Coffee With John

John Kefalas is a life­long pub­lic ser­vant who has worked tire­less­ly for the peo­ple of North­ern Col­orado. I helped plan and pro­duce this series of videos for his 2010 reelec­tion cam­paign for Col­orado State House Representative.

In plan­ning this series of videos with the Kefalas com­mu­ni­ca­tion staff, we set our­selves the goal of pro­duc­ing the most sub­stan­tial cam­paign ads pos­si­ble. So much cam­paign mes­sag­ing is based on exag­ger­a­tion and per­son­al­i­ty, but John’s strength has always been his abil­i­ty to talk specifics. To that end, we planned to make a series of short videos address­ing spe­cif­ic issues:

• Clean ener­gy
• Edu­ca­tion
• Job cre­ation & small business
• Trans­porta­tion

I shot a lot of video for this project. I fol­lowed John around as he spoke to com­mu­ni­ty groups, can­vassed neigh­bor­hoods, met vot­ers, and vis­it­ed local busi­ness­es. John’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor wrote scripts on each of the four cho­sen issues for John to deliv­er to cam­era. In the end, though, we real­ized that less real­ly was more, and that the typ­i­cal “can­di­date address­es the cam­era inter­cut with B‑roll” piece evoked the type of sub­stance­less mes­sag­ing we were try­ing to avoid.

One of the things I find most com­pelling about John as a leader is his lack of slick­ness. He has a ten­den­cy to come across a lit­tle stiff when address­ing a cam­era direct­ly, but he’s deeply knowl­edge­able on the rel­e­vant issues and com­mu­ni­cates very well one-on-one with his constituents.

That’s how we came to the con­clu­sion that the most ele­gant solu­tion was to let John talk to some­one about the issues that mat­tered most to him. So we arranged to stop by a local cof­fee shop (Star­ry Night in Old Town), and had him sit down with my grand­moth­er Gladys for about an hour—no scripts, no fan­cy pro­duc­tion, only an occa­sion­al prompt from me to talk about a spe­cif­ic issue we want­ed to cover.

That con­ver­sa­tion pro­vid­ed ample footage to cut togeth­er minute-long videos on each of the four top­ics, and a longer flag­ship video that cov­ered John’s can­di­da­cy more generally.

John hand­i­ly won re-elec­tion. It had noth­ing to do with these videos, but I think the qual­i­ties that made him so pop­u­lar with his con­stituents are on full dis­play here.