How effective is the combination of your music video and ancillary text?

Music videos are primarily used to provide a visual representation of a song as well as to market and increase sales of the song. The ancillary text in addition to the music video provides a hard copy visual of the

music/song being promoted. It is important that both the music video and ancillary are

representative of the song and genre.

• An example of an effective combination of music video and ancillary is shown by popular 1980s hip hop group Run DMC.

Above we have a still shot from their music video for the single My Adidas. The video provides many conventions of a1980s hip hop video. The video includes various still shots of the three members of Run DMC. The locations vary, however they always remain in urban areas. The use of gold chains, big shades, tracksuits and trainers are stereotypical to hip hop and therefore add to authenticity of the genre.

Above we have the ancillary that was paired with the music video. As we can see the three members of Run DMC are present, wearing the same typical clothing we saw in the video. By doing so they are immediately recognisable to their audience. The name of the artist is clearly visible; the unique logo design (RUN DMC) is present and the genre of music is hinted by the cover art. The combination of all of these makes this cover effective in marketing Run DMC’s My Adidas as a hip hop single.

• By choosing a song that was in typical to the 1980s hip hop genre, it was clear what we had to include in our video and ancillary. From watching other 1980s hip hop videos we were able to identify certain items that we had to include in the video. To ensure that our main product conveyed authenticity we had to make sure we included locations and outfits typical to the genre.

Above we have an example of clothing and a location typical of 80s hip hop. We have the tracksuits, gold chains, bright colours and a graffiti background.

Above we have one of the pictures from our set/ancillary. As we can see our picture is very similar to the example given on the left. In a similar way to the example we have included tracksuits, gold chains, bright colours and a graffiti background.

• After all the research we made sure that our main product included all the requirements for a 80s hip hop music video. Perhaps the most important part of our music video was the location. We created a background that included lyrics from our song “Jump on it”; the words were written in bright colours and were behind the actors during filming. In the picture provided above we can see that graffiti was also included in the video. The use of graffiti was very popular in hip hop videos of the 80s; it helped convey the sense of an urban lifestyle.

• One other scene we used was a car green scene. The use of green screen was very popular in the 80s/90s. By using a green screen you are able to create illusions which can not be created by filming normally.

Above we have a still shot from the video Check the rhyme by A tribe called quest. We can see the use of green screen in the background, which has made it possible to have the house and words.

Above we have a still shot from our Jump on it music video. By using the green screen we were able to give the illusion of driving. This would have been impossible to achieve normally with the equipment e had. The green screen was also included to emphasise again the concept of a 80s video.

• As we can see in this slide, the three main characters are present in the ancillaries. As they appear in our music video.

• We have made sure that the combination of our music video and ancillary text is effective in conveying a typical hip hop video from the eighties. We have used exactly the same characters in our music video in the cover of our digipack and our poster .By doing so we allow the audience to automatically identify our work, when they see our ancillary the will recognise the stills and photographs taken from the set of our music video.