Seniors rock the village

The teen pop sensation Meghan Trainor may be all about that bass, but the Sandel Senior Center is all about the place — Rockville Centre, that is. With that sentiment and a fun video, the senior center handily won the village’s first “I ♥ RVC!” video contest.

The winning video features more than 100 senior center members and employees dancing around the village’s streets and businesses — including a glass-swinging moment at Churchill’s — to a revised version of “All About That Bass.” Mayor Francis X. Murray even makes an appearance, jamming with the crowd at the School of Rock.

“We were trying to do a parody, but our most important goal was to have a great time and be proud of our involvement in it,” said Nancy Codispoti, who handles programming at the center and was the driving force behind the video. Codispoti and coworker Wendy Weinstock wrote the new lyrics to the mega-hit song.

Filming the video was organized as a program at the senior center, with sessions once or twice a week in January and early February. “We filmed the whole entire thing on an iPad,” said Codispoti. “We [sometimes] rigged it up on a ladder and a music stand.” Other times, Codispoti held the iPad, which caused some trouble when the sun shone on the screen while they were filming on a moving bus.

She asked her nephew Steve Dispensa, who owns the film production company DDI Productions, to edit the finished product. He also found a singer, Sabrina Seidman, to provide the vocals. “There were 83 clips that my genius nephew edited,” Codispoti said.

The harsh winter made the project challenging — filming at the School of Rock had to be rescheduled twice due to snowstorms. “It was such a terrible winter we had to take stills from past Rockville Centre events,” Codispoti said. “All of the portraits — except for Churchill’s and School of Rock — came from the village.” She said that inserting the photos into the video was the most difficult part of the production process.

“It was a project and it was a program, and it was sometimes difficult, but it was so rewarding and a blast,” she said. “And it created a lot of great moments — not just the ones you see on the film.” Codispoti also said that the mayor was “a trouper” during filming.