Dire Straits - Money For Nothing

What this video is

Released in June 1985, 'Money for Nothing' arrived at the precise moment MTV had transformed from a cable curiosity into the dominant force in popular music. The song's working-class narrator watches rock stars on television and voices envious bewilderment — a self-critique that the video literalises by embedding fictional MTV broadcasts within its own frame. By deploying then-state-of-the-art CGI to satirise the…

Why it matters

The video is a foundational document in the history of CGI in audiovisual media. It represents one of the earliest deployments of computer-animated human characters in a mass-distributed format, predating the widespread use of CGI in cinema. The rotoscoping technique applied to live performance…

The director

Steve Barron (born 4 May 1956, Dublin) is an Irish-British filmmaker who began as a camera assistant on A Bridge Too Far (1977), Superman (1978), and The Duellists (1977). He co-founded production company Limelight, which became the world's largest music…