diminished in importance. Visual images of bands and their music are now popular, and more than 200 “promos” get made and shown on TV in'Britain every year. ’ They cost an average of $34,000 to produce; but despite the cost, no record company ignores them. For example in last week’s top 75,13 had videos on ITV and the 8.8. C., all made by video firms working in this lucrative field.

They are screened on pop shows- watched avidly by millions of youngsters each week, and they are made by full-time "promo” makers and funded by record companies with an eye to commercial success.

Chris Giffin, head of TV promotion at Chrysalis Records, says that last year Ultravox’s “Vienna” was the fifth best-selling single in Britain.

It stayed at number two for four weeks and sold about 850,00 copies. Most of those sales, he says, were due to the video.

The biggest promo manufacturer, Millaney Grant, is owned by four young men, each of them earning well over $68,000 a year. An Australian, Russell Mulcahy, aged 28, has already • made three of the most successful pop videos.