The 2018 midterm elections were more than just a referendum on President Donald Trump’s leadership. The election cycle will also go down as a new age of visual storytelling about the wave of women seeking office. With unprecedented numbers of women on the ballot, filmmakers used novel storytelling approaches to introduce voters to the candidates. The commercials are all notable for their storytelling prowess, their distinct visual choices, and for how the stories of women confronting the status quo were front and center.
As visual storytellers, we can learn from and imitate the sophisticated persuasive work on display to tell our own compelling stories. As journalists, understanding the successful visual language at use here helps us tell smarter stories about how candidates are connecting with voters.
Here’s a look at several campaign videos about women, two of which went viral this election cycle.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
“Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office. I was born in a place where your zip code determines your destiny.”
That’s the start of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s get-to-know-me campaign video. This came out before the 29-year-old congresswoman from New York was a national star, and before she won a primary victory over a long-time Democrat. It’s a film that paints Ocasio-Cortez as a relatable, hard-working protagonist taking on forces larger than her, including people in her own party. There’s no doubt that this intimate origin story paved the way for her success, and introduced a new form of storytelling that is being widely copied by other women, including all the women now running for president.
It was made by Detroit filmmaker Naomi Burton, who admits she borrowed from storytelling techniques she honed while creating advertising campaigns for companies like General Motors. After the 2016 elections, Burton decided to quit her job in advertising and focus on making what she described in an interview as “leftist propaganda.”
“I was creating propaganda for all of these corporations,” Burton told New York Magazine’s podcast, The Cut on Tuesday. “What we’re trying to do is take all that we learned from that private-sector world about creating, you know, really high-end, high-quality content, and just bringing that over to the left. Create Super Bowl-level ads for leftist candidates and for this leftist movement.”
The video features Ocasio-Cortez in a traditional narrative voiceover structure. But there’s also something that hasn’t been seen much in campaign videos about a previous generation of women running for office: the ordinariness of a woman getting ready for her day and then how she spends it, from sunup to sundown. This has become Ocasio-Cortez’s trademark: an unprecedented glimpse into her personal life using social media. This film marks the debut of this sort of storytelling.
I’ll break down two specific sequences to understand why the visuals were so effective with this narrative technique:
The film begins with seven quick clips in 10 seconds of Ocasio-Cortez in her own bathroom getting ready for the day by doing her hair and putting on mascara. There’s a softness to the focus, suggesting a wide-open aperture and the use of the natural light, and it is all conveyed with handheld camera work and medium- to tight shots. (With one exterior, establishing shot of her apartment building, also shot handheld and with some artful solar flare on the lens.) These are deliberate choices that, within the first 10 seconds, convey a sense of authenticity we don’t get with older female candidates.
There’s another interesting visual choice, shot with the same hand-held, wide-open aperture. From :49 to 1:02, we see 13 quick clips of children and families. These children are holding hands with adults, playing, eating with their moms at home, and walking across the streets with their fathers in the diverse district Ocasio-Cortez was running to represent. (Again, with one solar-flared exterior in the mix, clearly a favorite technique of the filmmaker! and one that gives us that sensation of being there, in that place, as the story is told.) The final medium shot, handheld, is a video portrtait of a young girl, someone who looks like Ocasio-Cortez might have when she were 7 or 8. And then we cut to her as an adult, speaking to a group at a church. It’s time to fight for a New York that working families can afford, we hear her say.
Burton says these scenes from a woman’s life may may seem novel now only because there have been fewer women involved in creating video. More women in video means more stories get told about women, she said. “If more women were just involved in that, you’d see scenes in women’s lives,” Burton said.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, there’s a lot of filmmakers and campaign managers out there trying to recreate Burton’s magic. Since the video came out, and since Ocasio-Cortez’s election, we’ve seen other candidates letting people into their homes.(Kamala Harris in her kitchen, for example.) It often seems staged, and that’s because it is. You can’t imitate Ocasio-Cortez’s millennial comfort with cameras and social media. Other candidates who want to create narratives that invite voters and viewers into unguarded moments will have to find their own authentic visual language to show us scenes from their lives.
Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar
Like the Ocasio-Cortez film, with Mary Jennings Hegar we get the origin story of a candidate who is new to politics and needs an introduction to voters. Hegar, though, is no ordinary woman. She’s a heroic former Air Force helicopter pilot who fought to lift the ban on women serving in on-the-ground combat roles. The Texan broke down a lot of doors – and that’s the storytelling metaphor that drives the film that introduces her to voters. She needs to be made relatable, and that’s done through storytelling that portrays her as an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances doing whatever it takes to physically and metaphorically bust through barriers.
One of Hegar’s first memories is of a door, she tells viewers: the glass one that her father threw her mother out of when she was a child, which is depicted as a re-enactment in the early scenes of the film. Throughout her life Hegar faced barriers, and that meant “opening, using and sometimes kicking through every door that was in my way,” she says in the video.
Let’s look at how the use of a steady cam, along with visually and conceptually matched cuts, are an important part of the storytelling approach:
She tells us right away in the opening seconds of the film that it is a story about doors, and we see Hegar’s modern-day front door in Texas. It’s open, and it’s though we as viewers are invited in. In one, fluid 20-second steady cam shot, we get to walk in her front door, through her hallway and into her dining room, where her husband is delivering food to her and their two children and another adult. (We even see the tattoos on Hegar’s right upper arm, something few previous women running for Congress have dared show.) In that same long shot, the camera comes up to the door on display in her dining room, as Hegar explains how it is the door to the helicopter she was in when she was shot down in Afghanistan.
We go directly to a conceptually matched cut of an actual door on an actual helicopter, in a re-enactment of a combat scene. From here, we see scene after scene of Hegar walking through doors. (Note at 1:06 the Air Force poster on the wall of her re-created childhood bedroom, and how it cuts to the same poster outside of a re-enactment of her entering the Air Force recruitment office years later.)
These conceptual match cuts occur throughout the piece, contributing to the narrative flow of the story, that one thing led to another in her career, and that the door she’s trying to break down now is an inevitable progression of that.
The idea for the get-to-know-MJ ad came from producer Cayce McCabe, an experienced writer and director at the political consulting firm Putnam Partners. He told Adweek that he shot on a steady cam to make the Hegar campaign video feel “very fluid” and “as though the whole spot is connected.” He also told Adweek that filmmakers can make political ads that are as cinematic and as “well-shot, well-produced, well-written, clever” and even “attention-grabbing” as those made by big corporations.
“There’s no reason that political advertising needs to be particularly boring, or particularly straightforward, or what people have been used to seeing in political ads for decades,” he said. (What a relief!)
Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda even tweeted about it. “MJ, you made the best political ad anyone’s ever seen. I should be asking YOU for help!”
Hegar was in a tough district for Democrats, even for Democrats who were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. But 3 million people watched Hegar’s video on YouTube. It’s sure to open yet another door for her.
Heidi Heitkamp
I include this campaign commercial because it has a striking visual technique, but it was used in a way that was likely unhelpful to the candidate. It also illustrates what might be a generational/fashion shift in storytelling. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota was well known to her constituents – a 2012 profile of her first campaign for U.S. Senate described her hugging her way across the room because she knew so many people wherever she campaigned. Even though everyone already knew her, as a Democrat in a state where 63 percent of voters chose Trump in 2016, she faced an uphill battle against a sitting congressman with as much name recognition as her.
So it’s worth looking at the eye-catching campaign commercial she released at the end of the midterm cycle. It’s a 30-second commercial more in the vein of a traditional television spot aired at the end of a campaign. Heitkamp sits at a table, armwrestling a muscle-bound man at a table – and winning. (We never see the arm-wrestler’s face, just his meaty back and shaved head.) We hear music that’s a little reminiscent of a WWF promo video, and the lighting has that garish look of a night-time sporting event – pro basketball comes to mind. And most strikingly, the 30-second spot is shot in one take with no cuts, using a controlled dolly shot to swoop in over the arm-wrestler’s shoulder toward Heitkamp’s face in a positive action shot. “I’m Heidi Heitkamp and maybe this is how we should decide elections because it couldn’t get much more ridiculous,” she says, in a nod to the role of fake news in modern politics.
This one-shot controlled dolly shot is fun to see – it’s what caught my eye in my Facebook feed. But imagine how much more effective it could have been had it been used with the narrative aplomb the other two women deployed? Something that demonstrated, visually, Heitkamp’s place in her state, using the landscape and her connection to it to her advantage? Something that evoked feeling for her love and familiarity with the place she hoped to continue representing in the U.S. Senate.
Heitkamp directly names her opponent, something both Hegar and Ocasio-Cortex also do in their ads. From a storytelling perspective, it gives the women adversaries to vanquish, and as viewers we are invested in the outcome. But unlike Hegar and Ocasio-Cortez, Heitkamp doesn’t give us an intimate glimpse at her womanhood. She is one of the boys, in a masculine-leaning commercial with unflattering light.
The campaign ad got little attention, and Heitkamp lost the election. I reached out to the campaign but didn’t get a response about who made the spot. It came at the same time as Heitkamp’s vote against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and she released a separate ad explaining that vote, which likely stole the thunder from her ad. Given Heitkamp’s reputation as a down-to-earth and relatable politician, the commercial was a surprising pick.
I’m hopeful that in future elections, women won’t need to show they’re one of the boys to get elected.
-Erika Bolstad