There’s a genre of candidate video created in this election: the montage of happy, popular, friendly moments from campaign appearances, over-edited because they can be. They come from someone on the campaign who discovers iMovie on the Mac and says, “I can be a filmmaker, too.” They edit together a bunch of clips and quotes and put them to music. Voila: the three-minute masterpiece. Problem is, they’re usually cheesy, uninformative, and long, and often embarrassing. I don’t know why they bother. Here’s the latest example, from Joe Biden:
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I’m such a hack I use Windows Movie Maker. It’s got this great auto-cheese function.
Don’t be such a downer. I watched this video and in my opinion it is a moving piece. I don’t want every video to be a policy lecture. You can learn a lot about a campaign and the candidate from videos like this.
What is your example of the ideal YouTube video?
But Jeff, cheesy, uninformative, long, and embarrassing seem to be the hallmarks of a successful YouTube channel! Have you seen some of the droning, narcissistic vloggers that have established what it takes to be a wildly popular YouTube Partner? There’s clearly an audience for all manner of crap out there; I for one would rather see more of this kind of crap, as it at least has some basic production value.
Plus, that particular video-maker, Ryan Fenton-Strauss, has produced quite a portfolio of vids, including some very cool short ads. I think he can be granted some slack to foray into the cheese genre.