[SIT tone]
[Operator] I'm sorry, Captain Disillusion is not available. Please hold for...
[Mr. Flare] Mr. Flare, suckers!
Conception: it's messy and unpleasant for everyone involved.
Unless it's immaculate.
But even then, you're not immune to disasters. Here's a statue of the Virgin Mary being carried away by a flood!
[person speaking]
Only in Venice...
Or is it?!
Why don't we take two minutes out of our busy day to find the original source of this video?
What's this? Some sort of funny name? For what?
A comedy group! From Spain..?
Hey there's nothing funny about suppositories, El Supositorio.
I gotta take a suppository of electrons once every sixtieth of a second or I'll die!
And what's this tag on their initial tweet? Tenerife!? Isn't that one of the Canary Islands?
And isn't this actually the Virgin of Candelaria?
The patron saint of the Canary Islands?
How do we get Venice? It's almost as if someone saw this video,
reposted it as their own, adding the first thing that came to their head as context,
and within a day, that was shared by everyone as fact,
because that's the Internet!
But like Venice, Tenerife has been getting flooded lately.
BBC news has the story.
[BBC reporter] Some astonishing images, a flash flood in Canary Islands.
Local media say five people died after two and a half hours of heavy rain
on the island of Tenerife and La Gomera.
[Mr. Flare] Five people dying is terrible... Except it didn't happen.
Not in the flood of 2014,
Or 2017 or 2018!
It's a story from 2002 that keeps getting recycled with the news of each new flood.
Come on, details matter, Lego!
Speaking of which, that shot looks familiar...
So, the Virgin Mary was actually a box of garbage!
A devious hoax perpetrated by the comedic geniuses of El Supositorio.
Whose geriatric imaginations were probably inspired by this footage of a flooded church in Tenerife's capital, Santa Cruz.
Seriously, someone should, like, do something about this issue of global rising sea levels.
Hello? How do you guys deal with it in Santa Cruz, California?
[Garret Ginner] Okay, guys so what we're gonna do is go through the blocked off sides with a Prius,
getting towed, with full clothes on, on a boogie board.
[screaming and laughing and music]
[Ben] Hey, we should go down on these side streets. They're way worse.
[music]
[Garret] Issac's knee took a bit of a beating. Ohh
Your cap fell off in one of the puddles.
Was your check engine light on before this?
Nah.
Someone had one job of putting a sign up...
All right, Cam, ready to get wet?
[Cam] Hell yeah!
[music and shouting]
I am having the time of my life out here.
Everyone's all concerned because it's flooded.
This is fun, I'm having a good time.
[Mr. Flare] Okay so we're doomed. But now that we're sure the Virgin Mary clip is fake,
we can get self-righteous about how poorly it's done.
The foreground stuff has sloppy rotoscoping,
the statue isn't reflected in the cars,
and most importantly, it's just a flat picture tacked on to the trash bin with a simple one-point track!
It doesn't interact with the 3D perspective of the shot,
like a Snapchat dog filter on a ghost.
Let's see if *we* can do better...
Instead of picking one point on the bin,
let's track as many features on it as we can for as much of the shot as possible.
Through a low resolution, obstructions, motion blur, and blended frames.
I don't care if you have to hand-animate them through pure guesswork,
keep going!
You might miss a few news cycles, but if you make it to the end,
congratulations! We're halfway done.
Now let's track everything *but* the trash bin to recreate the camera pan.
Then, we ask the computer to analyze the motion of all the points against each other,
And guess what? It has to do what we ask.
It's designed to serve us unquestioningly. Hahahaha!
Artificial intelligence my a--!
And voilé: we've extrapajulated the real 3D motion of the box.
...more or less.
Now we can stick anything we want in its place.
Staying on theme of improving things, let's swap the moldy old photo of the Virgin Mary statue,
for a cool, textured 3D model statue of the Buddha.
Then we just match the lighting, place some 3D dummies to simulate the reflections of close passing objects,
add windshield reflections, and rotoscope the foreground,
to end up with a much more believable result.
Right?
Well, I think so.
What do you know anyway? You're not big on details...
You haven't even noticed that I've been gone for TWO YEARS!
Ever since Captain Disillusion accidentally smashed my lamp into the wall,
and had to replace it with a newfangled LED one, which doesn't cause a lens flare
I don't have a body.
I'm a virtual spirit, existing only in the no-man's land of your sick imagination.
But, that's okay. Change is a part of life.
Someday I might, you know, reincarnate into another vessel.
Something better, or at least something different.
Something that has yet to be conceived...
[Dedicated to Mr. Flare] [2007 - 2017 RIP]
(Subtitles by @SWinxyTheCat)