MHS students show school pride with lip dub

File under: Skyler, the budding cinematographer.

This screen grab shows the end of the Moscow High School lip dub video.

From the Moscow Pullman Daily News today. Hundreds of Moscow High School students catapulted themselves to Internet stardom this month thanks to a lip dub video they created to showcase their school spirit. During the video, nearly all of the school's approximately 600 students dance, lip-sync and otherwise strut their stuff through the hallways and classrooms they spend most of their time in each school day.

The video, which features students lip-syncing and dancing to the song "Pump It" by the Black Eyed Peas, has been watched more than 8,500 times since it was posted on YouTube on April 10.

Alaina Mullin said she got the idea for the lip dub from a similar video her sister was shown last summer. "We never really thought it would happen," she said. But when she and Caitlyn Faircloth were brainstorming activities for the school's annual Arts Fest, they decided to recruit some friends and start planning.

The five students who organized and filmed the video—Mullin, Chavez, Faircloth, Skyler Martin and Sebastian Mortimer - tried to prominently feature students from each MHS club and sport, but they said the school has so many extracurricular activities that some groups are represented in background shots.

They said they picked the song "Pump It" because it plays at just about every school dance, so it's familiar to most students, and the lyrics aren't filled with potentially inappropriate innuendo.

"It's a fun song that has a lot of different parts in it," said Mortimer, the project's "creative mastermind."

Mortimer said it was challenging to place students in their spots and direct them to walk at a certain, consistent speed during each practice run and the official take. "We filmed most of the practices just so we knew what it would look like," said Martin, the group's videographer. The final video features a blooper reel after the lip dub performance and credits.

Although any project involving hundreds of people is bound to have its occasional hiccups, the students said they were happy with the result and that it felt good to prove naysayers wrong. Students of different backgrounds and ages worked together on the video, even though many of them didn't yet know each other.

"I feel like we kind of united the school for at least one day," Chavez said. Faircloth said the students are thankful to their peers and the MHS staff for supporting them throughout the project.

"It honestly wouldn't have worked if people weren't excited," she said. "It made spring of senior year a lot better. Now I feel more sentimental toward the school." The students said they hope future classes of MHS students will create their own lip dub videos as a new school tradition.