political campaigns and music

When Colin, Lauren, Sam and I created our propaganda project a little while back we all decided that a good topic we could focus on was political elections. We eventually came up with the idea of Colin and myself becoming fake candidates for the mayor of south campus and it really changed how I viewed several propagandistic techniques in campaign videos. The most surprising technique that I learned through doing this project was the role of music in campaign commercials and just how much it adds to a certain appeal which typically is pathos.

Here is one of obamas campaign commercials

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aR3Gpsn4v4

I find it really interesting that the effectiveness of this message is dramatically enhanced by the low, swelling and dramatic music that in conjunction with the images of obamas mother.

After seeing and remembering videos such as this I decided that I would record some guitar work to accompany any of the campaign videos that we made for our project and I think this also had a significant impact on the viewer even though our videos were about nonsensical and ridiculous issues. Heres the website that has the videos I recorded some guitar work for: Its fascinating how much music can impact the viewer and affect them in a particular way.

http://southcampusmayor.webs.com/apps/videos/videos/show/7717576-peter-j-smith-ad-attacking-colin-mcglinchey

I never knew how important that was until I actually tried to do the same in my own fake campaign video.