hello so this little video of a dog uh supposedly being rescued from an oncoming train has got kind
of popular it is a fake video and there's a number of ways we can tell it's fake and i'm going to go
through them. But you know first of all something uh that's pretty common in fake videos is this
ridiculously shaky camera i just look at it kind of wobbling all over the place like i don't know
what's supposed to be going on there. But you know the the way the reason is wobbly is the the camera
was originally probably done on a tripod so they can composite two shots and then they have to add
the wobble later and so it ends up looking like this ridiculously uh weirdly wobble sinusoidal
thing. But yeah there's other reasons we can tell it's fake and it kind of all boils down to shadows
because this is if we didn't have these shadow clues it would be fairly uh convincing but we do
and this is something another person pointed out there was let's see this guy here professor farid
did this shadow analysis showing the directions of the shadow it doesn't seem to match up with the
guy in the dog now this is actually a little hard to do because there's a a ditch there and so it's
you did you're not you're not projected onto flat ground so it's a little difficult to get exactly
the same things but there's a much simpler way of doing it actually much simpler way of showing
that it's fake now uh the first thing is if we zip back to the start we can see yeah before he does
this little cut to zoom in that there's this shadow right here which is the shadow of this
uh some lamp over here now this is a shadow here this is a shadow of a rock that's there so this
shadow isn't going to move as the sun moves this is a shadow of a lamp and as the sun moves around
this will move around so i'm just going to let's see i'll just take a little copy of that area for
now and then let's move forward now you'll see he does this little zoom in here he zooms in to
see the train coming around the bend but this actually gives him the opportunity to do a cut
if he didn't do that zoom you would see the shadow pop now if i zoom in again here you will see
that uh this shadow has moved it's moved in this direction it's moved away so this gap between
the two is bigger now i can demonstrate that by simply taking the clip i did earlier and create
a new file and paste in that clip now i'm going to go back and i'm going to go forward to where
the train is coming around the bend and i'm going to do a similar uh clip around there copy that
and paste that over the top of this now make the top layer transparent so i can line up the shadow
now we can see if i flip between these two layers the one with the man we see that the shadow is
close to this rock and the one with the train the shadow is much further away and obviously the sun
hasn't moved that much in a few seconds so this is two separate shots and that in itself kind
of debunks it but we may as well keep going and look at what else is going on here another thing
that's very hard to do with shadows is if you have something casting a shadow then something
else comes along and obscures that object and the shadow behind it now you've got two shadows
and if you're trying to composite the actual guy in you've got to kind of remove his shadow
and this doesn't happen here you'll see that when when we get close when the train gets close to him
you see he's lying down here and he kind of lifts up his head and you see a shadow underneath so you
see this little shadow here of his head as you go up problem is that shadow should not exist
because what we have here is a train obscuring everything now if something's casting a shadow and
we move something in front of it that obscures the shadow like here i'm moving this uh this
cardboard here you'll see there is no shadow under this this model's head so that's yet another way
that we can see that there is there's nothing else going on you can also see that in this
scene uh we have this shadow here over what looks like a tree or something but when the train comes
along it's still there you can see the edge of that shadow there which again shouldn't be there
so we shouldn't have any shadow and i duplicate that here with the shadow of a little table
when the card comes along no shadow is visible whatsoever no shadow visible here so again that
shows that it's uh not actually possible now an interesting thing with this particular setup here
i cut this notch in to simulate the gap between the train cars and you'll see when it goes over
the guy's head right here you will see that the line does not cut through his head because
his head is in a different position in fact it comes over a little bit later and you see that
uh in this if you look at this bush over here you kind of see a similar type of effect you see the
uh line there but the the bit of the bush that's illuminated pops into at a different angle and
you see this uh throughout the the background here you see there's gonna bits of grass pop in and out
then when it comes to his head you'll see that the line actually goes straight through his head
which it shouldn't actually do it should actually be kind of
on one side or the other depending on the angle of the sun and again you can see this shadow here
and the shadow is still there so it's fake about uh four different ways
it's a a reasonably well done video though another thing you can notice actually is
that when you zoom into this area here when the train's kind of getting close you notice
everything around here get all kind of fuzzy and blurry and kind of dark before the train
even gets there and i think that's just because they had to kind of blur things out because there
was so much going on shadows are tricky you want to shoot these these fake things on an overcast
day but unfortunately it's in full sun so we can very easily see that this is in fact fake