You Gotta See This

I was so glad to catch The Rachel Maddow Show last night, when she talked about a video battle between two rival Washington high schools. Here’s the clip from her show, but I’ve embedded the full videos below that.

The challenge came from Shorecrest High School‘s video department to arch rival Shorewood High. Mr. Mitchell’s class produced a four-minute, one-shot, apparently all-hands video for OutKast’s Hey Ya.

[youtube width="480" height="295"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPTd8MgAeqI[/youtube]

Not to be outdone, Shorewood High School’s video production class turned in Hall & Oates’s You Make My Dreams Come True. Student Javier Cáceres taught himself and other students to lip sync the song backward, then taped (assisted by teacher Mr. Ballew) the entire four minutes in one shot, then ran the backward-lip syncing, backward-walking, backward-everything-ing tape backward and set it to Hall & Oates singing forward.

Trust me, it’s a whole kettle of awesome.

[youtube width="480" height="295"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7TI-AJi2O8[/youtube]

We’re still waiting for Shorecrest’s response, but as Rachel points out, other schools around the country are preparing to jump into the fray.

So what does this have to do with anything gay? I would have posted this anyway just because I like the videos, but on a hunch I checked out the two schools’ websites this morning. Both Shorecrest and Shorewood have GLSEN-registered Gay/Straight Alliances (Washington’s GLSEN Chapter, region 4).

I’m not sure exactly why, but that didn’t surprise me.

Good on ya, Shorewood and Shorecrest, for all of it. Now let’s see some more videos!