Meet the people behind Cincinnati Children’s viral lip sync video

A viral video by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center is a 100-percent in-house effort aimed at spreading a message of hope this holiday season.

WATCH: Cincinnati Children’s lip sync video goes viral

The hospital’s marketing & communications department received a video request from Protective Services from its manager, inquiring about officers performing a lip sync challenge video, according to Tanya Leach, video manager for Cincinnati Children’s.

“They wanted to use it to just to do something fun with the officers, patients and families, so they were wanting to send something out to other protective services officers at other hospitals or police departments, fire departments, things like that,” Leach said. “They just wanted to shoot it with their cellphones.”

Instead, members of the hospital’s marketing department responded that they would love to help with the custom mash-up video and make it the official Cincinnati Children’s Holiday Greetings video, she said.

Cincinnati Children’s protective services officer Walt Coleman Jr., who has been in a band for 30 years, came up with the altered lyrics and recorded music with a freelance music mixer to create the soundtrack for the 4-minute video, which is racking up hundreds of thousands of views on Facebook.

MORE: Cincinnati Children’s jumps to No. 2 spot in nation, is first in Ohio

Coleman debuts at 29 seconds into the video, playing bass and providing vocals for a sizable portion of the production.

“I think a lot of people would think we just did a karaoke version, but there was a lot of behind-the-scenes effort (put) into it,” Leach said. “We didn’t want to get hit (with) a copyright violation, so we recorded the music over a different beat.”

Protective Services Officer Veda Genous, who leads a choir at Changing Lives Ministries and has been singing in a church choir since she was 7 years old, starts singing her heart out at the video's 2:08 mark, Leach said.

Stacey Adidou, a Cincinnati Children’s senior administrative assistant, used the skills she honed as a former dance and cheerleading coach to choreograph the entire holiday video, Leach said.

Adidou appears in a pink shirt around the 1:10 mark in the video.

Other employees were involved but Coleman, Genous and Adidou got involved in the upbeat video and local musician Gary Godman, of Northern Kentucky, helped Children’s create the infectious, often complex music mix, Leach said.

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From 2011 to 2017, Cincinnati Children’s ranked third in the nation among all Honor Roll hospitals, according to a U.S. News and World Report’s Best Children’s Hospitals ranking.

In June, it moved up one spot in those rankings, becoming second in the nation.

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