Indiana Republican Party uploads parody video of President Obama's DNC acceptance speech

The email went out Thursday, hours before President Barack Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention. The Indiana Republican Party sent a message titled “Lost and Found.”

“Somehow,” the message began, “a thumb drive containing the ready-for-teleprompter first draft of President Obama’s DNC acceptance speech for tonight was lost and found in Charlotte, then passed along to us.”

The attached link, it turned out, was not a draft.

“It was purely parody,” said Pete Seat, communications director of the Indiana Republican Party. “It’s something we did in-house.”

Seat paused.

“It would be cool if we found one,” he added.

What Seat and E-Campaign Manager Marina Nicholson produced in-house was a YouTube video with scrolling dialogue meant to emulate the words displayed on a teleprompter screen.

It begins innocuously enough, rolling a description of the date and setting, “Thursday, September 6, 2012, Bank of America Stadium (Rain or shine).”  

But the first words of dialogue make the parody obvious.
 
“I accept your nomination to run for re-election not on my record, but against my opponent!”

Seat said highlighting Obama’s record was the point.

“It served its purpose, I think, to point out, ‘Here’s the things Obama will ignore,’ and that’s exactly what happened,” Seat said.

The parody already has more than 1,000 views, making it the most popular of the Indiana Republican Party’s videos by far.

“How close will the first draft be to the delivered version?” the email asked. “We’ll know tonight.”

The answer was not at all. Obama’s speech was, in fact, very different from the fake “first draft.”

Seat pointed to issues like unemployment, which he said Obama failed to discuss during his acceptance speech.

In Charlotte, N.C., Obama spoke broadly about the economy.

“When the house of cards collapsed in the great recession, millions of innocent Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their life savings, a tragedy from which we’re still fighting to recover,” Obama said.

The parody video, Nicholson said, is a great example of what can be accomplished creatively and with low-budget technology.

When the idea was first pitched, they knew they’d need a way to easily create and package the product. Nicholson said she normally edits campaign update videos on her computer.

They used the application dv Prompter before this video. It creates scrolling text that runs on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch screen.

In the past, Nicholson said, they’d used it in the field or when the party chairman taped video updates.

Seat created the video’s text using the application, and Nicholson made a tripod from a stack of CDs.

Her iPhone taped the scrolling text on Seat’s phone. She used Google to search for ways to clean up the audio, remove the sound of people walking on the floor above and stabilize the image.

“It’s still a little shaky,” Nicholson said. “But that’s part of the charm.”  

Seat said the story of the video’s production makes it particularly interesting.

“Sometimes, if you want to cut through the noise, you have to do it in a little creative way, and that’s what we wanted to do,” Seat said.

The Indiana Republican Party's video can be viewed here.