Posted by Paul Devlin
This is the Director’s Cut of the music video for CeCe Peniston’s “Finally” which has never been released publicly as far as I know.
This was back in the day before it was easy to do special effects with Avid Plug-Ins and Adobe After Effects. To get this look, the Director, Claude Borenzweig, came up with the unique technique of layering different shapes over the same sections of video, all Black and White. The different layers were passed through isolated Red-Green-Blue channels of an old-school Kaleidoscope effects box. When the layers overlapped, they created all sorts of surprising, unusual colors and shapes which were further manipulated. Clever concept and a great look.
But the record company was very conservative and forced Claude Borenzweig to pull back on his bold experimentation with the process. He found that frustrating. So after the project was completed and delivered, he came to the boutique edit house Chromavision where I was working as a video editor, with the raw tapes. He wanted to make his own version for his Director’s reel. My instructions were to re-create the process and go wild with it. Which is exactly what we did.
Take a look at this version and then compare it to the original and let us know what you think in the comments below!