Product

I wanted to make a project that would highlight how scary the selection of our next President can be, since our decision will literally affect the future of America for the next 4 to possibly 8 years. My project is a recreation of the intros for American Horror Story, but themed around the role of American President.

Intention

Being right in the middle of the Presidential election process, the biggest question on everyone's mind is: who will become the next President of the United States? Whoever becomes our next President is a huge deal, which is certainly not something that we should be taking lightly. However, some people are saying that elections are on their way to becoming just a joke based on this election so far.

Context

I particularly happened to like the horror genre in general, so after reading the project description I knew that I would want to make something horror-related. While looking for different horror-themed shows/movies, I happened to run into a lot of advertisements for elections, which is what gave me the idea for having my project be about the election. I just happened to pick American Horror Story because it has "American" in the title and the sequence had the format that was easiest to work with for this project.

Process

The structure behind the title sequences of American Horror Story is relatively simple: it is a collection of random unsettling/creepy images with the titles of the actors' names thrown in between randomly. However, the scenes in the intro do not feature the characters themselves but rather generic themes of what that particular season is about (each of the seasons have completely unrelated storylines). So my challenge was to find videos related to being President, but not featuring any of the candidates themselves. Although there were no videos of the actual Oval Office online, I did find a news segment about a man who recreated the Oval Office in his own home, which is where many of the clips from my video are from. Other clips are of generic American themes like the American Flag or a bald eagle.

I also had to edit all of the clips so that they would appear more AHS-esque. Most of this consisted of color correcting and adding noise to the images so they would appear darker and creepier, but I added some other effects to make the video more interesting like flickering and speeding up effects. All of the effects were made using the builtin Adobe Premiere Pro CC effects.

Reflection

One issue with this project was finding video clips that were relevant enough to use, as well as being a good enough quality and not having any sort of overlays or watermarks on them. It doesn't look as complex and professional-looking as the actual American Horror Story intro, but being restricted to only using clips that I could find instead of filming them myself, as well as not being as experienced with video editing as professional editors, is probably why. I think that the end result is pretty entertaining to look at, but I don't think that it quite conveys my original intention of "this election is important" behind this project. 

Attribution

Created using Adobe Premiere Pro CC

Inspired by the American Horror Story Season 1 Intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c3VVJb562Y

Source Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roTHJH3_URA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IXuhwGKdCs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCYkhUXE5jE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qmvoxGCpD8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgLM1IWCeiM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg5DwQwx2JI