Behind the Scenes - Our 2023 Winning Lipdub Entry

11 May 2023

A behind the scenes look at UniHall's winning 2023 College Row LipDub video.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to make a winning LipDub video?

LipDub is one of our favourite dates on the Inter College competition calendar every year. Have you ever wondered what it takes to make a winning LipDub video? There is a lot of creativity, time and effort put in to bring the concept to life and we love how it brings our community together.

As part of the competition, colleges are given a set of rules for creating their LipDub video and a series of options to earn bonus points. This year the rules were:

• No external help

• One continuous take

• Under 5 minutes long

Bonus criteria were:

• Head of college dressed as an animal
• Include shirts of other colleges
• Head student lip syncing in suit/ball gown
• Include an animal or pet
• Include chef or dining hall staff
• Camera person makes an appearance in the video

Points are awarded based on creativity, production quality, lip syncing, involvement and engagement.

It’s a team effort to produce LipDub and the committee consists of residents from various UniHall committees, including ResClub, our Arts Committee, HiRez Media and the Student Music Committee. This dedicated team has around a month to make the magic happen! The first step is to choose the song that will be used and decide on the basic storyline the video will take, then it’s time for auditions.

The entire UniHall community is invited to audition for main roles in the video. Auditions consist of the resident lip syncing to the first section of the song in front of a panel of 3-4 committee members. Everyone who auditioned was offered at least a supporting role in the production.

While auditions take place the choreographer is busy planning all the dance moves and transitions of different roles. Once roles are assigned numerous hours are spent in dance rehearsals getting the moves just right.

Our whole community is once again invited to take part in making props to be used in the video. Our art room becomes a hive of activity working on background props and costume items to make sure everyone in the video looks great.

Our videographers have numerous run throughs of the route to be taken during the final shoot to make sure they get it just right on the day. The transitions where the camera is passed up to balconies were only able to be practiced once before the final shoot, making the final production value even more impressive.

This year’s video scored 217 points in the competition, outperforming our previous best score of 212 for our 2021 entry by 5 points.

Over 100 individuals were involved in brining this year’s UniHall LipDub video to life, with various residents committing a combined total of approximately 220 hours to the project. While that may seem like an immense amount of time for a video that is less than 5 minutes long, we think you will agree the effort was well worth it! We’re so proud of the team that made this project a reality and the way the UniHall community came together to bring their vision to life.

You can check out the final product here.