Who is Kamala Harris? You’d have a hard time finding anyone who hasn’t heard her name by now – Harris is the current vice president of the U.S. and the Democratic presidential nominee. Harris’ long-standing public service career spans from her beginnings as district attorney in San Francisco to her role as California attorney general and later as a U.S. senator. Her national profile rose during her initial presidential campaign in 2019, and she became even more prominent when she joined Joe Biden’s ticket in 2020.

Even as her profile rose from her early days as district attorney in San Francisco to her role as vice president and now presidential hopeful, some voters remain uncertain about her policy positions. Vox’s video, “Kamala Harris, explained in 7 moments,” published in the early days of Harris’ nomination, provides a straightforward look at her career milestones. The video arrived at a pivotal moment, offering context on her evolution as a candidate amid a wave of renewed support and a fresh campaign brimming with meme-driven, cultural energy.

Storybench sat down with Ed Vega, video producer and editor at Vox, to learn about how Vox’s explainer video distilled Harris’ political career into seven easily digestible moments. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The “Kamala Harris, Explained in Seven moments” video released mid August, a little after Biden stepped down and Harris became the front runner. What was the start of the process for making this video? Why seven moments?  

Vega: We had been having lots of conversations about if we should say anything in regards to everything that was happening in the political landscape. It was hard to know what to say, because as anybody who lives in America might remember, for a while it was very unclear whether Biden was going to step down or not. 

Once that became clear there was the question of ‘what even is there to say about that?’ We had a team meeting to just think up ideas, and tossed out the idea that while Kamala has been VP, I think that she’s operated in the background a little bit and most Americans didn’t really know much about her, so maybe a classic explainer on who she is could be interesting. 

I had seen a profile that CNN had done about two years ago, but it was interviewing her friends and her family. It didn’t explain who she was, it was more like who she was through the lens of people that loved her. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we just thought there could be a different approach. 

Once you landed on the seven moments format, how did you select them? 

Once we sort of settled on that idea, the seven moments came because we did a piece on President Zelensky maybe a year or two ago. Joss Fong, who is the originator of the Vox format, came up with the idea to do that in eight moments because he was a very public figure before he became president. So when we were talking about how to handle this Kamala Harris explained video, somebody else brought up the idea of doing it in that same format. 

The format is very interview driven, so it was a mix of thinking up moments that seemed like they defined her and then talking to the experts that we spoke to and seeing if those moments felt like they rang true for them, and how it helped build the story of who Kamala Harris was.

The computer screens opening of the video and the recurring element of the screens is a very striking visual. How did that idea come to the team and how’d you put that together?  

I think it ended up being really beautiful. Visually it’s pretty similar to the Zelenskyy video, except the Zelensky one I think had a lot of older TVs, and we’re trying to make this feel fresh and new because she has been under a more social media spotlight, we tried to make it a little bit more techy. It was made in After Effects, it was a team effort. It almost looks like it’s a 3D effect, but it’s not. I think it’s a 2.5D sort of situation. There was a lot of corner pinning to match the perspective of the angle of the mount of the monitors.  

A lot of the clips and interviews have these rounded edge square framings, how did you and the team sort of decide which clips to put it on and what kind of effect that would have?  

We wanted to make sure that all of the moments stood out. They started within a computer screen, and then at certain points we would make them full screen. We wanted to make sure that those were like the primary emphasis and that people wouldn’t get confused. 

We compromised to make sure that  the seven clips stood out, and then whatever clips that weren’t part of the seven clips were just helping to add texture to the story. 

We want it to be as neutral as possible. And it’s so easy to tip over into, like, seeming a little bit too positive or a little bit too negative. Figuring out what words to highlight to bring focus to all of the sections was a bit challenging. and we went through like a couple different iterations on that. Part of the aesthetic that our art director wanted was for it to feel a little bit CRT- like: jittery footage. The actual quality of the footage was totally fine. It was purely for artistic effect. 

From inception to publishing, how long does it take to produce a video like this? 

With Biden stepping down, everything being as crazy as it was, we knew that we wanted to do it really quickly. We turned this video around in like a week, super, super quick. We wouldn’t normally do that, we try to do three weeks to a video, give or take. For this one, it was just like, “let’s try and do it as fast as we can.”

I came in and I helped edit and refine things. Once we had the moments, it was getting all of that in the timeline and a lot of using stock libraries to see what other supporting imagery we could use. If there were particular hearings, there was the question “is it better to show a clip from the hearing or better to show a photo?”

A clip is great contextually, and then photos can give a little bit more context of an abstract idea of things. Based on the framing you can insinuate that her performance at a particular time was good based on where the camera angle was. If she wasn’t doing well maybe we wouldn’t choose a picture that was as flattering of her in that particular time period.