Hopkins flash mob dances for donor appreciation video

Continuing a three-year trend of creating videos as a means of thanking University donors, Hopkins's Communications and Marketing Divisions staged and filmed a forty-person flash mob in Gilman Hall last Tuesday afternoon.

The Alumni Association will release the video in the spring. It will feature a, "‘Hopkins-ized' version of the Sly and the Family Stone classic ‘Thank You for Letting Me Be Myself Again,'" Kate Pipkin, Director of Communications and Marketing for the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, wrote in an e-mail. The message was sent to the University community, soliciting participants.

"Dancing skills are not required, though they are a plus," Pipkin wrote in the message.

Approximately forty students showed up in the Atrium for the event. There, the participants followed a choreographed routine to the funk hit, whose title and lyrics capture the ethos of the forthcoming video: gratitude to alumni donors and other benefactors. The shoot lasted an hour and was essentially problem-free, according to Pipkin in a follow-up e-mail.

"We weren't disappointed," she said.

Participants, meanwhile, relished the opportunity to express thanks through – as freshman Eleni Padden described it – "a most expressive art form."

"Hey, I love to dance," she said. "And for once, it's doing more good than harm."

The concept of performance-based video appreciation stems from creative collaboration within Office of Communications, primarily through the department's Marketing and Creative Services team.

Jay Corey, the team's director of video strategy and the producer of this year's video, could not be reached for comment.

This year's video is the third of its kind at Hopkins. Pipkin cites the emphatic success of past videos as the driving factor in the decision to make another.

"President Daniels has received such positive feedback from them, and wanted to have another created this year," she wrote.

Past videos include "We Thank You" – a play on Isaac Hayes' disco hit "Thank You" – and last year's release, "The Model of a Modern University," which spoofed a theme from the Broadway musical Pirates of Penzance.