The video of Take on me, by the Norwegian band A-ha, is the new member of a select club that, at the moment, only has three members: that of the pre-90 video clips that have managed to exceed 1,000 million YouTube views. Until now, according to the magazine about the music industry Billboard, only November Rain, from Guns n 'Roses, and Bohemian Rhapsody, from Queen had achieved it. Take on me, with its mix of real image and cartoon, has been the third to get it. This is the story of the video clip that needed two versions and more than four months of drawing to become a success.
The Take on me video clip, published in 1985, uses a technique called rotoscopy, which consists of first recording the real image and then drawing or animating it. It is a classic cinema tool that requires many hours of work, since you have to paint on each of the frames. It has been used, for example, in Snow White and the seven dwarfs to provide realistic movements to some characters, in the lightsabers of the original Star Wars trilogy or in A scanner darkly, where all the actors were drawn on the original frames.
According to BBC News, Mike Patterson, creator of the drawn part of the Take on me video , took 16 weeks to paint more than 3,000 frames, but it was worth it: Patterson, who currently works as a film professor at Southern California University, in the United States, he says that "it is crazy to have students who were born after the video clip was published and that it is still his favorite."
From the blue video clip to the drawn video clip
The famous Take on me video clip was not the first of the song. In 1984, a year before the launch, the theme had a first version with different arrangements and a different video clip, known as the blue version ("blue version") for its background:
This first version of Take on went unnoticed by the general public. However, the Warner producer was convinced that the song could be a success: they prepared some new arrangements for the song and hired Steve Barron - who had directed the video of Billie Jean, of Michael Jackson - as director of the new video clip. "Warner told me that they had some Norwegian boys with a good pop song and that they were going to bet on them," Barron explained to the BBC. "They told me: 'We give you as much time as you want and we release you until you're done.'"
Barron devised the history of the video clip and its comic aesthetics, which does not appear only in Patterson's rotoscopes: before it was painted on the video clip frames, the actual image had to be recorded. Many of the original sets also maintained the cartoon aesthetic, as can be seen in the three-chapter documentary that A-Ha published in 2019 telling how the video clip was made.
After the publication of the video, it became a success. "I imagined the video clip would have visibility, but I didn't expect it to be on MTV at all hours for a year," Patterson told the BBC. "I can go anywhere on the planet and, wherever I go, everyone says: 'I love that video."
Beyond the success of the video clip itself, Take on has become a pop reference. The series of drawings Father of Family recreated the video clip in one of its chapters, and the song has been versioned by bands like Wizard of Oz or Weezer. These, in addition, paid tribute to him in a video clip:
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