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Did the sight of a man apparently soaring through the air on bird-like wings fill you with a childlike sense of wonder? Well, we hate to tell you this, but it's a hoax. Gizmodo suspected as much, so it asked the guys at Industrial Light and Magic to take a look. The crappy video quality immediately raised the ILM team's suspicions, as did the dodgy physics, and the surreal steadiness of the supposed head camera. After obsessively poring over the video for a while, they found some tell-tale proof.
In the video, a black spot suddenly appears on one wing right after takeoff, after the camera conveniently pans away. "The wing is CG. You can tell because the model they used didn't have perfect textures," a technical director explains. "It's a pretty good fake, but it's absolutely a fake." (Sam Biddle's post at Gizmodo shows a breakdown of the video in question.) Elsewhere, they noticed a man casting a clearly computer-generated shadow on the wing—it even "does a moon-walk/shuffle" without him. Another CGI company noticed that in another video, the team shows off its design in a program usually used by CG artists, not engineers.
