Higher Ed TV: a behind-the-scenes look at Calvin College LipDub with the students who produced it

I don’t know why but I just love lipdubs. I guess this kind of one-take online videos is powerful as it captures pretty well the energy and preparation that goes into these productions.

Anyway, I stumbled upon Calvin College lipdub last week as it was posted to an email listserv I follow (see not everything HAS to happen on Twitter these days ;-) by someone working at the college. At the date of this writing, the video got more than 18,000 views and more than a hundred comments with some interesting discussion going on.

Haven’t watched it yet? Go for it, there are really some golden nuggets in this video:

LipDub at Calvin College from Rachel Kuyvenhoven on Vimeo.

The video was entirely produced by a team of 3 Calvin College students, Kristin Crawford, Josh Schroyer, and Rachel Kuyvenhoven, who answered a few of my questions via email last Friday:

1) Why did you decide to do the lipdub? Did you work with the college?

We saw the original university lipdub by students at the Hochschule Furtwangen University in Germany, and we were inspired! We wanted to make our own lipdub because we thought it would be a new challenge and a lot of fun. The project was done completely by students, and it was not for a class or for credit. However, we did get some support from the college in order to make it, since we needed permission for filming and equipment to use.

Tell us a bit more on how you did it?

We chose the song, planned the route for the video, and then planned all the choreography for each section. We did a lot of practice takes in order to know exactly how each section would look.
The majority of the preproduction time was spent on organization and logistics. We held casting auditions and then promoted the project in other ways to get more students involved. We first started planning in January, and then we worked on choreography from February to April, with the filming happening at the end of April. The production took three hours, and we did five takes of the video.

Any tips/lessons learned you could share with students/staff members who would like to do a lipdub at their college/university?

Our tip is that the more that you do ahead of time, the smoother the filming will be. We spent hours on preproduction, and as a result the production took only three hours.
With videos like this, there’s always the issue of music permission.
The music is so integral to the video, so it’s important to search for the right song. But it’s also important to consider the legal use of music. We sent in music requests from the start when we first began the project, and we are continuing to do so.