Alumnus makes rap video to enter in YouTube contest
Kailey Delinger
Issue date: 4/12/07 Section: News
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Graduate, get a job, start making rap videos. It may not be the future that every TCU student has in mind, but that's the way it has turned out for one 2006 graduate.
On March 30, Chip Hanna, a TCU alumnus who works at an advertising agency in Fort Worth, submitted a rap video to YouTube and entered himself into a contest to win $25,000.
Hanna, who graduated with a degree in advertising and public relations, is one of 370 entrants in a contest sponsored by TurboTax, a tax preparation computer program.
The contest, called the Tax Rap, accepted entries until March 30 in the form of two-minute-long rap videos submitted to YouTube. Online viewers were allowed to vote for their favorite rap about TurboTax until April 8, at which time the top 13 videos were submitted to be judged by Vanilla Ice.
Hanna said the idea to enter came from an e-mail he received with updates about happenings in the advertising world.
"I saw that Vanilla Ice was sponsoring a contest for TurboTax and I was like, 'I could write some phat rhymes,'" Hanna said. "I just sat down one night and started writing stuff down and I decided to enter it."
The final product, called "Hip Hop Tax Blues", is a music video tour through Fort Worth with Hanna's rap alias, White Chocolate Chip.
Though the alumnus said the video was made in an afternoon, his friend Whitney Barnard, a junior communications studies and radio-TV-film major, said she was genuinely impressed with it.
"It wasn't just like 'I am going to film you while you sing this little thing you made up,'" Barnard said. "It had great camera angles and lots of awesome cuts and there were different themes through the whole thing."
Still, winning the contest requires more than resurrecting an old Halloween costume - which was the inspiration for the White Chocolate Chip character - it takes good camera work.
Hanna made groups on Facebook and MySpace in an effort to garner votes and the video has caught on at his job at the Balcom Agency, an advertising agency in Fort Worth, and at his church, Grapevine's Fellowship Church.
On March 30, Chip Hanna, a TCU alumnus who works at an advertising agency in Fort Worth, submitted a rap video to YouTube and entered himself into a contest to win $25,000.
Hanna, who graduated with a degree in advertising and public relations, is one of 370 entrants in a contest sponsored by TurboTax, a tax preparation computer program.
The contest, called the Tax Rap, accepted entries until March 30 in the form of two-minute-long rap videos submitted to YouTube. Online viewers were allowed to vote for their favorite rap about TurboTax until April 8, at which time the top 13 videos were submitted to be judged by Vanilla Ice.
Hanna said the idea to enter came from an e-mail he received with updates about happenings in the advertising world.
"I saw that Vanilla Ice was sponsoring a contest for TurboTax and I was like, 'I could write some phat rhymes,'" Hanna said. "I just sat down one night and started writing stuff down and I decided to enter it."
The final product, called "Hip Hop Tax Blues", is a music video tour through Fort Worth with Hanna's rap alias, White Chocolate Chip.
Though the alumnus said the video was made in an afternoon, his friend Whitney Barnard, a junior communications studies and radio-TV-film major, said she was genuinely impressed with it.
"It wasn't just like 'I am going to film you while you sing this little thing you made up,'" Barnard said. "It had great camera angles and lots of awesome cuts and there were different themes through the whole thing."
Still, winning the contest requires more than resurrecting an old Halloween costume - which was the inspiration for the White Chocolate Chip character - it takes good camera work.
Hanna made groups on Facebook and MySpace in an effort to garner votes and the video has caught on at his job at the Balcom Agency, an advertising agency in Fort Worth, and at his church, Grapevine's Fellowship Church.
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