Pascack Valley holds first lip dub
Pascack Valley students and faculty members participated in PV’s first ever lip dub on May 26. The video was shown at PVTV’s Talent Night on Wednesday, June 5, and published on YouTube on Thursday, June 6. The lip dub was organized by PV juniors Brianna Oliveira and Sienna Orlando and filmed by sophomore Kyle Commerford.
A lip dub is a music video that combines lip singing and songs. The idea was started by PV video production teacher Michael Sherman over holiday break.
“Mr. Sherman has wanted to do this for a really long time,” Orlando said. “When we got back from break, he pitched us the idea and Brianna and me were really on board with it. We were like, ‘Let’s do it,’ and then we started planning.”
Orlando said the first step of planning was researching other school’s lip dubs as a source of inspiration. They then talked to sport team captains and club leaders and created a route throughout PV for the video.
“[Team captains and club leaders] played a big part of it because they are the ones who lined the halls and were outside on the field,” Orlando said.
Oliveira and Orlando wanted to start the lip dub in the front of PV to show the video audience “this is who we are,” according to Orlando.
“If I didn’t have [Oliveira and Orlando], this wouldn’t have happened,” Sherman said. “The school showed me what we’re really made of. The whole point was to bring everybody together and have a fun day. I try to preach to the kids that take my class that a class like mine is so collaborative — it’s not just one person. The help and support we got from everybody was a great thing.”
To edit the lip dub, Commerford used Final Cut Pro, a professional video editing software, to compile the songs with the singers’ voices, add sound effects and graphics, and display the end credits.
“The editing process consisted mostly of tweaking a lot of little areas and overall trying to get everything perfect,” Commerford said.
The final product took around eight hours to complete. While filming, Commerford wanted to include everyone on the sides of the hallways, along with placing indoor sports and outdoor sports in certain areas that fit the teams.
“I decided to shoot the practice run handheld rather than using our stabilizer, as the rig can get heavy overtime,” Commerford said. “But during the real take, I used the stabilizer to get smoother footage.”
Sherman is planning on having another lip dub for upcoming years, but would like to make the event more student-run.
“The route will change and things will change, and now that kids know what it is, we can get more support and maybe have twice the number of songs,” Sherman said. “Maybe it will be a new tradition before Valley Cup.”
