A lip dub is one continuous shot of the entire studio performing a song - every learner has a moment, every part of the studio gets used. The camera moves through the space, learners hand off the "spotlight," the song plays once start to finish, and at the end you have one video that captures the whole tribe in motion. It's the centerpiece of Exhibition Day. It takes weeks to do well.
| Week 4 | Preparation, in full, as the sole Quest focus. Song chosen, song mapped, route walked, moments assigned, crew roles claimed, and as many rehearsal reps as the week will hold. Nothing is filmed for real. |
| Week 5 | The recording week. Blocking Tuesday, dress rehearsal Wednesday, the shoot Thursday, choose the take Friday. |
| Target | Fully recorded by Thursday of Week 5. |
| Week 6 | Slack, deliberately. A reshoot window if the studio wants one; otherwise review and refine. Nothing new gets made. |
We film with a week to spare so that a problem is a problem and not a disaster. A sick camera operator, a corrupted file, a take nobody likes, a locked door on the route - any of these costs a Quest block if you shot on Thursday of Week 5, and costs you the Exhibition if you shot the Wednesday before it. Anything that erodes that margin is a regression, not a scheduling tweak.
The lip dub isn't introduced until Week 4 - earlier and the tribe doesn't have the muscle, later and you run out of runway. What follows mirrors the day pages exactly. If this page and a day page ever disagree, the day page is right and this one needs fixing.
Every Quest block this week is fifty minutes of Lip Dub, and every block from Wednesday on ends by running whatever exists so far.
By Friday: a song, a map with real timings, a route walked twice with music, a storyboard, a banner, assignments, and a crew. Steps one to four of five.
If the film is finished and the studio is happy with it, Week 6 simply doesn't need this section. That's the design working, not slack going to waste.
Seven roles, taken from what the day pages actually use. Name them as leadership jobs at the point of asking, so nobody reads being off-camera as being left out - and say it before assignments, not after, because the learners who'd rather be behind the camera need to know the option exists.
Walks the route backwards at a speed a studio have to match, and decides when the take starts. Needs steady hands and nerve. Walks the route alone first, at real speed, while everyone watches - that walk defines the route more than the storyboard does.
Checks positions, calls the countdown, calls the take. This is the person the studio looks at on shoot day, not the guide. The single biggest act of trust available in Week 5.
One per section of the song, so four or five in total. Each owns their people and - the part that matters - their handoff. They talk to the Section Lead either side of them before they talk to anyone else. The clearest script of any role, which makes it a good first leadership rep.
Owns the master assignment list and the lyric map from the day they're made until the shoot. Unglamorous and load-bearing: "we'll remember" is how a lip dub falls apart.
Owns the speaker and whether the song can actually be heard along the whole route - which is not the same as whether it's loud at the start. Tests it before the studio arrives.
Watches the takes back and knows what changed between them. The person who can say "take two was better and here's the eleven seconds where."
One learner whose job is the foot of clear space behind the operator, with the authority to stop a run if the path isn't clear. Real responsibility with a real reason.
Picking too long a song. Stay under 4 minutes. Sub-3 is even better. A 5-minute lip dub is misery to film.
Choosing a song with inappropriate content. Read the lyrics, all of them - some "clean" songs have second verses that are not clean - and check licensing at the same time if the film is going to be shared publicly.
The move is to screen privately, the night before the vote, not to veto publicly after it. Anything that can't be used comes off the ballot quietly and you tell that learner privately why. The studio votes, and the vote is final; a guide who overrules a vote has taught the studio that its votes are advisory.
Letting one learner dominate. If a returner ends up with 10 lines and a quiet learner ends up with 0, fix it before Week 5 ends. Every learner gets a moment.
Underestimating the camera path. Walking and filming smoothly is hard. The Camera Operator needs real practice. Try a few practice runs with just the camera and music - no performance.
Locking a take the studio isn't happy with. You have a whole week. If Friday's viewing says the take isn't good enough, the studio gets another go - and because you filmed on Thursday of Week 5, that costs you a Quest block rather than the Exhibition. Ask the question out loud on Friday and again at Tuesday's artifact review, and mean it both times. But don't re-shoot forever either: at some point the imperfections are the charm, and the studio is usually better at knowing when than the guide is.
The studio picks. But here's the criteria checklist for whatever they bring forward: