You know how it is, right? You’re sitting around watching High School Musical with your kids for the 18th time, and you start thinking, “This is sweet, but it would never happen in real life. You’d never get all the jocks and the skaters and the braniacs at school suddenly bursting into song and performing perfectly choreographed dance moves.”
And you know how you feel compelled to spoil the moment and share those This-would-never-happen-in-real-life thoughts with your innocent young children, thereby scarring them for life?
Well stop it!
I’m here to tell you that it does happen in real life. I saw it with my own jaundiced eyes Saturday at the University of Victoria, and I have 23-year-old Shawn Slavin to thank for it.
It turns out the world could use a few more Shawn Slavins. He’s one of those guys who remembers people’s names, and believes he can make a difference.
“Shawn is community,” said Kyla Smith, a friend and fellow UVic student. “Shawn is one of the most personable and fun and genuine guys, and he just wants everyone else to feel that.
“And I know that through his career at UVic, he’s felt that there’s a separation. We have a great campus . . .but people sometimes keep to themselves. You’ve got people who live on campus. You’ve got different clubs. But we’re not coming together as a whole. And he feels that.”
So when the case of mistaken identity happened last May, Slavin saw an opportunity.
What happened was this: Spain’s Universitat de Vic released a brilliant lipdub video set to Train’s “Hey Soul Sister.” (A lipdub, by the way, is a type of music video that combines lip synching and audio dubbing.)
The video went viral, racking up nearly 800,000 views on YouTube alone. Blogger Perez Hilton even posted the video on his popular website, but mistook the Spanish UVic for the one here in Victoria, saying: “There are some talented people up in Canada!”
Once the blogosphere cleared up the misunderstanding, Slavin got the idea that “the real UVic” should do its own video as a way to unite the campus.
His goal he said was to “try build a real sense of community here, because I think that’s something that we’re lacking right now.”
Slavin and a team of 10 close volunteers, backed by another 120, worked for months to get the idea rolling. Thanks to the power of social media, they were able to get to the word out quickly by e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Koh, a 23-year-old dancer from Victoria, saw the Facebook posting six weeks ago and offered Slavin her services as a choreographer. She put together simple moves that non-dancers could learn fast. Slavin’s team then filmed her performing the routine in slow motion and posted it on YouTube so everyone could practice.
On Saturday, hundreds of students showed up on campus at 7:30 a.m., and were assigned to classrooms, where they ran through the dance routine a few more times.
By 10 a.m., they were assembled in the autumn sunshine in front of the McPherson Library, performing the dance to Michael Bublé’s “Haven’t Met You Yet.”
Slavin estimated the crowd at about 800 students, hopped up on caffeine, and dressed in everything from UVic garb to Santa costumes, clown outfits and the latest Spiderman wear.
The video shoot started with students standing in the fountain, before it moved inside to the library and up the stairs to the roof for a climactic shot of the students dancing below.
Slavin and his volunteers had been hoping for a crowd of 1,500 to 2,000, so they could set a Guinness World Record. But that was beside the point. Slavin wanted a sense of community and he seemed to get it.
“It really brought the campus together,” said UVic student Kaitlin Erb, 19. There were times, she said, when the crowd erupted in song, even when the cameras weren’t rolling.
“I was going through the crowd, and people were meeting each other,” said Smith, 25..
By the end of the morning shoot, when the crowd burst into a chant of “UVic, UVic, UVic,” Smith said that Slavin really had accomplished his goal.
“That wasn’t choreographed,” she said. “That was just spontaneous community.”
lkines@tc.canwest.com
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