A video in which a group mimes a song in one continuous take, usually with the camera walking through a building and the microphone passing from hand to hand. Named by Jake Lodwick on 14 December 2006; his Flagpole Sitta office lip dub followed in April 2007 and was covered by The Washington Post.
I was in one at university. Nine takes, a broken banister, and a marketing department that used the footage in a prospectus for four years without telling any of us.
Reported that after L'Université du Québec à Montréal made one to The Black Eyed Peas' I Gotta Feeling in 2009, the format went international and universities began commissioning them.
Died around 2014, when the form had been fully claimed by admissions offices. A student prank with a budget line and a sign-off process is not a prank any more.
The rule that makes it a lip dub rather than a music video is the unbroken take. Everything difficult about the form — the timing, the corridors, the handovers — follows from that one constraint.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
