A Dallas high school's Theater Arts teacher and his students know how to get their funk on, and they're not afraid to show the world.
Mr. Scot Pankey of A. Maceo Smith New Tech High School has some definite skills. This stylin' teach put together this jaw-dropping dance video with dozens of his students as a class project, set to Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk." Pankey keeps the beat for almost five minutes, strutting through the school's hallways and joining up for dance breaks with several clusters of his 200 students along the way.
Aside from the fact that he managed to rope that many technology students from six different classes into shaking their groove thing, perhaps the most impressive thing about the video is that Mr. Pankey and his crew pull off the entire thing in a single take that was shot (riding on a library cart!) and edited by students. Watch closely and you'll see that the camera never once cuts away from the solo camera that tracks the teacher and class' impressive dance from start to end.
What's more, this dude's got game. Yeah, he's the school's Theater Arts teacher, so you'd expect him to have some talent in the song/dance/acting milieu, but it's a rare teacher that can pull together choreography, technology, student participation and sheer moxie into something that works this well.
According to WFAA of Dallas, the video was the culmination of two weeks' worth of preparation. Most of the students had never performed on camera before, but Pankey saw this as a way of getting the kids to break through their fears and self-consciousness. The local news station's segment (below) includes brief interviews with Pankey and one of his students, as well as rehearsals.
In a live on-air interview with Pankey and three of his students from Dallas' KDFW, Pankey explained that he has "a lot of timid students," so he agreed that if they would do the video, he would do it with them despite thinking of himself as "not a dancer." He added that they never expected the video to go viral. It was merely something they did as a fun school project.
