Outcome

Intention

Ongoing presidential election has become a topic of great attention on CMU campus and throughout the states. In the past few weeks, presidential debates have taken place to provide the general public a chance to get to know the candidates and their beliefs better. However, what these debates occur to me is that how helpful they actually are. The candidates keep bringing accusations against the other and try to make some humorous/sensational statements, while on the other side, the audience, left with myriads of unverifiable "facts",  seem to be more interested in how the candidates react emotionally and refute verbally. At least least as far as I see, most audience seem indifferent about what the candidates really did and didn't, what the candidate really believe. I intend to create a remix of presidential debate video and soundtrack of pop music to address the topic.

Context

I featured "Love the Way You Lie" by Rihanna and Eminem as the soundtrack of my work. First because the song is a duo, which matches the presidential debate video. Also, one major debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is about who is the "liar". Trump often refers to the "fact" that Clinton lied about her dealing with confidential emails; while Clinton always describes Trump as a "liar" who constantly makes things up.  Accusations without actual fact check between the two appeared accusation for the sake of accusation to me. I thought the phrase "love the way you lie" may sound interesting in this context. And this reflects my intention of the project well, so I chose this song as the soundtrack.

Process/Product

I downloaded source videos from Youtube and cut the video track and sound track together, Since my work is a relatively simple mashup, I used iMovie instead of other advanced video editing tools such as Premiere. The major difficulties was to integrate the voice and the video. It was technically challenging to match the "voice" with Clinton or Trump. And interns of its outcome, it was challenging to unify very diverse elements (serious presidential debate scenes and pop music). (See my reflection/critique below).

Reflection/Critique

Working on this project makes me experience in the first hand how different media lead to divergent effects. My inspiration comes from a meme which is a static image. However, as I actually started working on the reproduction, I found the video product turned out to be very far away from my expectation. While images convey the theme and the effect to the audience through visual elements (images, words), video constructs the world of the work thorough audial elements together with visual elements. For example, coordination of audio and video, in my work's case, the soundtrack is not really harmonious with Hillary Clinton's voice impression. This makes my work not that integrated and united. I feel the media not only contextualize my work but also fundamentally reconstruct my work from technical level.

If I got the chance to work on this project further, I would like to dig more into the technical issue and try to replace the soundtrack with Clinton and Trump's voice while keeping the existing music. Also, I would like to line up the video part with the sound track more precisely. 

Sources

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRlI2SQ0Ueg

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmPOoIgEZ5Y

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8oFtMemP44

References

Meme on a social media. (The subtitles is lyrics from a well-known love-themed song.)