Talk about not knowing what you’ll be when you grow up!

Matt Harding was a video-game designer in his early 20s, traveling the world. On a whim, he put together the now-immortal video, “Where the Hell Is Matt?” It consisted entirely of short clips of Matt, a non-dancer, doing his “stupid dance” in one famous world location after another, edited to a great, soaring song. The result had a power, a universality, a happiness, that drove it to become one of YouTube’s most popular videos.



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Every couple of years, Matt has followed up with another, similar movie. Each time, he raised the stakes. Underwater dancing. Zero-gravity dancing. Dancing with other people in each country.

And now Matt released his 2012 video. It’s a big departure — and it’s a masterpiece.

This time, it’s not Matt just swinging his arms, stepping in place. This time, he actually learned to dance, often in the style of the country he was visiting. As a result, there’s a feeling of collaboration, of immersion, that wasn’t in the earlier video.

The kicker is the final shot. After all those joyous, wordless clips from 50 countries, the final scene is Matt, his baby son on his shoulders, dancing simply with his wife in their own back yard. It’s perfection. And it’s hard not to tear up.

Go watch the video. You’ll probably need a couple of viewings. You might also want to watch the outtakes, which Matt just released yesterday. They’re funny.

What a weird, unguessable, uplifting piece of pop culture! I couldn’t help wondering how much of Matt’s video was pre-planned genius, and how much was happy accident. So I conducted an email interview with Matt himself.

DP: What did you use as a camera?

MH: I used the Panasonic GH1 for the first year or so after reading your review, but got fed up that it would auto-adjust the focus in the middle of shots and ruin them. There was no way to turn off that setting. So I upgraded to a Canon 7D and that’s been pretty great.

DP: For the last couple of videos, Stride gum paid for your travel. Did you have a sponsor this time?

MH: No, I made the new video without a sponsor. Because of the success of previous videos and an ongoing endorsement with Visa, I was able to self-fund this one. I’m hoping to earn back what I put into it through ads and by selling the video as a download on my site.

DP: Whose choreography is it?



MH: The choreography was about 50 percent taught to me by the other dancers and 50 percent stuff I either brought to them or made up in the hotel that morning. I was starting from absolute zero as a dancer, so I worked with a choreographer here in Seattle named Aiko Kinoshita and another in Los Angeles. You might know of Trish Sie from OK Go’s treadmill video and other stuff they’ve done. She drilled into me the importance of keeping it spontaneous and not trying to bring in a rigid dance routine.

I learned to just go for short, big moves that would read on camera and keep people from stepping on each others’ toes. There was a lot of “How about this? Okay, that stunk. So how about this?”

And if there was a local dance that everyone knew, we’d just do that. In Baltimore they insisted there was something called the Baltimore crab dance. You can see us doing it in the video, but I’m pretty sure they all just made it up on the spot.

Sometimes the local dances wouldn’t work. The traditional dance in Saudi Arabia involves a bunch of men flailing their swords around. That wasn’t really the image I wanted to project, so I taught them Shuffle Off to Buffalo, which they were familiar with from the Loony Tunes with Michigan J. Frog.

DP: So we should not assume that the dances we’re seeing are, in fact, representative slices of native culture?

MH: Yes. The traditional dances of Lebanon in no way resemble the opening number of “West Side Story,” and the Huli Wigmen of Papua New Guinea do not normally do the Hitchhiker. But when I’m with the Himba tribe in northern Namibia, or at the mass dance in North Korea, the dances you’re seeing are pretty authentic.

I should also mention that a number of the dance steps in the video were lifted out of Dance Central on Xbox Kinect. That was actually a really good way for me to learn the nuances of some well-known moves. I respond well to dance training when it comes in video game form.

DP: Especially in the second half, it almost looks like the dances are intended to fit together as you leap across the globe.

MH: The credit goes entirely to my editor, Jarrod Pasha. We printed out still frames from every shot, put them up on a wall, and spent hours trying to find connections. The goal was to make two years’ worth of improvised flailing look like it was meticulously planned from the start.

DP: How come you blurred out the other dancers’ faces in the Syria clip?

MH: Men and women dancing together is a sensitive issue in a lot of the Middle East. Not so much in Syria, but it doesn’t take much to put someone in danger, and I don’t know how paranoid to be. So it’s more of a political thing, but yes, I blurred the dancers’ faces in Syria for their safety.

DP: It also looks like everyone’s dancing to the same beat. Was there a click track?

MH: There was no click track. We cheated big-time.

A large portion of the clips in the video are either sped up or slowed down to fit the tempo of the song, which was recorded long after the dancing was done. I had a general tempo in my head and I did my best to keep people moving at the right speed, but of course I was way off a lot of the time.

You can usually speed things up by 15 percent without anyone noticing, but something weird happens around 20 percent where it just looks like Keystone Cops. It’s harder when there’s water in the shot, or jumping, or anything that we’re used to seeing move at a certain speed.

DP: We see only a few seconds of each location. How much dancing did you and your fellow dancers actually perform?

MH: We usually only danced a short time for each clip. I knew I was only going to use four seconds, so I would just loop the move I wanted and we’d do it a few times; there wasn’t much point in beating it to death. When you’ve got a large crowd of untrained dancers, the challenge is keeping their energy up. The most fun and exuberant moments always come at the beginning, after they’ve gotten the basics of the move down, before they start looking tired, bored and cranky.

Also, I’m very lazy. If there’s a word that means the opposite of perfectionist, I’m that.