MONTREAL – We now know the video of a Golden Eagle snatching a baby in Montreal, Canada that went viral on the internet Wednesday was indeed fake.
The video, which was uploaded to YouTube Tuesday and has 5 million views, was created by a group of design students at centre NAD– a 3D Animation and design school in Montreal.
According to a statement on the school’s website, the video was created by Normand Archambault, Loïc Mireault and Félix Marquis-Poulin who are students in a and digital design class.
“Both the eagle and the kid were created in 3D Animation and integrated into the film afterwards,” said school spokesman Claude Arsenault.
The video appears to catch an amazing slow motion shot of the Golden Eagle spreading its vast wingspan, swooping in and lifting a toddler off the ground. The eagle drops the youngster only after coming to a realization that the human is too heavy to lift.
Still in shock, the toddler is seen crying after the attempted lift off
“We brainstormed some ideas of what is viral online,” Archambauld told the Canadian news organization CBC. “Everything that is animal related and baby related are super popular so we tried to bring both together and make something extraordinary that wouldn’t happen every day.”
He said it took about 400 hours to make the video.
The school grades the project on the amount of views each video receives. Ones that have over 100,000 views automatically get a perfect score.
This is not the school’s first viral fake video. Last year a student project video of a
also went viral.
