THE MAKING OF A-HA’S “TAKE ON ME," PART 2

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On this week's episode of the Rhino Podcast, special guests John Beug, former Warner Records music video executive, and Jeff Ayeroff, former Warner Records creative executive, join executive producer John Hughes to discuss how they brought their revolutionary vision for a-ha's "Take On Me" music video to animated life. 

Link to the full podcast is included below. 

ON HOW THEY GOT INVOLVED WITH THE VIDEO'S PRODUCTION:

BEUG: "The way I got involved was I came across this student film AND thought, 'This is really pretty interesting.' It's called, 'Commuter.' I saw this piece - I was working in the motion picture business. Not particularly loving it, but I've been involved with a couple of successful films, but was making music videos actually just for sport and thought, 'This student film would make an interesting music video.'"

"And in my taking the, the piece to Jeff, I said, 'Jeff, this could make an interesting music video.' And I think the rest is really history."

AYEROFF: "It was like one of those, 'Duh!' It was like, 'Where did you find this guy and how do we get ahold of him?'"

ON THE PROCESS OF HOW THE VIDEO CAME TOGETHER: 

BEUG: "The piece - Steve Barron shot the entire piece, did an entire edit and then Michael Patterson went back and drew over it. I mean, I can remember seeing him sit in front of, a 16 millimeter projector, rotoscoping."

AYEROFF: "There are shots, Mike, on the canvas, have shots of them doing that. Trying to work, I don't know. How many months did it take before they delivered it?"

BEUG: "God, it's three or four by the time we were done." 

AYEROFF: "So that was, that was, you know, part of the great luxury of having the record out in England. Having it not go very far at all is like, okay, pack it away. We'll be back. And I had to have the Rob Dickens who ran England at the time - [he] was my friend and still is. My friend had to understand where do they deliver this later."

"It [was] going to take this long to do this. And probably, and I don't remember this per se, but I probably had a illustration to say, this is what we're doing. I understand what this is. You know it's going to take some time."

ON HOW THEY FELT AFTER SEEING THE FINISHED VIDEO:

BEUG: "I was happy it was done, you know? I mean, I'm saying that lovingly, but I mean, it's just to imagine you'd go over and watch my phone, you know, and you wanted, I think he did at least 1600 drawings, if not more. You know, and everyone and, and to figure out what the rotation was."

"And because if you, if you watch the video closely, you realize it's negative and positive space working back and forth, which is part of the vibration and the charm of the pieces that, yeah."

AYEROFF: "And it's also not flat - it's the cameras, the camera's rotating and he's doing these lines, you know, the movement lines, that accent stuff that was uniquely his. He also made those movement lines, which were just like, 'Where did that come from?' And you see that in Commuter."

BEUG: That's something that I saw that I was like, 'Whoa.' Cause there was a guy in commuter, it was a guy sitting on a train, you know. So there was all these train motions and back and forth."

Listen to the rest of the podcast here

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