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Videographer Arun Chaudhary knew he had to pick up the pace for his candidate, Barack Obama, after listening last summer to a rapper named Jin the Emcee tell of his conversion to the Obama cause. Jin had just improvised a rap for a New York City audience that had gathered for the candidate’s first official volunteer meeting. The Chinese-American singer disclosed how he became an Obama fan after spending a night viewing all of the candidate’s campaign videos on his computer.

“That was a tragedy,” Chaudhary recalled. “I thought to myself, you should never be able to go through all the video content on the site in just one night!”

These days, of course, it would take a lot longer to go through all of Obama’s videos. Chaudhary, a New York University film-school professor on leave to work for Obama, has made sure of that. Indeed, Chaudhary, a full-time $40,000-a-year director of field production for the campaign, crisscrosses the country alongside the candidate with two other videographers, making films that seek to pull supporters into the contest by letting them peer through his lens.

“Why do you need to see someone with a mike in their hand telling you what Barack Obama said today, when you can see for yourself what Barack Obama said today?” Chaudhary asked by way of explanation.

The campaign says it hired a pro with real film experience to add something fresh to Obama’s moving-picture promotions. “There’s a lot of open space to be creative in a campaign and people don’t take advantage of it,” Joe Rospars, the campaign’s director of new media, said in an interview.

The Obama team usually refuses requests from journalists to look under the campaign hood to write about the staff. But the candidate’s press operation liked the idea of National Journal writing about its video operations and cleared its videographer for his own close-up.

Chaudhary, 32, helped define a creative space in the campaign from the get-go last year, dreaming up a promotional “trailer” with cinematic production values to show at a rally that Obama held in the Big Apple. It featured a tongue-in-cheek look at the candidate’s stump speech, using documentary-style, behind-the-scenes outtakes. It was an instant hit with the crowd.

The trailer’s popularity gave the campaign team a sense of the possible: a video with commercial appeal married to pop-culture pizzazz, plus a narrative eye that could inform and entertain supporters and that might replicate its impact through blogs and mainstream media attention. For example, a 1950s-style black-and-white animated trailer that Chaudhary made about Obama for a Jefferson-Jackson Dinner found a larger audience through the website Talking Points Memo.

Chaudhary said he uses his knowledge of classic film to pump up his political videos. He aims to encourage people to vote for Obama, while also deconstructing the tedium and repetition of the campaign trail to let them feel like they’re a part of it all.

The filmmaker and his bosses believe that their videos speak mostly to the converted, and in that light their work becomes an online organizing tool to engage, motivate, and inform Obama’s backers.

The Obama team approaches video “like it’s interactive,” said Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics. “I can not only watch a video but [also] give it a ranking, share it with a friend, make a comment after the video, and just have a more social experience.”

There are few yardsticks to measure how campaign videos affect candidates’ communications and voter choices. Grove monitors the number of hits that a video receives, something the Obama team also does. It’s an inexact measure, but a high level of hits presumes public interest and a certain degree of trust in the campaign’s product. Grove and videographers such as Chaudhary are convinced that an audience exists for substantive political video on the Internet, films that go beyond mere entertainment. In their world, citizen-generated videos such as “Obama girl,” with its pop music and Hooters-esque costuming, have become passé.

Chaudhary points to the impact of the video he made for the Iowa campaign last winter, which Obama organizers repeatedly showed to supporters and first-time caucus-goers across the state. A video that becomes a centerpiece of a campaign’s basic “literature” by definition has an effect.

Before Obama, Chaudhary—the son of an immigrant Indian father and a Jewish mother, both scientists—had tried to interest New York-area politicians in his scripts for political ads and Internet videos but to no avail. Then came the senator from Illinois.

Chaudhary lobbied hard for a position on Obama’s team, going so far as to interrupt his wedding rehearsal dinner and even his wedding day last May to sell himself to Rospars, who is now his boss. Immediately after his marriage in Texas, Chaudhary spent time driving around a sprawling ranch to get the practice that a native New Yorker needed to make the five-hour highway treks between Chicago and Des Moines before Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses.

By early this year, he had also gotten the hang of what it takes to turn a story around fast in a political hothouse. Chaudhary points to his counter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ad as an example of quick thinking.

Clinton made successful use of her first-up ad, which suggested that she, more than Obama, was ready for any 3 a.m. crisis phone call in the White House. Her ad team had used decades-old stock footage of a sleeping child actress, Casey Knowles, in its commercial. After the ad aired, the adult Knowles was interviewed on CNN, and she turned out to be an Obama fan who was practically begging her candidate to put her to good use. So Chaudhary did, and his video of Knowles endorsing Obama got nearly 500,000 hits.

“Not only does it highlight the irony of an Obama supporter ending up in Hillary’s 3 a.m. ad,” the filmmaker explained, but “the piece deconstructs the methods by which negative ads are made, giving the audience a glimpse of the process itself.”

After 10 months with Obama, Chaudhary has at least 878 videos posted on the candidate’s website and on YouTube. Viewing them all in one sitting would take far more than one night, which is what inspired the filmmaker in the first place.

Obama’s race speech in Philadelphia in March attracted more than 4 million hits on YouTube. One million viewers have seen his State of the Union response. Chaudhary’s short clips from Obama’s town hall meetings and big rallies lure an average of 10,000 viewers each.

While teaching at NYU’s graduate program in film, Chaudhary specialized in short works—which came in handy when he joined Obama’s campaign. These days he’s often the director, producer, and shooter behind the lens of a digital video or still camera, focusing again and again on the same subject: Obama talking in Fort Wayne, Ind.; Obama bowling in Altoona, Pa.; Obama at a sombrero festival in Brownsville, Texas. His footage has appeared in the campaign’s separately produced television ads and in a recent high-definition message from Obama that aired on Fox’s American Idol show.

Along the trail, the filmmaker has helped make rapid-response even faster. On the day last week that the media focused on Obama’s observation that small-town Americans were “bitter,” Chaudhary and his team posted damage-control video content from the candidate on YouTube within 19 minutes of taping it. When the video was ready, a campaign spokesman e-mailed the link to reporters and to Obama supporters. Within 12 hours, the video had attracted more than 73,000 hits.

After every campaign bus trip, Chaudhary creates slickly edited wrap-ups that show the candidate’s progress through such states as Pennsylvania and Indiana, and the Mountain West. Videos are often e-mailed to supporters on the campaign’s carefully groomed voter lists in target states, in case they missed Obama at an event.

As fast-moving and unscripted as a campaign can be, Chaudhary said he relishes the absence of time constraints on his work, and the freedom to operate at low cost. He believes he has stepped into a “different era of filmmaking,” one that he dreamed of as a young student.

“The only choices [I had] were to move to L.A. for fiction films or stay in New York for advertising,” he recalled. “Our little [Obama] section of 233 North Michigan in Chicago is probably one of the few places in the world where such a [video] laboratory exists. Here, anything and everything can and will be tried.”

It’s appropriate for a candidate who’s working the same way, and defying expectations.

When Chaudhary was a teenager, his father asked him why he didn’t want to go to law school and then get into politics. “I can’t, Dad,” he recalled saying. “I have a funny name.”

Staff Correspondent Alexis Simendinger contributed to this report. The author is covering the presidential campaign as an NBC/National Journal reporter.