About

Shia LaBeouf's Intense Motivational Speech, also known as Just Do It or the Shia LaBeouf Just Do It Meme, is a video featuring actor Shia LaBeouf intensely shouting inspirational messages to the camera while gesturing bizarrely. The clip, filmed in front of a green screen, inspired numerous parodies, remixes, memes and reaction videos.

Origin

User Mike Mohamed uploaded a video to YouTube titled "Shia LaBeouf delivers the most intense motivational speech of all-time" ^[1] on May 27, 2015, accumulating more than 1.4 million views in its first five days online.

The video is a segment from a collaborative video project between LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö, Luke Turner and Central Saint Martins BA Fine Art 2015 students, originally uploaded to Vimeo by Rönkkö / Turner with the title "#INTRODUCTIONS". ^[2]

Spread

On May 30th, 2015, Redditor ridris submitted a post linking to "Shia LaBeouf delivers the most intense motivational speech of all-time" to the /r/videos ^[3] subreddit, which gained more than 3,700 upvotes in two days.

After the upload, many users began creating parody videos. YouTube user Michael McNeff uploaded "Shia LaBeouf TED Talk" (below, left) on May 30th, 2015, and within two days the video had more than 1 million views.

Another remix, titled "Damn It Shia" (below, right) and uploaded on May 31st, 2015 by YouTube user millerwa4 has over 775,000 views in one day.

On July 14, 2015, the official YouTube account for Sonic the Hedgehog uploaded a parody remix placing Shia LaBeouf in a scene from the game Sonic Generations (shown below). The satirical nature of the video is keeping in trend with the company's other social media accounts, most notably their official Twitter account, Sonic_Hedgehog.

Various Examples

External References