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Comment by postfuturist | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring impossible feats of physics, the video is fake. There is a comment on the first Wired article which points out incontrovertible evidence of poorly done compositing around the 20 second mark with the guy on the left running "through" the wingtip without bumping it.

Uncut, raw video from the side of complete take-off and landing (since there is supposedly someone taking video from the side) would be enough to prove its real. Too bad this isn't real.

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That 20 second mark is pretty damning - the shadow cast on the wing by the guy on the left is visible before his body is in front of the wing.

Thanks for crushing my dreams.

There's a few frames around 20 second mark that look strange - here's one where the guy seems ready to run through the left tip, his left thigh is behind the wing, and his left foot seems to be in front: http://imgur.com/riyjn

Next frame he appears in front of the wing entirely. I don't know - does post processing software do weird things that cause visual artifacts?

My pleasure. I worked on the visual effects team for a movie with a _lot_ of compositing. This is cut-rate stuff. Can you imagine what sort of things we will believe if someone were doing this sort of fakery with a real budget?

Exactly - I read the Wired article yesterday and didn't even think to second-guess it even though in general I'm something of a skeptic. I just marveled at how clever and technologically advanced humans have become.

Ironically, this is a demonstration of how clever and technologically advanced we are, but not in the way I originally thought!

There is nothing strange going on around the 20 second mark. The sun is very low and the wing is almost aligned to the position of the sun. You can also see the left tip is bended upwards, so the guy is clearly running around that tip. But because the lens is zoomed in it's a little hard to see the actual depth.

His "shadow" (CG, no doubt) is on the front of the wing, while he is still "behind" the wing.

http://imgur.com/NqgTL

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