Diane Martel (Production League of America) and Latoiya's "Fallen Star"

Secret Weapon: The Wiz.
Snoop and I wanted to create a period piece. He showed me a scene from The Wiz where Dorothy was transported to Oz via crude optical effects. We wanted our piece to have a similar feeling. I watched movies like Disco Godfather for graphic design and lighting, and looked at Tami Show and That was Rock episodes, Motown specials, that sort of thing. Performers back then were brilliant: the style and finesse, the stage craft - they relied solely on themselves to affect a crowd. Latoiya has that special ability to perform in an unaffected way and it was important for me to allow her performance to resonate.

Big hair flatters all.
We had very little money to work with so I went and pulled all of the props myself. I found the giant ice cream cone at 20th Century and it became a major part of the clip. One of my favorite things about the video is the hair - this wonderful hair artist Laini Thompson created perfect period wigs and facial hair. Look at Snoop's side part; he is giving you Harold Melville.

'Lo tech' means 'styrofoam moon'.
Latoiya has a beautiful, timeless feeling about her; she is a lovely free spirit. We thought it would be interesting to let her sing freely in a nostalgic, lo tech environment. The lyrics"You promised me Venus, Saturn and Mars" inspired the outer space theme. I was also enormously influenced by the Hughes Bros. Nike spots, which are off the hook.

Sci-fi can be cool.
In order to get the degenerated look we wanted, we mastered to digibeta and then bumped down 5 generations on VHS and back to digibeta. We searched through hours of sci-fi stock footage to find the right material: whimsical, hackish space fields. The comps are deliberately sloppy and some of the compositions are random and childish.

Isaac Hayes for President.
We also shot a scene inspired by a 1972 photo-shoot with Isaac Hayes in Penthouse, where Snoop was dressed like a pimped-out-high-priest and the girls have matching blonde afro wigs, and looked like nymphomaniacs with artillery belts and bullet chokers in an Egyptian Village. Nellie Kim was the stylist, she killed it. This scene didn't make it in the video; it was too crazy.