In the final seconds of Scarface's "On My Block" video, as the camera reveals several pairs of shoes hanging over a telephone wire, a billboard in the background bares the words "What is in the beginning will be in the end."

The biblical verse sums up the point director Mark Klasfeld wanted to make with the video, which tells the veteran rapper's life story in what appears to be one continuous shot. ([article id="1457994"]Click for photos from the video[/article].)

"The whole pair of shoes over a wire is pretty indicative of somebody dying [in the projects]," Klasfeld explained recently from his New York office. "I wanted to start it with one pair and then end it with many. And it was the same kid in 1968 as it was in 2002, meaning the hood is f---ed up. It's kind of hopeless and the sh-- never ends. It's a cycle and it's hard to get out."

The billboard at the end of the video and the one at the beginning with the verse "And this too shall come to pass" are Klasfeld's favorite parts of Scarface clip, but not just because of the messages they provide.

"It was actually digitally created in post[production], and nobody will ever know that," Klasfeld said, perhaps forgetting he was being interviewed. "It looks completely real."

Although "On My Block" lacks the gloss typical of many hip-hop videos, the director spent long hours in postproduction, not only on the billboards, but on creating a video that appears to span five decades chronologically.

"We shot the whole thing on 35 millimeter, but we aged it for the beginning, then degraded and added grain through the '70s and '80s," Klasfeld said. "It's constantly changing up until modern day, where it gets clearer and more resolution, like current videos have."

Klasfeld achieved the seamless shot effect by using a motion control camera, a special recording device with a computer that enables the camera to replicate the exact same move over and over.

"In essence we can just keep shooting one of the scenes until we get it right," Klasfeld explained. "We can pick the best take in editing, yet the in points and out points will exactly match. So when you get to the next scene, you can match it seamlessly."

The director and his photographers set the in and out points by watching each scene right after it was shot on monitors on the set — a time-consuming process that pushed the two-day shoot past 40 hours. But by the time the final scene was filmed, they basically had an edited version of the video.

Before Klasfeld had even heard "On My Block," he knew he wanted to do a different kind of video and that the unpredictable Scarface would be open to ideas.

"I've done a lot of things in hip-hop, and I really wanted to do something like a short film, more than I had ever done before," said Klasfeld, whose résumé includes 'NSYNC's "Girlfriend" and Ludacris' "Area Codes." "I just think that hip-hip is at the point where there is nothing new coming out of it and every video has the exact same things in it. And I was really inspired to fight against that and do something that was groundbreaking. I didn't want to have any performance. I barely wanted to have Scarface in the video."

Once he heard the song, Klasfeld got the idea to give the history of a block in a seamless shot. The video begins with Scarface's birth and moves immediately to the death of his father. There are two other shooting deaths portrayed, along with several confrontations with police, including a powerful scene in which a cop sprays paint into the main character's eyes.

There are also more lighthearted events depicted, including break dancing and a poker game. Martin Luther King appears on a television set in the latter scene, while an earlier TV shows a Black Panthers rally.

Although there are a few obvious references to Scarface's life — like a poster advertising "Hip-hop Group Seeking New Member - Ghetto Boyz" — the video is not entirely based on the rapper's life.

"It was a little bit hard for him," Klasfeld said. "Like him being born on the street. He was like, 'I was born in a hospital.' But I was like, 'It made sense visually.' It's not 100 percent accurate. He's been through a lot of things, but we took other people's experiences as well."

Klasfeld filmed the video in the same Houston neighborhood where Scarface grew up and used people off the street to fill his cast.

"There was even one point where one of our kids didn't show up, so we actually cruised around the 'hood for a while and found a barbecue with a kid who looked like Scarface at age 14," the director said. "That's why it looks so real."

Unlike the billboards, none of the characters were created digitally.

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