The Martlet

Shawn Slavin is on a mission to create community at UVic. And he’s planning to do it through the production of a lipdub video.

“A lipdub is a music video that is created by gathering together as many individuals as possible, spreading them throughout a campus and having them lip-sync and dance to a song,” explained Slavin, a fifth-year chemistry and psychology student. “The camera moves through the campus and everybody stays stationary.”

When he ran for a director-at-large position in the UVic Students’ Society election last spring, Slavin campaigned on the promise of bringing students together. Although he didn’t make it onto this year’s board, he’s still striving to create community on campus.

“I think that this is one way that … we can begin that process of community-building on campus and between the university and the greater public,” he said. Slavin hopes between 2,000 and 4,000 people participate in filming the video on Sept. 25.

So far, he’s received huge amounts of interest. The Facebook group he created for the event (UVic Lipdub — be part of a viral video) has more than 1,300 members.

The community has stepped up to support the project as well. B.C. Transit has donated two double-decker buses to film on and several university departments have donated funds that will be used for things like lighting, props and advertising.

The idea for the video came from another UVic, this one from Spain, who made a lipdub using Train’s song “Soul Sister.” The video hit YouTube at the end of May and now has had more than 710,000 views.

The video Slavin is organizing will feature Michael Bublé’s “Haven’t Met You Yet” and Rick Astley’s “Never Going to Give You Up.” Slavin says that he received many song suggestions for the video, but chose Bublé because he wanted something both local and mainstream.

Slavin encourages people interested in getting involved with the video to learn the lyrics to the songs and the choreography so they can participate on Sept. 25. Both the lyrics and a video of the choreography have been posted on the Facebook site. He also wants people to join the group so they can receive updates on the project.

For those interested in taking a starring role in the video, Slavin will be holding auditions on Sept. 13 and 14 at 3 p.m. at Vertigo.

“The way that I see this project is that I’m providing the framework and [students] are providing the content. The goal of this project is to have it be visually appealing,” he said. “For what we’re actually going to see in the video, that’s up to every student. What I’m saying to students is that the more exciting you are, the more decked out you are, the crazier your costume, the crazier thing you can do in the video — be it flips or jumps or human pyramids or whatever — the crazier it is, the more the camera’s going to want to look at you.”

After the actual filming takes place, Slavin says making the lipdub go viral will be up to the people in the video.

“You have zero control over whether something goes viral or not,” he said. “You can only hope that it’s going to be good enough to get to that point.”

Slavin is also hoping to use the video to raise funds for the B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation and the United Way by getting businesses to make pledges per view for the first 30 days the video is on YouTube.

But having a viral video isn’t the only factor that will determine the success of this project for Slavin.

“My whole purpose of doing this project is to have fun and to bring students together on campus … I want this to be talked about for the next year. I want people to feel like this is something that they’re proud of, that they’re proud to be at UVic, that they’re excited,” he said.

“There’s not a lot right now that UVic can stake claim to. There’s nothing really that’s bringing us all together and feeling like we have this kind of unanimous identity… The student society hasn’t done much over the past few years to unite those groups and I really think that this is the year that we can change things.”