TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Lip-Sync Away, Office Drones

ADVERTISEMENT

By DAN ZAK, The Washington Post

Published: November 18, 2007

They've given us some great laughs, but YouTube and other video-sharing venues have also smothered cyberspace with homemade bunkum. So it was a pleasant surprise to find a little online refinement via the concept of "office lip dubs," music videos made by workers in offices around the world.

The videos are filmed in one long camera shot with the song dubbed over the footage during editing, which lends theatrical heft and volume to what would otherwise be a routine lip-sync. The concept fell into our laps when we received a link to a video made by the staff of AOL France, which, is laying off some employees. About 40 people at the company made a "souvenir video" during a recent office party, according to a design director at AOL France who spearheaded the project.

See the result at www.daily motion.com/video/x3a60z_ lamour-a-la-francaise-lip-dub -aol-f. As "L'Amour a la Francaise" by Les Fatals Picards plays, the staff members strut and sashay through their offices - weaving among cubicles, down stairwells and finally outside the building, where they run in place and dance with bittersweet joy in front of a giant sign that says "for rent" in French. It's a casually exhilarating viewing experience.

The term "lip dub" was coined by Jakob Lodwick, 26, founder of Vimeo, a video-sharing venture that, unlike YouTube, supports high-definition video and allows only user-generated material. In April, Lodwick organized the first office lip dub using "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger at the New York office of Connected Ventures, which owns Vimeo (view the maiden creation at www.vimeo.com /173714).

"It's kind of the bridge between amateur video and actual music videos," Lodwick says. "And it's packaged so that other people can share the concept. ... Any impression that this was an elaborate, carefully choreographed, thought-out piece is inaccurate. We really just threw it together quickly. It's the kind of thing anybody can do."

The concept was noticed by the staffers of Heaven, an online digital marketing company in Paris, who made their own video dubbed to Weezer's "Undone (The Sweater Song)" to artistically respond to Connected Ventures.

"It got us quite a buzz in France," says Heaven founder and chief executive Arthur Kannas, 37, speaking on the phone from Paris. "It's been fun for us to make it."

Heaven then launched OfficeLipDub.com, which features nine office lip dubs, and Vimeo has its own lip dub site at www.vimeo.com/lipdub.

MAKE YOUR OWN

Want to produce an office lip dub? Jakob Lodwick and Arthur Kannas offer advice:

•You need a director, someone who can conduct, corral people and give orders.

•Don't worry about screwing up.

•Don't think you need expensive equipment. Lodwick shot the first office lip dub with a Panasonic DVX100 camera, but a small digital video camera or the video function on a point-and-shoot will do the trick. The editing can be done with the iMovie software program.

•Don't hesitate. There's no need to have an exhaustive series of meetings about shooting the video, and don't spend a day doing 50 takes.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT