Photo by Morgan Grana.

Correction: Acquirefest is in its 6th year, not 4th as was originally reported.

It takes a special kind of courage to sing on stage, especially without music to back you up. For a cappella singing groups, music and vocals are one and the same. On May 4 and 5, this year’s Acquirefest concert will give numerous Santa Cruz singing groups the chance to display their talent.

The sixth annual Acquirefest, a concert hosted by student-run Acquire A Cappella at UC Santa Cruz, features a panoply of voice-only musical groups, including representatives from UC Berkeley, UC Davis and University of Oregon.

Erick Porras, second-year music student and member of Acquire A Cappella, was part of the team responsible for organizing the event, hosted this year in the Stevenson Event Center.

“All the groups have really stepped it up this year,” Porras said.

Acquire performs a cappella covers of popular songs, often creatively reimagined or mashed up.

“My personal favorite is our mashup of ‘Seven Nation Army’ [by the White Stripes] and ‘Sweet Dreams’ [by Eurythmics],” Porras said.

Acquirefest was founded in 2007, said Mitch Allen, fourth-year UCSC astrophysics student and Acquire A Cappella’s musical director.

This year’s Acquirefest concert doubles as a premiere for Acquire A Cappella’s first album, a recording of the group’s lineup of covers.

“We just wanted something that reflected who we are as a group,” Allen said. “We got the equipment together at a friend’s place and recorded part by part. It took us about a year fixing and mastering and making it sound like a good, natural a cappella album, and I think that’s what we have.”

Copies of the album will be available for $5 at the concert.

The CD is not the only creative project that the group has undertaken. Acquire regularly performs in downtown Santa Cruz and hosts concerts in venues across the UCSC campus. They have created several music videos, including their popular viral cover of The Lonely Island’s “I’m On A Boat.”

Sophia Rocco, a second-year physics major and self-proclaimed Acquire A Cappella fan, said she is looking forward to Acquirefest.

“[Acquire] brings a little bit of excitement and happiness to the lives of college students,” Rocco said. “I’m always impressed by people who can perform on stage in front of hundreds of people.”

Acquire A Cappella director Allen is proud of the tradition that Acquirefest has created.

“Every year that we’ve done it, Acquirefest continues to be the largest a cappella festival in Santa Cruz. We’re pretty proud of that fact, and we strive to improve it,” Allen said. “It’s totally one of the most fun things we do all year, and we love to share that with anyone that wants to come.”

Acquire A Cappella members have been practicing hard to ensure that this year’s Acquirefest is memorable, Porras said.

“We hope that everybody has a good time,” he said. “We’ve been working really hard, and it’ll be nice to get a crowd to come see us and the other groups.”

Groups performing include UCSC groups Acquire, Isang Hming, Cloud 9, and the Hightones; UC Berkeley groups Dil Se and Decadence; UC Davis groups Spokes and Liquid Hotplates; Stanford University groups Fleet Street and Harmonics; and University of Oregon groups Divisi and On The Rocks.

“Acquirefest shows that UCSC is on par with the rest of the [UC] system, as far as singing goes,” Rocco said. “It’s something we can be proud of on our campus.”

Illustration by Kristin Talley.

For a moment of fame on YouTube, past “celebrities” have generally been witty, loathsome or incredibly lucky. Now there’s also lip dubbing.

Rising in popularity at universities all over the world, lip dubbing is the latest trend to hit UC Santa Cruz. A lip dub video features hundreds of costumed students lip-syncing to a song, one continuous and unedited camera shot winding through different areas of a building and  millions of hits online.

UCSC Weekend Activities, a student-organized club through OPERS, is bringing lip dubbing to the West Coast for spring quarter. Tony Dianda, organizer of the club, said that no events were organized for this quarter due to fears of further inclement weather.

UCSC’s lip dub video will join the many that can be found online — a quick YouTube search reveals a veritable plethora of other works. These range from the University of Montreal’s library-based rendition of Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” to Rosemead High School’s “I Gotta Feeling,” a cover of the Black Eyed Peas’ song.

Dianda said that the club’s biggest motivation is to allow students to reach out and be brought together from opposite sides of campus.

“Because there is no real central part of campus or football games that everyone goes to, meeting people is more difficult [than at other schools],” Dianda said. “Anyone can participate in our activities. It’s not targeted towards any particular group. It’s targeted towards everybody.”

Past events hosted by UCSC Weekend Activities have included campuswide games of Capture the Flag and stargazing outings. Their upcoming lip dubbing event is set to take place sometime during the first three weeks of spring quarter.

The event will be free for participants, who can register on the group’s Facebook page.

“Last quarter we tried to do stargazing and ended up with 140 confirmed guests,” Dianda said. “I’m expecting somewhere between 100–600 people for this.”

Students have spent the last month voting on the group’s Facebook page for the song they feel would best represent Santa Cruz. After much deliberation, Smash Mouth’s “Walking on the Sun” lost to the B-52s’ “Love Shack.”

Third-year Robert Culpi, the organizer of the UCSC event, said he first had the idea of staging the lip dubbing event after watching one of these videos.

“My friend suggested I try to do it myself,” Culpi said, “but I quickly realized that it was far too big of a project to do on my own. I realized I needed a bigger group to get it going so I handed off the idea to the UCSC Weekend Activities club by writing on their Facebook wall.”

For the UCSC Weekend Activities’ lip dubbing project, Dianda has brought together a small team of about eight people, whose jobs include makeup, costume design, choreography and filming.

Second-year America Whitten, the advertisement director, said she is doing everything she can to publicize the event.

“We will be tabling, putting up posters, making announcements in lecture halls and sending messages via Facebook,” Whitten said.

The team said the hardest part of organizing the event has been choosing the location where the filming will take place. After much debate, OPERS was selected as the best location for filming, narrowly edging out the Music Center. Film director third-year Andrew Burgher had the final word on choice of location.

“We chose that location mainly because the area there has a lot of places for us to move around in,” Burgher said.

Burgher hopes to mesh the past styles of lip dub videos — such as filming in large spaces — with “a little twist of Santa Cruz” by potentially adding in shots of the bay and campus.

As the videographer, Burgher said one of the most challenging aspects of filming a lip dubbing video is producing one continuous take.

“To make it possible, I will be using a Steadicam,” Burgher said. “To pull this off successfully, there will have to be a lot of moving parts working in unison — this meaning that all logistical elements of the production from camera and crew to sound and choreography will have to be prepared, practiced and rehearsed.”

Efficiency and practice are key to the success of a lip dub video, which demands split-second synchronization, hundreds of props and personnel and zero errors in the final cut, so at least one pre-event meeting will be arranged. There will be a preset path and specific casting for each particular moment in the song.

Culpi, who had the idea to create this video, said the project is in good hands and could be quite successful.

“The team that I met with are all really approachable,” Culpi said, “and I feel they have a good handle on the event.”