Voting is Attractive

Here's the link to my video!  Please watch and give me some feedback on the ideas!
http://youtu.be/xBSVYcUMNmo

My voting campaign was aimed at college students.  My main target was BYU students.  I chose to narrow my audience because BYU students are stereotypically obsessed with dating and are always trying to be more attractive than their competitors.  Americans often talk about our responsibility to vote and a need to have our voices heard, but I tried to take the argument from a different angle.  While it is optimistic to think that people will vote on moral grounds, the likelihood of them voting when they do not have tangible results is unlikely.  I attempted to portray a tangible result to BYU co-eds.  

I used quick shots and slow shots to effectively emphasize points.  The first scene when the door slams was purposely speed up to show that the girl wanted nothing to do with a guy that did not vote.  I used a freeze frame at the end of the dating scenes to show a shift from the dating scenes into the actual message.  This slowing down gave the audience a moment to digest what they were seeing before being told.  The scenes where the students were discussing the actual information were much longer than the earlier dating scenes.  This was to emphasize the importance of their word. 

I mostly used medium and close up shots.  This was to create an organic feel that made the situation personal.  The main character was telling a story, similar to a video blog style, and the emphasis was on the action and words, not the scenery.  I zoomed in specifically on the faces when she was asking “You didn’t?” to show her outrage and his ridiculousness for why he did not vote.  I used more medium shots at other times to show that he was alone when he was frustrated.  The medium shots were also very effective in showing the two people comfortably.

I also attempted to show the rule of thirds by having the individual shots slightly off center, with their eye on one of the intersections of the grid lines.  In shots with two people, I tried to make it symmetrical or at least balanced by the way they were sitting.  I tried to have the two people mimic each others body language.    

After each rejection, there was some sort of slamming sound.  This was repeated in the door shutting, the cup hitting the table, and the slap on the cheek.  This repetition was to emphasize the beating the main character is feeling from being rejected so many times simply because he did not vote.

The music I chose was very purposeful.  The first song, Tenuousness, had a great modern vibe that brought the story along.  A slower song would have made it drag, and a faster song would have made it too intense.  An older song would not have been as applicable to the audience as a modern song.  It would have become another voting campaign made by our parents.  The title of the song was also appropriate.  A tenuous person doubts themselves, and the main man was definitely doubting his ability to date.  The second song, Me Without You, brought the attention back to how love can be successful and how much he wants to be attractive to the girls he likes.  It has a happy and upbeat tempo to show a subtle shift in the main mans attitude. 

The highly saturated shots at the beginning were to show a leap back in time.  The colors show a shift to reality.  I chose blue and red as the background because those are two colors on the American flag and the colors of the two main political parties.  I tried to use each color equally to show that this video was not promoting a single candidate or party.  I chose not to use super typical American colors, and a more offset blue and darker red, because I wanted the video to stray from tradition.  Youth of today see American politics as a tradition of arguing, and I wanted to change that perspective.  

I used very little typography.  Within the first minute of the video (the main message of the video) I used type only once to tell the date.  It was a better alternative to simply show the time of year than to have the man character introduce it.  It made the story move quicker because it started in media res.  I chose to use a serifed, more old fashioned font to show that the scene was in the past.  This combined with the lack of color and contrast made a dream like feel of hurtful memories.  The typography in the credits changed to a sans serif font that is more relaxed and individual to bring the video back to modernity.  I could use a more relaxed font because the main character was back in a good reality, rather than the terrible dream.