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Mostly Cloudy Mepham ‘lip-dubs’ its way to YouTube
Lip-dub video posted on YouTube already has more than 1,500 hits
Mepham High School has officially gone viral.
On June 8, a video was uploaded to YouTube featuring hundreds of Mepham students taking part in a choreographed dance celebration throughout the school. But it wasn’t just students — faculty and administrators got in on the fun too.
The nearly 13-minute-long video has had more than 1,500 hits in two weeks. Titled “Mepham Lip Dub 2012,” it was conceived by art teacher Kelly Schiulaz and English teacher Melanie Sirof, who happened upon a lip-dub video earlier this year that was created by a school in Colorado.
After viewing it, Schiulaz said her immediate thought was, “We have to make this happen at Mepham.”
A lip-dub is a homemade music video that combines lip-syncing and dubbed audio. In Mepham’s video, students lip-synced to four different songs while the audio blasted over the school loudspeakers — “Tonight Tonight,” by Hot Chelle Rae; “Wannabe,” by the Spice Girls; “Bohemian Rhapsody,” by Queen; and “Good Feeling,” by Flo Rida.
Schiulaz said that after watching the Colorado lip-dub in January, she and Sirof gathered students from various clubs and sports, and showed them the video clip. “They were all really excited about it,” she said.
The teachers and students then brought the idea to Principal Michael Harrington, who was immediately interested. “It was a lot of fun to film,” Harrington said. “And I think the product represents the students and the opportunities we have at Mepham.”
A student vote was held to choose the songs, and Schiulaz said that different groups of students were assigned to different areas of the school, where they were allowed to select their own costumes, props and choreography. “It was all up to them,” she said.
After just a couple of practice run-throughs, the entire lip-dub was filmed in one take on May 23. Mepham student Dan Levy did the filming, and junior Christina Gajda was the editor. “It was really fun planning it,” said Gajda. “It’s very different from anything else the school has done. It came out really well.”
