University of Illinois Students Shake On The Quad, Harlem Style

Traffic on the quad is usually fairly easy to navigate, but students walking to class on Feb. 20 found themselves unable to pass through without clearing unusual obstacles like celebrity cardboard cutouts and flying Jimmy John’s sandwiches.

While these objects seem out of place on the quad, they are nothing short of normal for a traditional Harlem Shake video, which was being filmed with approximately 2300 student participants, according to the event’s Facebook page.

Aaqil Khan, a junior in LAS and the mastermind behind the video, said he encouraged students to show up in front of Foellinger auditorium wearing whatever they could find laying around their dorm room.

This resulted in participants dressed head to toe in morphsuits, Illini spirit wear and superhero and villain costumes such as Captain America and The Dark Knight Rises’ Bain.

“The idea of (Harlem Shake videos) is just to wear something totally random,” Khan said. “And the more random it is, the more funny it is.”

Khan took his own advice was dressing for his role of the solo dancer at the beginning of the video.

“I wore a very, very large sombrero and a construction worker jacket and short orange shorts,” he said. “I started the dance wearing an Illini shirt and jeans, (but) everyone’s wearing loud costumes so then I changed into my costume.”

Costumes weren’t mandatory for participation, though. Bridget Albright, freshman in AHS, said she had fun dancing even without dressing up.

“I didn’t wear anything special because I had class and wouldn’t know what to wear anyways,” she said. “I danced in the crowd but not necessarily in the front where the crazy people were.”

Regardless of where she stood in the crowd, Albright was included in the video thanks to the several cameras that shot the scene from atop the stairs of Foellinger Auditorium.

Khan worked with Terrence Thompson, junior in media, who was able to rent cameras from the college. Khan said the different angles helped produce the best quality video.

“I had one camera that was kind of rotating around the quad and getting angles from all around,” he said. “We had two main cameras positioned from Foellinger Auditorium pointed down to where we were dancing, and we had students with their cameras.”

While the traditional Harlem Shake music was added to the video in the editing process, Heartland DJ volunteered to set up speakers on the Foellinger steps so participants could listen to the music while dancing.

Despite only using 30 seconds of footage for the traditional style video, “everyone was dancing for four or five minutes just for fun,” Khan said.

Because there was so much extra footage, Khan and Thompson created two videos, one of which resembles a traditional Harlem Shake and the other which features extra footage, including the famous I-L-L chant.

“At the beginning of the dance, one kid did a standing back flip which was really neat. Another part we had superman in a cape fly across the screen so he went ahead and did that. So he captured the best 15 seconds he possibly could.”