The ‘happy’ students

The ‘happy’ students

5 February 2014

DE La Salle High School has jumped on the happiness bandwagon in a lively bid to beat the winter blues.

Game for a laugh teachers, students and staff danced their way through classrooms, corridors and the canteen in the school on Friday to record their own version of Pharrell William’s Happy music video.

Almost 13,000 people have already been given a lift by the recording since it was posted to YouTube at the weekend.

Like similar Happy music videos made in cities around the world, including Belfast and Dublin, De La Salle urges its audience to “clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.”

The video was the idea of the school’s head of media, David Sherry, who is delighted by the unexpected success of the recording, which he said was made within one afternoon.

He said he was inspired to attempt the recording as a practical exercise for his GCSE classes after watching a similar video made in Belfast last week as part of a worldwide Happy craze.

With no rehearsals, makeup or second takes, he said the video very simply “is what it is.”

Although everyone taking part, from senior teachers to the school’s cooks, throws themselves into their dancing roles with gusto, the undisputed stars of the show are the lively Nathan Botsford and his rhythmic classmate Hafeez Oladipupo who open the video.

“I was teaching the boys on Friday and told them we were going to do a bit of filming, they jumped out of their chairs and danced and that was our first bit done. Everything was completed in one take,” he said.

“I didn’t even explain much about what we were doing, I just told them to go for it. We started after breaktime on Friday and we had the whole thing wrapped up by the end of the day.

“We think we have captured the happiness of the school, everyone really went for it.”

Mr. Sherry said the teachers were as keen as the students to get involved and said he thought their sense of fun comes across well.

“It was not hard at all to get the staff to take part,” he said.

“We have a range of abilities in this school and the staff are always looking to get involved in anything they can.

“In other schools teachers might keep themselves to themselves but our teachers were here at the of a hat.

“This is all part of our efforts to build the school’s media department and the fact that we turned this video around so quickly shows we can do it.”