![]() I feel that there are a lot of incredibly talented women, and just to have someone’s sex get in the way of something sounds very antiquated. I think that the film industry has been lagging, for sure. Do you think the music video industry is a more hospitable place for women than Hollywood? I never saw it as a problem in music videos. There has been a lot of attention on the dearth of female movie directors. You directed the movie The Runaways, and you have two other films in the works. And now that we see that we don’t have him anymore, that’s what he’s left he’s left us with this beautiful, daring, characteristic that hopefully we can all embody. I loved that because he never got comfortable and just sold what he was known for. He would say, “Let’s make the shortest music video ever.” He was always looking for something different. We knew each other, he felt very safe with me, and I was super-excited to be a part of his continuing creativity. Taking from the mind into the physical was the biggest gift he could’ve given me. I just thought, my God, any idea you think of, you can actually make. He really did to all the freaks and all the people who thought differently and all the people who wanted to dress differently, he really gave them permission. He gave me the permission to be myself, and that’s what he gave to the world. I had done “Little Wonder” and “Dead Man Walking” in 1997, just after I did the Marilyn Manson video. What was it like collaborating with him? David Bowie and I had a working relationship spanning 18 years. You’ve done videos with a number of artists, but you worked on many videos with David Bowie. For me, looking up at the stars is where inspiration comes from. I’ve always been intrigued with the unknown, and I find the knowledge of what it is we’ve lost. The world is looking down at their phones, and there’s a whole amazing thing happening above us. Have you always been interested in the universe? For me, I am looking up. You did a video for Katy Perry that also takes place in outer space. I don’t think I would call it dark it’s more that something is kind of off. So I feel like that’s how I create I take two opposing things, like beauty and something that you would at first think is decaying and ugly, and then mash them together and create this new thing. But my parents were opera singers and Italian. Hamilton is a steel factory city and it’s quite polluted. It’s interesting, because I’m a very optimistic person. I’ve embraced that that’s how I see the world. I used to wonder why and I don’t anymore. Is that an aesthetic that you naturally gravitate toward? It has kind of become my language now. ![]() It won Best British Video at the 1987 Brit Awards and was nominated for the Best Music Video category for the first annual Soul Train Music Awards in that same year.Your previous music videos tend to be quite dark. It ranked at number 2 on VH1's "Top 20 Videos of the '80s" and number one on "Amazing Moment in Music" on the Australian TV show 20 to 1 in 2007. "Sledgehammer" has also been declared MTV's number one animated video of all time. The video was voted number seven on TMF's Ultimate 50 Videos You Must See, which first aired 24 June 2006. "Sledgehammer" won nine MTV Video Music Awards in 1987 the most awards a single video has won. It ranked at number four on MTV's 100 Greatest Music Videos Ever Made (1999). Also included were six women who posed as the back-up singers of the song. The video ended with a large group of extras jerkily rotating around Gabriel, among them his daughters Anna-Marie and Melanie, the animators themselves and director Stephen Johnson's girlfriend. This section was animated by Nick Park, of Aardman Animations, who was refining his work in plasticine animation at the time. "I was thinking at the time, 'If anyone wants to try and copy this video, good luck to them.'" Two dead, headless, featherless chickens were animated using stop-motion and shown dancing along to the synthesised shakuhachi solo. Gabriel lay under a sheet of glass for 16 hours while filming the video one frame at a time. "It took a lot of hard work," Gabriel recalled. ![]() The style was later used in the video for " Big Time", another single from So. Many of these techniques had been employed in earlier music videos, such as Talking Heads's 1985 hit " Road to Nowhere", also directed by Johnson. Aardman Animations and the Brothers Quay provided claymation, pixilation, and stop motion animation that gave life to images in the song. The "Sledgehammer" video was commissioned by Tessa Watts at Virgin Records, directed by Stephen R. ![]()
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