A black Batman skipped through a crowd of spasmodically jerking students, sidestepped a man in a red morph suit, while someone wearing a unicorn mask grinded against FAU’s mascot, Owlsley.
On Thursday evening, Feb. 14, after the men’s basketball team’s win against Western Kentucky, students are making a music video. The song “Harlem Shake” by Baauer blasts through The Burrow’s sound system — a 30 second clip of dubstep that has soundtracked a new trend of dance videos. The music is so loud that OwlTV cameraman Michael Merson is barely audible when he says, “80 percent of these people won’t be in the shot.”
He’s right. Over 200 people showed up to take part in FAU’s take on the silly viral video that’s been making the rounds on YouTube the past few weeks. With the exception of the outlandishly dressed people dancing in the front row — like a krumping box of crayons and a girl clad in a neon string bikini — everyone blends in together on the camera’s screen, looking more like a writhing mass of limbs than people dancing. But they’re all having fun, and have a video forever immortalized by YouTube to remember it by.
“It’s just a really bizarre song accompanied by really bizarre behavior,” Merson says later, after they finish shooting. People are smiling as they leave, a surprisingly large number of guys putting their shirts back on. The entire event, from beginning to end, didn’t take longer than 15 minutes. The video had over 3,000 views as of press time.
