Coolio, or Artis Leon Ivey Jr. is an American rap artist/actor from Compton, California. He’s best known for his two extremely successful singles “Fantastic Voyage” and “Gangta’s Paradise”. It’s the music video for the song “Gangsta’s Paradise” that I am now going to be analyzing.
At this point it is worth noting that this song was included on the soundtrack for a film called “Dangerous Minds” and because of this there is a lot of movie style prolonged editing involved, and even some short dialogue at the beginning. The first shot in the video is a medium close up of someone’s legs as they walk down a corridor. The setting immediately stands out to the viewer as very dark and dingy, but we can immediately identify it as a school or a building of that nature by the lockers that line walls.
This first shot is prolonged until the camera cuts to a POV shot, which contains two intimidating individuals who due to the dark lighting are partly shadowed, adding to the foreboding atmosphere. The POV shot continues for a short while down the corridor, and the light becomes brighter in patches revealing aggressive looking men lining the corridor. After this the camera cuts 4 times between a completely shadowed man on his own, and then back to the person walking down the corridor. It is on the last two cuts of this sequence that both characters are revealed, the shadowed man being Coolio, and the person walking down the corridor revealed as Michelle Pfeiffer, the main actress in the film “Dangerous Minds”.
Just as I mentioned earlier the editing techniques involved, utilize a much more cinematic style in comparison with other music videos, cuts are slow and prolonged, and are used to replicate the slow swagger of the song, whilst also depicting Coolio as a infamous gangster type character. The fade transition is also used to great effect throughout, as it goes with the smooth repetitive nature of the music.
The sound in the background before the actual song kicks in is a heartbeat, this maybe inferring that the person walking down the corridor is nervous or apprehensive, or she maybe close to death as she seems to be in a dangerous environment. The song’s intro starts 15 seconds into the video, just before the woman character sits down in the room with Coolio. The lighting in the room is still quite dark, especially in Coolio’s half of the room, where the only source of light beams down on a small portion of his face, the room is lit this way because it adds an unpredictability and uneasiness to the scene, as we wonder why he’s lurking in the shadows, possibly hiding or concealing some as the case may be when involved with criminals.
Both character’s costumes are representative of the setting, no expensive clothes or jewelry are seen, only plain colored shirts, jeans and jackets. Coolio wears all black shirt and trousers with black sunglasses; the color of this costume also helps in creating the image that Coolio is a very intimidating and dangerous character, and as well, there is an official, businessman like style about the way he his dressed wish also conveys the message “I am the boss”. Michelle Pfeiffer is dressed in quite regular women’s clothes, which are jeans, white t-shirt and a black leather jacket, she Is dressed this way to be seen as the underdog in the situation. In comparison with the boss character that Coolio plays, her costume is normal, but with a fairly tough, streetwise edge in order get across to the viewer her rebellious attitude towards “The Boss”.
The shots included in this video vary from at the beginning, a POV shot, this is included to put the viewer in the shoes of the character that is actually walking down the corridor, and in this video attempts to create a nervy and intimidating atmosphere around the person filming by placing aggressive looking men in the scene. Shortly after this comes an innovative version of the shot reverse shot technique. This occurs when the woman and Coolio are in the room together, what makes the shot quite interesting is that whilst still using basic shot reverse shot, the camera starts at a close up and whist still focusing on the main character, creeps slowly back and pans around the room until it fades directly into the next shot, (when this is used it fades either to black or to a part of the room mostly concealed in darkness) or pans around the room until the opposite characters body blocks the camera and forces a cut. There are a few exceptions however when the camera pans from a close up of the woman, all the way back and round to an over shoulder shot from Coolio’s perspective where still the woman is still visible as the focal point. Other shots include high angle pans and various close ups on smoky backgrounds.
The other images that are prevalent in this video are short clips from the movie “Dangerous Minds” that the song was made for. These clips are interspersed with scenes shot for the video itself in order to prevent the video being one dimensional, as there is if not for the movie clips only two scenes on show for almost the entire video. Having the clips in there also helps the video serve its purpose as a promotional video for the film as well Coolio’s music.
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