When principal Gerry Goertzen approached his Abbotsford Christian Secondary student council about doing something for a fellow student in hospital, he was surprised by their reaction.

"I was thinking along the lines of a great big poster card or something to put up on the wall," Goertzen said Monday.

Instead, the school's Student Action Leadership Team decided they could cheer up Grade 10 student Alexis Summers with a lip-dub video - where some students pretend to sing along with popular songs while others go through a variety of actions in the background.

Nearly all 350 students in the school participated in the seven-minute video, which uses ABBA's Mamma Mia and TobyMac's inspirational Get Back Up.

The video can be found on YouTube at bit.ly/UupShA. By Wednesday afternoon it had 3,846 views.

"It's an unusual gift," said Goertzen. "You can't knit a sweater and have 350 people stitch a stitch in it. But you can make a video and do it.

"It was really a phenomenal gift," he said. "Here's a girl who really felt alone and the whole school pitched in to make sure she was not."

Although teacher Patrick Naayer did some supervision and co-ordination, the video was conceived, shot and edited by students.

Grade 11 student Casey Kowalchuk shot the video with camcorder on a tripod with weights to make it more stable and then edited it on the weekend.

"I really thought it was good to not do something for myself, but instead put my time and effort into something to help another student at the school," said Kowalchuk, 16. It wasn't hard to get students to participate.

"Everyone got really pumped and excited for it," said Kowalchuk, who has his own YouTube channel KCDK-TV. "It turned out really, really good.'

Alexis' dad Rick is the network administrator at Abbotsford Christian and purposely stayed away from the videomaking so he could watch it with his daughter at B.C. Children's Hospital, where she has been battling an abdominal pain for more than six weeks.

"It was totally amazing," said Rick after watching the video.

Alexis, who turns 15 later this month, was similarly surprised.

"She was totally taken aback by it," he said. "She was astounded at what the student body did.

"We're just so thankful to the Abbotsford Christian School community."

Alexis hopes to be able to thank her friends personally when she gets back to school, hopefully next month.