LIPDUBS FOR BEGINNERS
Thinking of doing a lipbub with your students? I highly recommend it! This little set of guidelines combined with stories about what I learned from producing a lipdub with my students this year might offer some help. Please note: I knew nothing about how to do this when I started. This is one of those wonderful learn together as you grow activities, meaning: the best kind :-)
“A lip dub is a type of video that combines lip synching and audio dubbing to make a music video. It is made by filming individuals or a group of people lip synching while listening to a song or any recorded audio, then dubbing over it in post editing with the original audio of the song…. Tom Johnson, a technical writer who blogs about Web 2.0's effect on communication, describes a good lip dub as having the characteristics, or at least the appearance, of spontaneity, authenticity, group participation and fun.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip_dub
Ever since first seeing UQAM’s fabulous UQAM's I've Got A Feeling Lipdub I’ve wanted to work with my students to make one, too. With the start of a new school year in April, I decided this was the time. I didn’t have anything quite so grand as the UQAM video in mind but still I didn’t really have a clue about how to pull off this project and I worried quite a lot about that – needlessly. As it turned out, all I really had to do was introduce the project to students by showing them some examples, giving them time and space to organize it all, and then stepping back while they did it almost all on their own.
1. In our first class this year, I introduced the idea by having some grand lipdubs like UVIC'S Hey Soul Sister and Udem's Pretty Fly and Trinity UWA's Don't Stop Me Now playing on a loop during the class breaks. Before long students asked me what that was all about, and so I told them “those are lipdubs and we’re going to make one.” Some cheered, others looked baffled, some just flat out rejected the idea. If this happens in your class, don’t worry. It’s typical when introducing any big project but the idea is to show them something that looks impossible and then walk them thru the steps needed to pull it off while giving them the kind of encouragement that says, “I know you can do anything.”
2. After watching some more examples I asked students to describe qualities of good lip dub songs and as a group we decided that the best lipdub songs are full of energy, action, and some kind of storyline or visual appeal. We then worked in groups to come up with examples of such songs. After some discussion we narrowed the suggestions down to Little Eva's Locomotion , The Knife's Heartbeats , Nine Day's 257 weeks and The Glee Version of Journey's Don't Stop Believing .
3. For the next class, I prepared a handout with the lyrics of these songs and we spent about 20 minutes in groups discussing which would be the right song for us. Then each group presented their ideas and we voted on Locomotion, though we finally decided The Grand Funk Railroad version of Loco-Motion had a little more power in it, not to mention a great opportunity for some air guitar.
4. We spent about 15 minutes at the end of the next several classes learning how to sing our chosen song, working of course on rhythm, stress and pronunciation. We did cloze activities, vanishing line activities, and sing around the room activities where one group would sing a line before passing the song over to another group. By the end of all this, we knew the song inside out.
5. Meanwhile, we began casually thinking of lipdub scenes, costumes, and actions to go with the song, though many ideas came out in the time we spent learning to sing the song: one student started rolling his hands like a train in motion, others spontaneously jumped up and back, someone said it would be great to begin with some guys in suits coming out of an elevator while snapping their fingers. All ideas were noted.
6. We then devoted one class to planning our lipdub from start to finish, with my only role in the process being the preparation of a handout with each line of the song followed by columns which were titled: who? actions? costume and prop needs?. Students decided on who would be director, director’s assistant, camera-person, and sound person (with these roles being taken by people who felt more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it) and worked in groups to suggest locations, actions, and costumes for each line of the song with the directors filling out a worksheet as each decision was made.
7.) After about an hour, we were ready to practice, and in the practicing students discovered they had to do a lot of revising because they’d, for example, underestimated how much time it would take to get from point A to point B. Though things sometimes veered into students’ L1, they were pretty good at trying to use language like why don’t we or how about ___ing and that’s a good ideas but … which is language we’d been working on in class. My role was mostly to encourage and to keep things in perspective (yes, you can film outside near the fountain, no you probably wouldn’t be able to film in the gym.)
8) Filming was set for the following class, with students using Facebook outside of class to share information about what was needed and to make last minute adjustments. I brought in a simple HD Video camera with a gorilla grip hand held tripod to make handling the tiny camera a little easier, gave the camera-person a short lesson in using it, stepped back, and let students get to work.
Update: I recently discovered that filming on even an older iphone works great!
9) It took five takes to get the lipdub done to everyone’s satisfaction, with each take taking the length of the song to do. Between takes we went back to the classroom, viewed what we’d just shot, and made suggestions for improvements. All this took about 90 minutes until finally we got things just right with a single long take.
10) Next came editing and uploading to YouTube. Since we have Apple computers at school, we used Wondershare to convert the HD lipdub file into an Apple compatible file, then imovie to combine our video with the original sound file. There was nothing tricky about this process except making sure we timed the audio track exactly with the lipdub video. Once we got that right, there was nothing else to do except edit in an intro screen with the name of our university and department and a final screen in which we fade to black before uploading the results to Youtube. All in all, three classes of freshman university students did lip dubs and we’d be happy if you’d use these as examples for your students.
Lipdub Examples from Chubu University's Department of English Language and Culture
Chubu University's Locomotion Lipdub
Chubu University's HELP lipdub
Chubu University's Don't Stop Me Now lipdub
Four informal rules to follow
1) Students should plan everything.
2) The video should be shot in one long single take with the camera-person walking backwards through the lipdub accompanied by the sound-person who is carrying an ipod w/ speaker or some way to play the song.
3) Somewhere in the video, students should identify the school they’re from.
4) Have students actually sing the song as they film rather than just moving their mouths.
We all learned a lot doing this project and as you can see the lipdubs got incrementally better with each production. Still, what mattered to me most was the collaborative spirit of cooperation that our classes felt doing this project and the joy they got from seeing their completed work online being commented on by their peers and others around the world. For me, that was true take away value. On a more personal level, I learned again the importance of stepping back far enough to let students figure things out on their own rather than getting too involved myself. In fact, the only time things went momentarily wrong was when I felt the urge to step back in and take control. My students were patient with me when I did this, but thankfully, strong enough already to say “No, Chuck, I think our idea is better.” And they were right. It was.
Good luck with your own lipdub projects and if I can be of any help, please let me know on facebook, twitter, or via email and by all means, please share your finished work! I’m thinking of setting up a ELT Lipdub YouTube Channel or Facebook page. What do you think?
Best,
Chuck
