Patrick Kelly for SG President

Tags / american university, branding, campaign, college, communications, logo, publicity, social media, student government, video

At the end of my college career at AU, I helped a good friend of mine, Patrick Kelly, run for Student Government President. His campaign spread widely on social media and relied on several video campaigns released throughout the campaign period.

We started with designing a logo. Kelly had previously run for Student Government Senate with the slogan “A New Day with PK.” With this in mind, I designed a logo featuring a rising sun and a refreshing color palette that broke with the more common red, white and blue scheme campaigns at American University often defaulted to.

To kick off the campaign, we released “Running on Issues”

The video was shot entirely on iPhone and after receiving the video files, I edited it in Final Cut Pro. The issues Kelly was “running” on were digitally inserted below his feet using Apple Motion, and track with the camera in three dimensions. Multiple takes of Kelly allowed us to cut to multiple camera angles throughout the video.

Each day of the campaign, Kelly filmed a brief video on one issue he was running on. The idea was to release one video with one idea every day of the campaign in a series called “7 Days, 7 Ideas”

The videos were shot and edited quickly. Most of them were shot only a day or less in advance of their release. We would set up time to record him in between classes and in between his campaigning in the residence halls. The campaign was so busy at the end, a seventh installment was never recorded or released. It became a running joke as to what the 7th Idea would have been. No one knows.

To wrap up the campaign, we had several a capella singers at American University record a reworded rendition of The Lion King song Circle of Life. The singing was recorded and then mixed with an instrumental version of the song for the video:

This was the biggest video of the campaign, earning more than 1,000 views on YouTube before the end of the election. Some footage was shot on iPhones while much of the footage of Kelly was recorded by me using a dSLR and tripod. The final video was edited in Final Cut Pro.