How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

One aspect that makes the combination of our music video and our ancillary texts effective is the mise-en-scene. Our music video uses many dark locations such as an alley way in the introduction of the video. The reason we chose to use a dark location is because it conforms to the hip-hop genre and creates the correct feel for the audience which we found out during our audience feedback. Black is a colour used to represent menace or evil but is also a popular indicator of power. This is a colour used frequently in the rap/hip-hop genre. People recognise it as a representation of power which is why we decided to use it for our artists ‘Sons of Da Projects’. Furthermore, black is a colour which can represent mystery and we use this so that our video and our ancillary texts can combine to make an effective combination as in our music video there is a great deal of mystery in the introduction. There are 3 characters in the introduction that are seen but they have not been introduced in any way – the audience have no clue who they are, however they are the focal points of the introduction so this will inevitably draw questions from our audience especially since there is ambiguous dialogue and they are in mainly dark locations. Furthermore, in terms of mise-en-scene, we subvert the ‘rich’ stereotype and don’t use females for a ‘male gaze’.

Another combination of our ancillary texts and our music video was the colour scheme. On our digipak, the colour scheme was said to be extremely effective. The mix of yellow and orange to create the colour that we desired was a stand-out of our digipak. We decided to mix these colours and put them on each of our artists because we wanted our target audience to see that we are not plainly conforming to the Hip-Hop genre. We wanted to show, through colour, that our artists are versatile, intelligent people. Yellow is a colour which is associated with intellect. It is also an attention-grabber and when contrasted on the colour black, it is often used to issue a warning. In this case, yellow is used for all of these reasons; we want to grab our audience’s attention. Other aspects of our artists that we wanted to highlight are from the colour orange. Connotations of the colour orange are also to grab attention (another reason which we decided to mix it with yellow), it symbolises strength and is also representative of domination. The final result of the mix of yellow and orange came to a gold colour. This was also intentional because we knew that the colour gold evokes the feeling of prestige. It also represents wisdom and high quality. We wanted to show our audience that our album was a great one and would show our lyrical prowess.

The colour scheme is also used for our music video and on our website; however, on our website we used the colour orange instead of gold. In our music video, the gold colour is seen when we used the ‘Flashing’ effect on the first artist’s performance. This was said to be a very effective and attention-grabbing effect because the audience had been used to seeing the colour black and it suddenly changed to a flash of gold. We did this, once again, to show our audience that our artists’ lyrics and performances were of a high quality. On our artists’ website, the colour orange is seen to give an energetic feel; our male artists’ performance consisted of a lot of movement laterally and used lots of arm movement too. We use black once again on our website but also include grey. Grey is a colour which evokes classy, fresh and innovative feelings. This is an aspect of our artists that we wish to display to our audience.

Another combination between our main product and our ancillary texts is how prominent our male artists are on each piece of our ancillary texts and our music video. In our music video, our male artists are the main focus in the Performance. This was so that we could show our male artists as dominant. Although the Vietnamese artist on the digipak isn’t in the music video of ‘Ready or Not’, he is still an important part of the group and we wanted to show that the males were the main artists. The reason we did this was because in Hip-Hop, the groups in this genre consisting of females aren’t/haven’t been too successful (not including Salt ‘N’ Peppa) and group’s such as Onyx, NWA, Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan were extremely successful in their time so we thought we’d take the route of having the main face of our artists being all male.