It looks like the incredible success of the lipdub produced by students from UQAM in Montreal, QC (more than 2.5 million views as of this writing) has pushed some institutions in the US to finally join the university lipdub movement.
Texas State University in San Marcos did its lipdub on November 8th in the LBJ Students Center with about 30 students. Lisa Duncan, University Marketing videographer was behind the camera.
The lipdub is available on Vimeo:
Texas State University – San Marcos Lipdub
There is also an interesting making of produced by the University Star, the student newspaper, on YouTube:
At the other side of the country, in Boston, Suffolk University students got their lipdub done on November 11th with about 50 of them and the help of the university communications office. They used a mash-up of songs from Queen for the music – a first for University lipdubs.
Jessica Krywosa, director of Web Communications at Suffolk, shared the link to this lipdub yesterday over Twitter and was kind enough to answer a few questions about it via email.
1) How did the Office of University Communications work with student organizations? Did the students have full creative control?
We reached out through the student activities office on campus who worked with student groups to find interested parties. We also reached out via Facebook and Twitter to any student on campus. There was combined control: students had input on everything from the song chosen to the choreography and characters.
2) How many students took part in the lipdub and how long did the project take?
50 students and staff members participated. It took 6 weeks of work and 4 hours of work. It was shot on November 11th in three takes.
3) Why did the Office of University Communications decide to support the project and host it on its YouTube channel – which is a first?
The Comm office is the centralized office for all university social media efforts. We drive the strategy for the university brand in all instances, including online. The Comm office created an integrated social media strategy and therefore uses ‘their’ channels as the ‘Official University’ channels. We do not own the channel from an office standpoint but as a repository for collaboration: we channel all university video content there for greater reach. Same for our Flickr, Facebook and Twitter accounts, instead of segmenting it as ‘our’ office channel, we created it for everyone to supply content to and create a community around.
4) What is your take on the issue of copyright for the music? Is it the reason why you used a “mash-up”?
What we produced is a mash-up and we hope that it produces a greater interest in Queen and in Suffolk University but we certainly understand the limitations of the digital millennium copyright act. We could be asked to remove it. We aren’t charging for this content or using it for commercial purposes. As with all of the university lip dubs, they used copyrighted music (Black Eyed Peas, Thriller, etc) and are still on YouTube today.
While doing my research yesterday on YouTube, I stumbled upon the following 4 new university lipdubs of interest produced in the past few weeks in Japan (as an homage to the one done by UQAM students), in Quebec and in South Africa.
Definitely some great videos! Regarding the copyright question, I would just bring up the point that if any of these universities are YouTube partners they are only allowed three copyright violations before their account is permanently disabled. While many copyright violations go unpunished on YouTube that is still a pretty big risk to take.
Karine – and you were worried that no US universities or colleges were going to pick up the LipDub trend from Europe :). Lets hope it picks up steam. It would be cool to see a competition between schools as to whose students can create the best, most creative, funniest, etc video. Nice post.
Not bad. But where is the energy that University of Quebec had?
And who said they don’t have the copyright permission? I know there are schools that get an ASCAP license for the music for their web videos.
Bob,
I was assuming that the schools didn’t have permission. I’ve simply never heard of a university entering into an ASCAP Experimental License Agreement for Non-Interactive Services – what would be required to obtain the right to use ASCAP music in YouTube videos. If you know of any schools that have done that I’d love to hear about it, as it would obviously be interesting to explore.
Apparently the lipdup fad has caught the attention of the music labels:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/vimeo-sued-have-staffers-uploaded-infringing-content.ars