NEW YORK CITY — Director Kat Webber recently teamed with Nice Shoes colorist Roslyn Di Sisto to complete work on a new Hanson video that takes viewers through the decades. Finally It's Christmas features the band performing the track in a range of settings that reflect the fashion and technology of the time.
“This video was really fun,” recalls Di Sisto. “Kat Webber, who directed and edited the video, shot on multiple formats: Bolex 16mm, VHS, as well as Alexa. Her treatment was focused really heavily on art direction, so there was a strong effort from her and the band to make each era feel unique using practical items, lighting, angles and even camera choices.”
That attention to detail and production planning, says Di Sisto, was extremely helpful to her as a colorist. “Kat is a close friend of mine, and we’ve done a number of projects together, so she gave me an incredible amount of creative freedom - let me go completely crazy at times! I spent a lot of time coming up with different options, it was so much fun.”
Di Sisto says she looked at many prominent music videos from each era for reference and used FilmLight’s Baselight system to explore looks for each scene.
“With the ‘50s era, Hanson really wanted to make it feel like the Ed Sullivan show, so we worked to match that ‘50s television look, but keeping it nice and simple,” she explains. “The ‘80s was a hoot! There was a lot going on color-wise, and so I pushed it even further by using some glow effects on the practical fairy lights and shifted them to purple. It felt right for that scene.”
With the 90s, Di Sisto again looked to videos from that era and went for something exaggerated, mixing both a grunge look with a bit of super saturated “Blind Melon” style.
“For me, a big part of the fun of seeing the cut for the first time was the reveal of Hanson themselves,” she notes. “Like many old Hanson fans, I hadn’t seen even what they looked like since the ’90s, so I wanted to make the present day look really contemporary: warm and skin tones super creamy. I wanted the audience to say, ‘Wow, look how good they look!’ And I think that comes across really nicely in that scene.”