If you were the President, what would you do? Fix the mortgage mess? Hand out free iPhones? Pull the troops out of Iraq? These are the questions posed in today’s Site of the Day, If I Were President.
Americans have been listening to Barack Obama and John McCain’s ideas for the past two months. Now, in the final days before the vote is taken, they’ll get a chance to hear a few more positions from people like actor and rapper Mos Def, movie star Danny Glover, recording artist Wyclef Jean, underground hip-hop star Murs, environmental activist Billy Parish, spoken-word artist George Watsky and other social influencers.
They’re all appearing in a series of web videos created and produced by Rehab, a San Francisco-based production and content company, for One Economy Corporation, GOOD Magazine and Rock the Vote.
If Mos Def Were President
Mos Def suggests that the rich have to perform mandatory community service—“mandatory!”—or else they’ll have to pay higher taxes, and he taunts those who might want to get out of it. “How does that sound, Mr. ‘I Don’t Feel Like It Today.’” He also says that if he were president, “America would be cool again—for real.”
Click on the image below to play the video.
The clips are currently running on the GOOD website, www.good.is, and on the web site of 24/7 Town Hall (www.247townhall.org), an affiliate of One Economy Corp., a non-profit organization dedicated to bring technology to lower income people in the US. The videos will also be available on a range of video sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and others.
The goal of the project, says Rehab Executive Producer Jessica Corbin, was to assemble a roster of top thinkers and taste makers in the areas of entertainment, the arts, environmentalism, sustainability and technology.
“We were looking for a cross section of people we knew would speak their minds, and whose points of view would represent the full spectrum of emotions, from funny to sarcastic to angry to hopeful. We wanted these to be authentic views, spoken from the heart, so that audiences would feel they were relevant and would respond in a genuine fashion.”
Rehab shot each thinker in a seamless limbo setting and animated their words and comments with dynamic onscreen type treatments, created by the motion graphics studio Spillt. Each video appears against a funky, soulful music track, ironically titled “Mister President,” recorded by the group Amnesty.
The series originated with One Economy Corporation, Corbin explains. They came to Rehab with the concept of doing a series of PSAs earlier this year. The studio in turn extended the concept into a broader strategy that included not just the creative and production, but the overall media distribution strategy as well. The videos were shot on location last summer at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
The series also includes Van Jones, founder of Green for All and author of The Green Collar Economy, city planner and urban environmentalist Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx; and yoga teacher and author Hala Khouri, founder of the social activism group Off the Mat, Into the World.
Credits
The If I Were President campaign was created and directed and edited by Sean Leaman via Rehab, with executive producer Jessica Corbin and editor Sam Miller.
Motion graphics and titles were produced at Spillt, Denver by creative director Ryan Bramwell and animators Chris Sayres, Bryan Long.
The campaign was produced for One Economy Corporation by Mohammed Soriano Bilal and GOOD Magazine director of production Jordan Ruden.