Author: ebolstad

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

The Courage to Change

“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

Doors

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

Arm Wrestling

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

As I work to weave a poem into one of my own visual projects, I went in search of inspiration from short films that are deliberate in their use of poetry. I came across Motion Poems, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that matches poets with filmmakers to produce work that interprets poetry.

Be forewarned: The motion poems are addictive and inspiring. Each one I watched led to another. And I wanted to know more about the poets and the filmmakers who created the work. How did the filmmakers chose the imagery, and what else had they produced? How much did they collaborate with the poets? Even without words, many of the films could be considered visual poetry. But with skillful use of sound and music and words, they transcend both film and poetry to become something new.

Some of the motion poems were explicitly linear, using reenactment to tell the narrative of the poem. Others were much less overt, and I was surprised by how much I was drawn to the nonlinear visual storytelling. With these types of motion poems, images are as carefully chosen as words to evoke emotion. There is much we can take from this approach, even when we are putting together journalism-based work: images have emotional power that we can use to convey a tone and even the intent of our pieces. 

In “How to Make the Girl” by filmmaker and musician Ann Prim, we see the power of a nonlinear interpretation of a poem by a fellow multi-hyphenate: musician and artist Dessa Wander. Prim often has a nonlinear approach to her work, which is deliberately designed to provoke feelings, she said in an interview with Minnesota Public Television about one of her other films, Filmetto – Porta 241.

“I really like the person viewing it to create their own narrative,” Prim said. “The human mind always wants to make a narrative. It wants to make sense of our surroundings.”

Of her films, Prim says she is drawn to telling stories of women’s lives, “especially stories that reveal the strength needed to survive and thrive.” A common thread running through her work is a focus on characters who tend to dwell outside social norms. They also often exist in what Prim describes as “the space between and in the process of becoming.”

That’s exactly what we have in “How to Make the Girl.” The four-minute film opens with the title appearing word by word over an abstract image (and sound) of a lathe. The words disappear one by one, as though they are being deleted on a keyboard from the end of a sentence. It’s an act of visual wordplay that suggests the girl can be unmade by external forces (or creators) as easily as she can be made. Viewers may create their own narrative, but they are given a visual clue at the film’s beginning that this film is about the forces that shape women’s lives.

From the start, music and sound are powerful forces in this film, as is befitting in a piece of art made by a filmmaker and poet with musical backgrounds. The film opens with a curtain drawing from left to right and music that evokes the rhythmic sound of industrial clicking. It was only on second viewing that I realized there was a hand – unknown who it was attached to! – pulling the curtain. A bare lightbulb swings in the opposite direction, creating an artful juxtaposition of imagery.

In the background are a girl’s dress behind plastic, dirty shears, blue rubber gloves and a hose. The hypnotic lightbulb continues to swing back and forth as the camera pulls away in an unmotivated negative action shot. We are 30 seconds in, and visually, we know that a stage has been set. The emotion evoked here is that of unease, that something natural is awry.

Next, we see shadows on the floor that represent the moving light bulb. We see a sequence of the items on the wall: the dress, the shears, the hose. The camera moves closer to pan over these items. Unlike the crisp medium opening shot, these are fuzzier, their focus deliberately muddy. The light from the shining bulb continues to swing across the items. And then, at 45 seconds, Prim focuses on the moving bulb, in an extreme close up that crescendos with the sound of the sizzle and crackle of the filaments within. It is so close we see the dust on the bulb.

This shot is followed by a conceptual match cut to the smooth legs of a girl, also swinging from side to side from some fixed point above. Her pale legs are the only bright spot in this otherwise ominous room. They being to spin, and we hear once again the sound of something turning. The next shot (at 1:12) is of an analog counter.

It is here that the poem begins, with words that correspond to the counter: “One hundred turns on the lathe…”

Fear is evoked next. A raw rib scuttles from left to right across the screen, using stop motion to animate its movement. “We don’t use the rib in this new method.” Feed it to the dog, the voice of the creator says, as a growling maw lunges at the rib at 1:40.

Again, the hand of an unseen creator is at work, turning the figure of the girl wrapped in a opaque plastic tarp. Still unseen, the creator tosses the body into the trunk of an old green Buick. It contributes to the feeling that we are watching a horror film, a Frankenstein under construction. And the treatment of the girl’s body, tossed in a trunk, suggests her disposability. The garage door begins to close. In a matched action shot that takes us in a close-up to the door, it slams shut, with a powerful bang. This shot is so carefully constructed, with such an eye for detail, that we see spiders scuttling at the bottom of the frame, disturbed by the slam and the noise. (1:57) This is imagery used to evoke disgust and unease, accompanied by the sound of scuttling insects, as though a collection of cockroaches scattered, off-screen, somewhere behind us.  

The camera as the car drives away is focused midway between the foreground and the background, so the taillights and the shape of it are out of focus until the car arrives at the point of focus. This is a beautiful, 20-second shot worth replicating. It is accompanied by emphatic techo music with a strong beat, and the muscular sound of a gas-guzzling sedan accelerating away. (From about 2 to 2:25.) This is a masculine, old-fashioned car, another clue that this film is about how women have mostly lived in a world created by men.

The screen fades to black, and then there is an abrupt shift of tone and color palate and music at 2:27. “La Camparsita” by the Brazilian guitar duo Los Indios Tabajaras, kicks in. (There are no other musical credits for this film, which suggests that Prim composed most of it. It’d be interesting to know whether she and Wander collaborated on the music.)

This next shot is also a lengthy one, lasting from 2:28 to 2:48. Once again, it begins with the girl’s feet, a callback to our first glimpse at the creature under construction. Prim uses a slider to pan slowly from the girl’s feet to her head. The girl is on a lawn chair in a pool, in a pink one-piece bathing suit, “baking” to her finish.

Next, we get an extreme closeup of the girl’s face, as it turns toward the camera and she removes tanning goggles. The next shot is so tight that we can see the veins in her eyelids and the wisps of blond, baby hair at her temples. The emotion evoked here is one of marvel: something real and youthful, yet artificially constructed, is awakening. The poem, which has been absent for more than one minute, does not start up again until we get closer to the girl’s face: “A day on the drying rack and the pupils should contract.”

I do not want to spoil the final minute for anyone who wants to watch the rest of this film, so I’ll end my discussion of film techniques here, other than to say that we return to the same shot we saw at the start.

The poem, except for its last few lines, is read by a separate voiceover actor, Mikel Clifford, suggesting once again, the hand of the unseen creator. Dessa Wander reads the final lines, though, leaving us with an existential mystery, but one certainty: It is the poet who created this world.  

– Erika Bolstad

 

– Erika Bolstad