Peter Gabriel | SledgeHammer

After I had completed some research into more short films which I could take inspiration from, we were shown during one of our Media Studies lessons, we were shown a music video called "Sledge Hammer" by Peter Gabriel. Even though Alex and I have decided to not do a music video together, we still needed to understand the basics about how music videos are shot and how this video became very popular during the 1980's. The music video features Peter Gabriel lip syncing the words of his song Sledge Hammer one frame at a time. The music video won a record MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards and the Best British Video at the 1987 Brit Awards. Gabriel was also nominated for three Grammy Awards: Best Rock Male Vocal Performance, Song of the Year and Record of the Year. As of 2011, "Sledgehammer" is the most played music video in the history of MTV. It is overall considered by many to be the greatest music video of all time. It goes to show how simple ideas can have amazing outcomes!

The music video all in all was very fun and appealing to even modern audiences. The music video includes a variety of synonymous objects which link to the song's lyrics or at least have some reference to do with the song itself.

The use of animation/claymation however in modern music videos could be considered to be very outdated and not trendy for many casual modern viewers because of the few music videos which include animations in the sequences today/ Generally music in the 21st century are shot using studio-standard camera equipment and lighting, with some CGI being added too depending on the song. The music videos of today often do not link to the song's lyrics, which in some ways can help to create enigmas for what is happening or what is being expressed, but for the everyday viewer this can become very confusing indeed.

Overall this music video has not only given me and idea of what the basics of music videos consists of, but this has also inspired Alex an I about how successful a simple and fun music video like this can be. This is important for both to realise as we now need to start thinking about how narrative for our short film and to not over complicate it.