The Daily Background

With his announcement today, Joe Biden relaunched his website joebiden.com, complete with now-obligatory announcement video. And what a video it is.

Biden has probably the worst-produced, worst thought-out video of all of the ones I’ve seen so far (and that includes Sam ‘I’m so subtle, standing in front of a painting of George Washington‘ Brownback). Seriously, it’s really, really poorly done for a number of reasons (and I don’t just say this as a documentary film major). From a technological standpoint, there’s no interactive element (Obama’s video for instance, powered by a company called Brightcove, allows bloggers to embed the video in their own website).

Biden messes up his lines at least twice, and you get the impression that he’s sort of ad-libbing at some places. In some situations this might come off as personable or human, but it comes off as though he didn’t bother to do a second take.

Further, from the standpoint of the video as a film (and here’s where going to film school makes me hypersensetive about these things I guess), there are several awkward, jarring cuts at seemingly random moments in the video. It’s as if the producers realized that listening to Joe Biden was boring as hell, so they just abruptly cut in a different angle to give the viewer some variety.

And when they do cut to a different angle, it appears as if they actually cut to a different audio source, which make the cuts even more jarring (not to mention the lack of cutting on action, which just makes it feel weird). The second half of the video switches at seemingly random intervals between a medium close up to a closeup, and it just takes the viewer out of it.

The video is also rather poorly lit. You can see Biden’s face just fine, but there are dark shadows looming all around the fireplace behind him. It’s not cheerfully lit like Clinton’s video, it’s not serious like Obama’s, it’s not traditioanlly homey like Brownback’s- it’s just scary.

Here’s the absolute worst part though: when the video switches angles the first few times, Biden keeps talking straight at the first camera. He doesn’t stop to look at the second camera. This obviously wasn’t planned ahead of time, and whoever edited it together probably just switched to the other angle randomly for variation. With the direct address of Biden looking at and talking straight to the viewer suddenly gone, it feels as if the viewer is watching Biden talk to somebody else.

Filed under: Presidential election, Z-TDB Blog