Algonquin High School Alumni Reflect on Viral Lip Dub Video 4-Years Later

Thursday, May 25, 2017
Joe Calabro, GoLocalWorcester Sports Team

Giles Ober doing his part in the 2013 lip dub video

Four years ago, then Algonquin Regional High School seniors Giles Ober, Nic Zanghi and Sam Huddart released a lip dub video of Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen’s song “Good Time.” The video went viral. 

"In the most positive way, this video has haunted me since the day it came out, but in a good way. Its one of those things that just catches peoples attention," said Ober, now a recent graduate of UMass Lowell. 

He added "one of the things we wanted to to was promote a more unified culture at Algonquin and show and school spirit and I think we did that. That’s what is really cool about it."  

Released on Monday, March 4, 2013, the video had over 18,000 views by Wednesday, March 6.

"It was purely electrifying. We didnt know how it would turn out, but the response was overwhelming. We worked hours and hours on this and for it to blow up like it did was just incredible," Ober said.

"The night it dropped, only a select few people had seen it. Just being on social media that night and seeing how fast it was spreading was unbelievable," said Zanghi, a recent graduate from UMass Amherst. 

If They Got a Do Over

Despite the success of the video, the creators say if they could go back, they would do some things differently.

"If i could go back and do it differently, I would have gone back and got permissive rights to the song. I would have gone to the record company and got the nod for the song because it got stripped from youtube after 72 hours or so," Ober said. 

'I would say that would be a do over and maybe not. Other than that, I wouldn’t change a thing, it was fantastic," said Huddart, now a recent graduate of Bentley University.  

"I'm not sure it would have made a difference honestly, just because of the litigation that was going on with that song at the time," said Zanghi. 

Making the Video 

In their senior year, Ober, Zanghi and Huddart took on the challenge of creating the first-ever Algonquin Regional Lib Dub as a year-long project for their Marketing Research class. In order to achieve their goal, the students promoted the project through Twitter, Facebook, posters, school announcements and video blogs.

Over the course of five months and two filming sessions, Ober, Zanghi and Huddart worked to direct and produce this video. 

"We filmed over two days one in November and one in December. The first day we were putting posters all over the school, and posts all over Facebook and Twitter. 

Then the first day of filming we had hundreds of students show up, it was pretty amazing."

Ober, Zanghi and Huddart had help editing the video from 2011 Algonquin graduate Mike Davis. 

"We didn’t realize how much post production work there was, but Mike helped us out and it was fantastic. We couldn’t have done it without him," Huddart added. 

Zanghi added, "It was a lot of fun to make honestly. It was just overall a pretty positive experience, and just a lot of fun.