UPDATE: The Lip Dub has been released! Watch below.
You don’t go to U of T for the fun. We’re a serious school, see. If you want a busy social life, you’d better sacrifice your marks and/or sleep. The result is three large campuses of over-achievers who stay in their chosen groups and don’t have time for big community events.
But a group of students is out to fight our campus apathy. Their tools: some cameras, pop music, and the occasional flaming baton.
“It’s gonna be big,” says project director Sandra Zhou, a second-year psychology major.
These students are doing a lip dub.
A lip dub is a campy, quirky video where a large number of participants lip-sync songs to a camera that moves throughout a site in one continuous shot. The craze started around 2007 with tech start-ups wanting to shed their stuffy, corporate image. It peaked last year with university students in Europe and North America.
Elaborately choreographed, university lip dubs are usually filmed all across a school’s campus, with students dressed in team gear and zany costumes, rocking to blasting music while playful antics ensue. Many raise money for charities.
U of T’s lip dub launches on Thursday. A teaser shows students in bright t-shirts with the word “crew” as they prepare choreographed scenes. The camera rolls through all three campuses, and eventually a cloud of fog. Cut to a scene of U of T President David Naylor in white shades dancing the robot. Now it’s nighttime outside Convocation Hall, where students are practising pyrotechnics. Cut to a line dance of UTSC students in hippie drag, and a montage by the engineering band. Throw in a dance number in the Robarts stacks and you’ve got just a taste of it.
The first university lip dub was filmed in 2008 at a German science university in a sleepy Black Forest town. Like all Internet trends, strangers saw something they liked, emulated it, and made it viral.
The trend hit Canada in 2009, when students at the Université du Québec à Montréal dubbed the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Got a Feeling” and got over 8 million YouTube views. Within months, universities in B.C., Ontario, and beyond followed suit.
It was a particularly extravagant video by UBC that inspired Zhou, who is leading a team of almost 50 volunteers. Since the summer they’ve been soliciting funds to meet a $15,000 budget, assembling student groups and filming.
They’ve gotten support from campus police, college officials, and building management. Local businesses have donated supplies, and companies like U of T Mastercard are pitching in. The proceeds will go to Sick Kids Hospital.
To boot, the group’s been committed to producing a tri-campus video, even refilming UTM scenes when there wasn’t abundant turnout. Like most St. George students, Zhou had never ventured to either satellite campus.
“I was really impressed by their character; both were just amazing,” she says. It’s these discoveries that Zhou says have made the project worthwhile.
“Meeting a whole bunch of people is just really rewarding. The kind of people I’ve met could be my lifelong friends and I wouldn’t have met them anywhere.”
But should it really take a year-long project to form human connections with your university?
The day school spirit died
U of T has an ambiguous relationship with school spirit. In January, The Varsity‘s sports section tackled precarious game turnout for Varsity Blues events. Though students get into games free with a T-Card, the stands rarely reach half-capacity.
Hannah Ehrhardt, a player on the women’s rugby team, lamented playing to a barebones crowd.
“If you take parents out of the equation, we’d probably have very few fans.”
It wasn’t always this way. Laurel Reid, an alumna for two decades, remembered going to football games every Saturday.
“The stands would be full of students, and everybody would go. It was a lot of fun, a lot of shenanigans. It would be like one big party.”
Indeed, Varsity archives show U of T as an active hub for activists, sports fans, and public debates. So what happened?
It could be a broader trend away from community values to individual gain. That’s the finding of a San Diego State University study published this month. Researchers analyzed surveys from 9 million U.S. Millennials — those born between 1982 and 2000 — are found they valued attaining money and fame over self-acceptance and group affirmation.
More locally, groups struggling to build community on campus often cite the estimated 85 per cent of students who commute. In recent years, administrators and student unions on all three campuses have started outreach programs for commuter students, with lounges and social events.
“I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that U of T is a commuter school and that it’s in Toronto — there’s so much to do in Toronto,” says Ehrhardt.
That and the fact that most students don’t go to U of T for its sports, or its lifestyle. While some campuses in the 519 embrace a party school image, Toronto’s schools are known for cultivating “Great minds for a great future,” as U of T’s slogan chimes.
In annual student satisfaction surveys, all three campus rate well for prestige and research, but consistently tank for campus atmosphere and work-play balance. For Zhou, it’s a question of size.
“There is spirit. It’s more like it’s there for different aspects,” she says citing how different constituent colleges have their own identities and sense of community. “It’s just because U of T is so big – we don’t get to celebrate it enough.”
Perhaps school spirit doesn’t come easily to a school of 46,000. With half our student body, Queen’s University has both high academic standards and robust student spirit. Some teams see triple the turnout of the Varsity Blues. Their homecomings, though occasionally destructive, draw thousands to the streets of otherwise sleepy Kingston.
When a 2011 UTSU election slate pushed for a similar homecoming, they were ridiculed in comment forums. Many just didn’t see the point.
“Kingston is a university town and Queen’s has a home-away-from-home atmosphere, while we’re largely commuters,” wrote one commenter. “There is just no way we can compare, or seek to have the same level of school spirit as Queen’s.”
“Sounds like a lot of money for a lame party,” chimed in another.
And while the Varsity Blues still have cheerleading squads, the tri-campus spirit brigade is dead in some closet. The Blue Crew was relaunched in 2003, but hasn’t been active since at least 2009. As now-UTSU President Danielle Sandhu recalled during the 2010 AGM, people lost interest.
“It was a pain wearing those over-alls,” she laughed. “But it got frustrating; nobody knew why we were there. A lot of students just didn’t see the point.”
U of T lip dub organizers have also encountered this lethargic malaise.
“I’m not gonna lie, it’s really stressful,” says Zhou, who’s led a few charity projects but nothing on this scale. “A lot of people were underestimating what we wanted to do, saying ‘oh umm I don’t know who you are, or if I can really trust you with this.’ It’s a little bit demotivating.”
It’s the idea of the overzealous student with no social life that Zhou’s team is fighting against.
“Some say we’re just academically focused. It’s true to an extent, but I wanted to show different stuff that we as U of T are passionate about. We have a lot going for us, you just have to put it all together.”
Will this spirit-boosting have a lasting effect? Or does it only last as long as the video attracts hits?
Taking tips from UBC
Zhou, like many other lip dub organizers, cites the University of British Columbia’s video as an inspiration. With live horses, underwater pool shots and a helicopter ride, the eight-minute video goes beyond over-the-top.
With around 1,000 students, the video portrays a school community of diverse students united in school pride.
“This really makes me want to go to UBC <3,” wrote one commentator. “Your school made my school look like shit!” another posted. The video’s director was taken aback by the response.
“The feedback I got was that it makes UBC seem incredibly spirited, which it is definitely not,” says Andrew Cohen. A commuter for all four years, Cohen joined a fraternity, did rowing and campus plays and still felt removed from the campus.
“There’s lots of clubs, lots of different faculties but a lot of UBC is quite segregated,” he says. “I dunno if exclusive is the right word, but they like to keep to their own, and most students commute. Plus it’s such a huge campus.”
When I say his description reminds me of U of T, Cohen’s friend overhears our phone conversation and pipes in, saying “it’s more like York, because UBC’s like 40 minutes from downtown.”
It was this sense of isolation that lead Cohen to start the lip dub project.
“I was in my last year of university and I didn’t really feel very connected to this school,” he said. “I didn’t get to experience a lot of social interaction, so I felt like this was a good way to meet people who were feeling isolated.”
Just like the musical TV show Glee, isolated students brought their talents together for fun and a sense of belonging. Volunteers snowballed.
The group approached local businesses for donations and access. They saved costs by getting venues and equipment for free. Cohen estimated the event wold have cost over $100,000, but the group only had to spend $14,000 for pizza and music licensing.
Organizers worked through bureaucracy, borrowed city buses and co-ordinated a 1.2-kilometre single shoot. The group even found a friend of a friend with a helicopter, and another when the original donor backed out.
“It took a lot of creative, intricate, self-induced problem solving,” said Cohen, who learned much from the experience. “I accomplished a lot of my goals. I met a lot of people, and we became a really tight team,” he said.
What does a lip dub do?
But did UBC’s lip dub change the campus as much as its director? Just three weeks from the video’s one-year anniversary, Cohen isn’t sure.
“I’d like to think it did. I hope we started something, and that UBC does start to get more proud of themselves,” he says. “Ultimately working together makes the whole community stronger.”
It’s this idea of getting together and accomplishing something as a community that hundreds of U of T students have shown up for.
“It’d be really great if this changes how people see U of T,” says Zhou. “The people who have met each other through this project already means a lot of community-building.”
Cohen says what comes out of a lip dub is what people go to university for.
“It’s not just what you learn, but the people you meet and the connections you make — that’s what makes university worth it all,” says Cohen. “That’s what helps you get a job. That’s what helps you in life.”
Perhaps that’s what lip dubs hold for places that are impersonal, work-focused, and cliquey — places like U of T. Neither rocking out in a gorilla suit, nor cheering on David Naylor’s robot dance will boost your GPA or professional network. But one hijinks at a time, lip dubbers are building up community, and ultimately themselves.
