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Why Douglas College should do a lip dub

By Jerrison Oracion, Senior Columnist

In the past few years, a new genre of video has surfaced on YouTube called a lip dub. Lip dubs are a way to show school spirit or raise awareness.

These videos amass a lot of excitement by having various people do a variety of things including singing, dancing, and performing stunts to a song in a single shot. The most impressive thing about a lip dub is that the camera is recording during the entire video without stopping for cuts or edits. This allows the lip dub to flow, letting the video progress organically to a big exciting finish.

In 2006, one of the founders of Vimeo, Jake Lodwick, made a video in which he lip-syncs to a song. When he edited the video, he synchronized the song with the video, which made it look as though he was singing the song, thus inventing the term “lip dub.”

Next, lip dub went viral on YouTube when L’Université de Québec à Montréal did a lip dub of the Black Eyed Peas’ song “I Gotta Feeling” in 2009. This inspired students from other colleges and universities to do their own lip dubs.

The first time I saw a lip dub was when I watched the opening scene in the season premiere of (Steve Carell) Michael Scott’s last season in The Office. In the scene, the staff at Dunder Mifflin do one in humorous fashion.

Then I watched Science World’s version of lip dub in which people in sang and danced to two of Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s hit singles “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and “Taking Care of Business.”

Some post-secondary institutions in the Lower Mainland have also taken part, like UBC and SFU.

In UBC’s lip dub, the lead singer of Marianas Trench, Josh Ramsay, makes an appearance. In SFU’s lip dub, zombies and zombie hunters can be seen going through the campus.

Lip dubs are a lot of work, but they have shown their worth. Douglas College should do one, because it would get the entire college involved, and inspire prospective students to attend the college. The college could attempt to make the longest lip dub possible on a low budget. They could also try to film the entire lip dub at both the David Lam and the New Westminster campuses in one shot to get involvement from both campuses.

The Douglas Students’ Union, if you are reading this, I just want you to know that I hope that Douglas College will do a lip dub this fall or during reading break next year. It would be worth it.