High school YouTube video gets famous by going backward

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The YouTube video from Shorewood High School in Washington state looks normal when it starts. It’s a lip dub -- a lip sync of a song done in a single take with numerous students taking part -- of the infectious Hall & Oates tune, ‘You Make My Dreams Come True.’

There are numerous lip dubs online, and this one is pretty much like any other, beginning with an enthusiastic girl running through the halls of the school, mouthing the words. But there are some odd things going on. Some students around her are doing impossible-looking acrobatics as the camera passes by. Objects fly up from the floor.

That’s because the Shorewood lip dub, which has become a big hit on YouTube, was filmed backward. The kids in the video (it’s a cast of hundreds, including cheerleaders and the swim team) did everything in reverse, including the lip syncing. That meant they had to painstakingly learn all the words phonetically, backward, like in the old days when we played records backwards to get devil messages.

A local television station did a story about the kids, and they demonstrated the technique.

The lip dub video isn’t perfect, but it’s wonderfully inventive, ambitious and joyous. It was done in answer to a challenge by a rival high school that did a regular lip dub to the OutKast song, ‘Hey Ya!’ We’ll do that other school the favor of not mentioning its name, because the Shorewood effort was overwhelmingly sick (in a good way).

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-- David Colker