This time Shayne Carter keeps his shirt on. “Cat Inna Can” is filmed in a warehouse, and there’s something funny going on with the colours. The warehouse is blue and the band’s skintone is a golden colour. It’s easy to do stuff like that with modern colour grading software, but how did that happen in the early ’90s? Witchcraft?
About halfway through there’s a thrilling dolly zoom – that’s when the camera physically moves in while at the same time the lens zooms out. So the band largely stays the same size in the picture, but the background warps and looks vertiginous.
The video is a bit of a grab bag of fun film tricks, with its central effect being the camera swirling around the band members. It feels almost out of control, as if Shayne Carter’s animal magnetism is having an effect on the cameras too.
Meow.
Best bit: the really strict cutting to the beat on the verses.
Director: Andrew Dominik
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision
Next… the New Zealand national genre.
I am pretty sure that this video would have been shot in black and white and then colourised to achieve that weird colouring effect. Basket Case by Green Day uses that process and looks sorta similar.
Very interesting! I’ve just had a look at the Green Day video. It’s a very ’90s look. It sort of fits with the ’90s trend for old photos from the 1940s and ’50s, being stylistically colorised and given an ironic twist. The Fits video doesn’t quite have that vibe, but it still works with the slight uneasiness of the song.