Adam Ant to Michael Jackson: Shaping the MTV landscapehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11499628Includes a story about MFN clip:
Knopfler wasn't into videos at all, he was into the purity of music and felt that somebody going and putting visuals to it was like drawing all over it.He felt it would disfigure and distort his music, giving it different emotions and different atmospheres.
As a result, we were in Budapest kind of pretending we were doing a live shoot with him at a gig.
But then we did the computer-generated Money For Nothing man.
CGI animation was new at the time and it was being used just for corporate logos - the letters and things - so it was just borrowed from that and we got the CG guy to create characters out of it.
We then felt that, if we didn't do something with the live footage, the coarseness of how it was put together with the character and the computer animation would be too rough.
I was keeping an eye on new technology and this machine had just come out called Paintbox - you could paint on the frames or manipulate the frames, literally frame by frame.
Me and a couple of friends bought one. That's how the effect with the blacked-out background and Knopfler's illuminated blazer, guitar and headband came about.
We painted on the live footage to weave it together. We just had some people working with Paintbox day and night because we only had a month on that.
But you make things fit the schedule, you make them fit the budget.
Sometimes you get lucky. You take shortcuts and sometimes those shortcuts are more interesting.
It's woven with naivety because we weren't really coming off of anything else because, with those videos, we were doing stuff that we really hadn't seen before.
