The music video to "Take on Me" was directed by Steve Barron, and filmed at Kim's Café and on a sound stage in London in 1985. The video used a pencil-sketch animation/live-action combination called rotoscoping, in which the live-action footage is traced-over frame by frame to give the characters realistic movements. Approximately 3,000 frames were rotoscoped, which took 16 weeks to complete.
The video depicts a romantic fantasy narrative. The concept was devised by Steve Barron - which was based on a comic book he read as a young child featuring "guys racing against each other on motorbikes and sidecars". A girl reading a comic book in a greasy spoon cafe - played by Bunty Bailey of dance troupe Hot Gossip - is attracted to a sketched version of Morten Harket (a-ha's lead singer) before she finds herself sucked into his' animated world. The pair are pursued by violent motorcyclists before the singer breaks out of the animation and they are finally reunited in the real world. The narrative touches on a stereotyped tale of the 'damsel in distress' ultimately being saved by the main protagonist.
At the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, the video for "Take on Me" won six awards—Best New Artist in a Video, Best Concept Video, Most Experimental Video, Best Direction, Best Special Effects, and Viewer's Choice—and was nominated for two others, Best Group Video and Video of the Year. It was also nominated for Favorite Pop/Rock Video at the 13th American Music Awards in 1986. It is arguable that the notoriety gained by the video stems from it being one of the first instances that a music video's reception has been viewed as instrumental to the song's general success. Its' seamless entwining of real-life footage and cartoon had never been seen in such a way before within a music video. It also exploits prominent aspects of culture in the 1980's - such as comic books, romance in a narrative, etc. If the video were to be deconstructed using Goodwin's Six - the heavy promotion of the lead singer would make his theory of 'multiple close ups of the main artist or vocalist' relevant. The fact that the video is centred around a comic strip could also be seen as an 'intertextual reference to other media texts'. It is, to this day, regarded as one of the most commercially successful music videos of all time.
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