Interactive video portraits of election candidates
During the last federal election the idea was thrown around of interviewing all of the candidates and putting the videos online.
The problem with just throwing up entire interviews is that few people will watch the videos and the ones who do will be bored waiting to get some tidbit of information. Say you interview four people, seven questions, one minute each = 28 minutes of video. That is an eternity! Would you watch 28 minutes of video of your four local candidates in hopes of hearing one or two things that interest you?
A new philosophy I’ve been following is “Think Backwards”
Typically in the media we capture and present video and then expect viewers to consume it as we give it to them. But imagine you just moved to Edmonton. You want to vote but you don’t know your local candidates or how they compare on certain issues that matter to you.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could watch four similar interviews at the same time and quickly jump to the information you want?
Well myself and data journalist Lucas Timmons did just that!
Watch an interactive video presentation of the federal election candidates in Edmonton-Centre.
I interviewed all the candidates and asked them the same seven questions. Lucas used the YouTube API and made hotlinks to each answer. You can quickly jump to the information you are most interested in. You can watch one minute or 28 minutes. You are in control.
My big idea was to interview all of the candidates in all of the ridings but there simply wasn’t enough time so I only did Edmonton-Centre and Edmonton-Strathcona.
I wanted to have a consistent look and feel to the videos. I decided on a simple white background and black and white tones so that the video would only show the candidate and not have distracting backgrounds. The other advantage of shooting this way was that I could also do nice still portraits of each candidate after the interview was done.
I had to be careful to ensure the framing, light and sound was consistent. I wouldn’t want to make any candidate look better or worse than the rest.