A-ha — 'Take On Me' Music Video, Savoy Hotel Area, London

The music video for A-ha's 'Take On Me' — one of the most innovative and recognisable videos in MTV history — was partly filmed at a café near the Savoy Hotel on the Strand in London in 1985. Directed by Steve Barron, the video combines live action with pencil-sketch rotoscope animation, depicting a young woman being pulled into the world of a comic book by the lead singer Morten Harket. The groundbreaking animation technique, created by Michael Patterson, required 3,000 individually traced frames and took 16 weeks to produce.

'Take On Me' initially flopped on its first release in 1984 with a different video. The rotoscoped version, released in 1985, transformed the song into a global phenomenon — it reached number one in multiple countries and has accumulated over two billion views on YouTube. The video won six MTV Video Music Awards in 1986 and is consistently ranked among the greatest music videos ever made. Its visual style has been referenced and parodied countless times in subsequent decades.

The café scenes were filmed in a location near the Strand in central London. The video's blend of real-world London and animated fantasy gave it a magical quality that matched the song's soaring synth-pop melody. A-ha, from Oslo, Norway, became one of the biggest pop acts of the 1980s on the strength of this single video.