Transcription

Greetings children, Captain Disillusioned here. Preambles are all well and good, but sometimes you just want to get to debunking a video. So let's start with a… Huh. Show me the topic videos archive. Transporting archive to room. Wait, I just want to see a list! Fine, let's just see what we've got. Hmm. Okay. What the? Oh man, is there really nothing left? Get it out of here. You! The one that got away. Ah, look at what they've done to you with all the endless reposts. There. This video is very special. It's a viral ad of world class ball kicker David Beckham kicking three balls perfectly into three distant trash cans in one continuous shot. And it might just be the last and most important of the golden age fake viral videos. You see, things used to be simple. Marketing divisions of huge brands would pay tons of money to traditional ad agencies who'd subcontract special new viral marketing consultants, then find a couple of grungy art school grads and hire them to produce an attention-grabbing, if extremely basic, hoax video to subliminally promote the brand. And content like that would win awards at Cannes! Fast forward to today, and the prestige has faded. Brands and celebs hire indie artists directly on the cheap to churn out quirky trick videos in the hopes one randomly goes viral. And these artists have to grind daily, and credit their own Instagram handle and their own Instagram posts. But there was a magical time in the middle, right around the 2010s, when viral ads were already common but were still produced by major ad agencies with proper budgets. That's when a killer formula was developed. Sports! Boxing, baseball, tennis, football, non-American football, any mainstream sports fan could stumble into a candid behind-the-scenes video of their favorite athlete casually performing a superhuman feat in their downtime. A premise so appealing, it persists to this day. That Instagram guy from before? He created this Tom Brady one. And this one of Steph Curry making five consecutive baskets from across the court during practice just for fun. Today, though, even when a video isn't debunked by an unconventionally handsome hero, the public is just collectively wiser. In this particular area, not in general. We're, dare I say, more skeptical about what we see. When the Steph Curry video dented the internet for a couple of days, some believed that the greatest shooter in NBA history could make all five shots, but there were plenty of people doubting and analyzing the video. Eventually, the team felt enough social media pressure to clarify that the stunt was faked. Curry himself was kind of cornered into admitting it. It's an ultimate compliment to probably be amazed by it, but not think it's outlandish that it could be real. But we had some fun with it. I did make two of them, though, just in case anybody was wondering. That's pretty interesting. If Curry could make two out of those five shots, maybe Beckham could have made two or all three of the kicks in his video. Maybe that's why there was much less doubt from the public. Then again, scoring free throws isn't as far-fetched as kicking balls into trash cans at different distances across a windy beach. But the LA Galaxy never had to issue a clarifying statement. Heck, Beckham himself assured a reporter from the Toronto Star that this statistically improbable stunt was 100% real. The guy potentially lied. To a Canadian. And that's why it's so important that we set aside the pressing issues with emerging technologies everyone's concerned about and figure out the truth behind this 12-year-old viral ad, once and for all. Big yikes, Grandpa. That's a lot of talking for no sponsorships. Hey, cool incandescent backlight. Did you loot that in the big war? Mr. Flair, it's been a while. I was just about to start the debunk. Um, no one cares. And the name's Flair Bottom Jay. What's the J stand for? Jeans, d***. It's my brand new secret streamer account, which y'all can access by hitting subscribe under this video. Become my Flair Power Bottoms. Do not do that. People don't want to hear your brainy moralizing CD. They just want to see a guy who looks like he has it all but acts like he doesn't clown on a video he's watching. Squirt aside and let me show you how it's done. All right, let's take a look at this. That's cool, but it's not that impressive, dude. Not enough to go, damn. David, you think you can get that trash can over there? Yes. Really? How about all three of them? It's even easy. Even easy? Wait, what do you mean? What do you mean by that? How is doing a hard thing three times easier than doing it one time? Okay. Here's two more. Whoa. Hold up. The dude just has two more balls with him? Like, what was happening? He waddled up to him holding two soccer balls under his arms like, hey, David, can you hit that trash can? Yeah. How about all three of the trash cans that my friend happens to have in his camera frame right now that neither you or I know about? Even easier. Well, hey, I happen to have two additional soccer balls which, combined with yours, serve this exact spontaneous situation we find ourselves in. He's excited. A little too excited. Oh, man. This is not happening. Oh, audio edit alert. Y'all heard that? They had the guy ad-libbing in post, and in one take, he said, this is getting out of hand, which doesn't make any sense. So they fade it out and fade in a different take where he's saying, this is not happening, which also doesn't make any sense. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Or that. Like, why is he saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no? Is he not a fan of this guy? Does he not want him to make the shot? Who is this again? Famous soccer player? Help me, chat. David Backham. Thank you, Jizzus38. I'm sorry. Is that what you say when you're initiating a high five? Give me some of that? That's not a thing, right? Chat, am I crazy? I'm pretty sure if I walked up to David Backham with two balls and said, David, give me some of that, he would not high five me. And he might even tell me. Enough. That is not what we do here. We analyze if a thing is fake as objectively as possible, and then let the children decide whether to admire or resent the person who made it. What am I doing? What have I been doing this whole time? Look, I realize that David Beckham is a legend and has many dedicated fans, so I'm not going to go out of my way to call out every fishy-looking pixel. I'll just present my observations. Because the video is actually done pretty well. Unlike some bargain bin hoaxes of today that add fake camera shake or simulate movement with a panorama, in this video, the messy camera work is real. There are clear shifts in perspective, and in 2011, they couldn't exactly shoot in 6K to crop in for such a clean image after the zooms. If a ball didn't make it into a trash can, they had to make alterations in the authentically shaky footage. Usually, this is done by temporarily stabilizing the shot, adding the fake stuff in, then bringing the shake back. But on motion this extreme, it's not easy. Point tracking is out of the question. You could try an intelligent warp stabilizer, as my little nephew Jepson Robsters did back when he was going through a teenage identity crisis, but even that doesn't lock things down enough to let us reliably judge anything. The only way to do this right is to first solve the 3D motion of the camera. It takes a lot of supervised tracking on such low-res footage, but if done right, in addition to recreating the movement, we can even estimate the field of view change during the zoom. Now that we know where the eyeball observing the scene was at every moment, we can reverse the process, projecting the scene back onto a rough model of the environment, and finally step outside the camera view to reconstruct a truly static vantage point. With a few more assumptions and educated guesses, it might be possible to figure out real-world measurements of things. Judging by the year, the steady white balance, the 23.976 frame rate, the limited zoom range, and extreme exposure drop during it, we can assume this was shot on a photo lens with a DSLR, something like a Canon 5D, or maybe a 7D, which seems to jive with this focal length estimate. It's been rumored that David Beckham is around 6 feet tall, so if I put a box of that height on the virtual ground and slide it to where he seems to be, I get his approximate distance from the camera. Now, an association football... ball... is supposed to have a circumference of about 69 nice centimeters. So if I slide a sphere of that size on the ground to where the ball is supposed to be, it sorta checks out. Then I can guesstimate where the ball ends up by moving it to match the apparent distance and position at the end. It's hard to see at such low res. Just in case, I'll also approximate the size of the trash cans, which tend to be around 3 feet tall, and place one there too. Based on all that, the first ball seems to have been kicked a distance of about 55 meters. Why does that matter? I'll demonstrate using my intern, Alan. Hello. Don't... don't talk for this. Like David Beckham, Alan is rumored to be 6 feet tall. His natural gait is about 2 and a half feet long. Oops, wrong button. Let's film at the exact same frame rate as the Beckham video, and have Alan clap his hands. Now let's have him move about 55 meters away by walking 72 steps. Go! Now, clap your hands again. Clap! Interesting. In our footage, the sound of the nearby clap is in sync with the frame rate happens, but the sound of the far away clap is delayed noticeably. Because the speed of sound through air is kind of slow, we hear it four whole frames later. In the Beckham video, if we make sure the sound of the kick also lines up, then the sound of the first trash can hit, happens three frames later. Fine. Now the next trash can is slightly farther. The kick still lines up. The hit... is delayed only two frames. Hmm. The third kick lines up. The third and farthest hit... isn't delayed at all. I'm just saying. No hate. There could be a reasonable explanation. Maybe the speed of sound is very fast that day. Let's just see what we can figure out on the visual side. We better not rely on the manual lineup of 3D objects to analyze anything subtle. There's too much guesswork. What can we observe strictly in the footage itself? Besides the weird boiling background during the second kick, and a strange absence of a sand puff during the third. Remember, our stabilization is close to perfect, so anything that didn't move in real life doesn't, but things that did move should at least seem like they obey the laws of physics. So without adding any misleading graphics, let's simply overlay each frame of the first ball flying to plot its arc. Hmm. It looks fine up to here, then goes a little wobbly. See, that's why we stabilize first to add fake elements rather than try to matchmove them into shaky footage. What might look passable in motion doesn't quite cut it in the unforgiving static view. On the second one, the sudden change in direction is even more clear. I mean, Jeremiah Robster was probably right all those years ago. The real kick must have gone so wrong they had to replace the ball early, leaving behind this shifting cloned background and weird changes in motion blur. It even kinda looks like maybe they replaced the ball just before the kick. But even if we charitably dismiss all of this as compression artifacts, that still looks a heck of a lot like a handoff to a CG ball. And with the third one, we get to experience Beckham's never-before-seen curved-then-uncurved kick. Ignoring the strange direction of the motion blur caused by the sudden zoom, the ball leaves frame veering off to the left, then descends from above. He had this move in his pocket the whole time, He had this move in his pocket the whole time, and he didn't use it against the New York Red Bulls in 2007, resulting in the greatest loss of his first Major League Soccer outing? He must have had a good reason. Hey, wait a minute. Soccer balls are pretty bouncy, right? The way they ricochet off the crossbar and people's heads? You'd think that a ball landing at such high velocity would either bounce right out or work off the momentum by bouncing around inside and come up a bit later. These balls pop out immediately, then seem to pull back in the opposite direction. It's almost as if someone tossed the ball into the can just to film a bounce as an element, but couldn't get it to stay in, so they settled for reversing the footage. You know, that or just lazy manual animation. What? I'm just saying! And speaking of sloppiness... Let's not forget that any ball that didn't really make it into a trash can would have had to be carefully removed not just during its flight, but down on the sand for the rest of the shot, right? Well, on that second kick, whether we assume the ball was replaced early on or at the apex of the arc, it's clear that in reality it flew off to the right of its target, so it would have landed somewhere around here. It would look like a dark spot with a highlight on the right. And here, in the final seconds of the match, Beckham winds up for the penalty kick, cameraman swoops in with a zoom, the VFX artist is overworked and underpaid, frame by frame, frame by frame, are we gonna see it? BALL! An embarrassing defeat for this star player's viral video career. The millionaire heartthrob philanthropist must surely feel like a piece of... In conclusion, there's no shame in David Beckham not making any of the three impossible goals in a staged Pepsi promo, only in claiming that he did. But there's no changing the past. Unless you have the components to construct the temporal tunnel. But now I'm afraid it's time for me to go, kids. A creative weirdo in orbit around Earth is about to put all his professional eggs in the YouTube basket. Remember, love with your heart, use your head for everything else. Greetings, children. It's me, Captain Disillusion. Who the hell are you, sir? Ooh, I'm the guy who's gonna roundhouse kick you into the right career path, kid. Thanks for watching!