SLIDESHOW: A Lipdub first: Mount Si music video shows off school, student spirit

Published 3:56 pm Sunday, June 5, 2011

From under a thick layer of red face paint, Robb Lane still looks happy. Exhausted, but happy.
“It was a lot of work,” he said Friday morning, after he got the entire student body to jump, cheer, dance, run, throw glitter, and yell through the whole school and out onto the football field for a celebration of school spirit.
“Now that it’s over, it was totally worth it,” he says with a grin.
“It” was a lipdub, a music video that several area schools have done to show off their schools and every lip-syncing student in them. The videos are posted on YouTube, which is where Lane saw the Issaquah High School lipdub, and decided “I really wanted to do this.”

As the ASB vice-president and a member of the Spirit Committee, Lane had no problem enlisting help. His committee of Tony Torchia, Jack Kelly, Chloe Villanueva and Kendall Maddux really promoted the event, and helped pick the lead lip-syncers from “a lot of interested people,” Lane said. “We had to choose, so we looked for the students who were the most dedicated, with the most avid school spirit, and these were the ones.”

Everyone had a chance to shine, and even sparkle, in the video though. Alisha Carvalho made sure of that.

“I found two jars of glitter in the hallway!” she said. Glitter stuck to her hands, face, eyelashes, and anyone that came near her, during the video shoot. “I guess I got excited but with the blacklights (in the ‘rave’ hallway) and the glitter, it just made everything sparkle more. I threw a bunch of glitter at the camera and it made this cool cloud.”

Cameron Wolf was another glitter target, but he was recovering nicely after the main shoot. What did he do for the camera?

“I waved balloons around, waved this shirt around and started acting crazy,” he said. “A definition of what lipdub is, is ‘organized chaos.'”

At least the camera crew was organized. Joe Dockery’s Wildcat production class were on hand, filming either the video itself or the filming of the video. Director Tyler Stewart, recovering from a broken leg, had a helmet cam strapped to his ball cap and was ready to follow Alex P, who was actually filming the video.

“I’ll be directing the madness,” he said.

The video starts outside the school with the arrival of (first singer) who backs up the school steps, and into the building where the antics begin. P, being pushed in a wheelchair, follows them and down the hallway, past each class section and each club doing its thing, and on to the football field for the finale.

There, 1,500 teens gather in a screaming, laughing, costumed mass to declare Mount Si Stadium is “our house!” and cheer for the last time this year.

Lane hopes that this will actually become the first lipdub of many that the school produces after he’s gone. “It definitely promotes school spirit!” he said.

His experience with this lipdub has made him absolutely certain he’ll get involved with the student organization at Central University next year. “It makes you love school,” he said.