Lip-dub is part modern-day school yearbook, part 21st century "happening." It's a silly, spirited and carefully choreographed video-sharing sensation sweeping campuses across the continent.
On Saturday, a lively lip-dub broke out at the University of California, Davis. It was the project of AggieTV, a video-production studio.
Dozens of students turned out to be a part of the six-minute music video performed to Queen's "Bicycle Race" and "Don't Stop Me Now." They lip-synched the songs, which would be dubbed onto the video later.
A proper lip-dub is done in one, long, continuous shot along a "path," which on Saturday started aboard a red double-decker bus, then moved along a sidewalk and into the Memorial Union, through the coffeehouse known as CoHo, out the door and alongside the West Quad.
Everyone in the shoot made a mad dash to the South Quad bike circle for a raucous closing shot.
"If you can see the camera, it's on you," an assistant director told her cast. "Be super-duper enthusiastic."
All along the way were clumps of students. There were Chinese dragons, taiko drummers, sorority sisters, lacrosse players, dancers popping and breaking, and a pair of UC Davis horse mascots, along with such props as a restored 1970s fire engine and many bicycles. Davis is, after all, home to the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame, and bikes are omnipresent on campus.
Costumes were encouraged, so Sam Graham of Richmond showed up in the head-to-toe green-man suit from Halloween. Some young women seemed to have stepped off the TV series "Mad Men" set, in cotton sundresses and head scarves.
And there was the produce department: a strawberry, banana, carrot, tomato and an olive.
Donovan Deame, a mechanical engineering major from Orlando, Fla., came as a Holstein cow, complete with cotton udders.
"We wanted to show off all the little things we love about Davis, like bicycles and cows," said lip-dub director Alicia Sanhueza, a design major from Phoenix. "We wanted to showcase the quirky and, on a beautiful spring day, bring together everyone from around campus and make a video that students, alumni and family members can watch and love and understand why Davis is such a great little college town."
Jake Lodwick, founder of the video-sharing site Vimeo, is credited with coining the term "lip-dub" and making the first one in 2006.
Since then, the lip-dub phenomenon has spread to high school and college campuses. Even the staff of NBC's "Today" show has made one.
The University of Quebec at Montreal's lip-dub to the Black-Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" has been viewed 8.6 million times on YouTube.
"They're going to become synonymous with college campuses, and we thought we might as well go through with it," Sanhueza said. The UC Davis lip-dub had been planned since November.
"I want to do this every Saturday," said Flora Scontos, who had a ninja "fight" scene with fellow student Nelson Harris.
Jack O'Connor, an Irishman who is weeks away from completing his year-abroad studies at the university, was one of the "soloists," who got a lot of camera time lip-synching part of "Bicycle Race."
"When I look back at this years from now," he said, "I can say I was here, and I did it. It's something to show my friends and family."
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