Koi UFO Video 080: "UFO Over Santa Clarita" (Meni Tsirbas and Gnomon School)
[DEBUNKED] Koi UFO Video 080 appears to show someone driving on a road through a desert when a UFO flies over the car and towards some power lines before a large UFO mothership suddenly appears and then disappears.
One copy of the video on Youtube has over 1.5 million views as at October 2014.
In fact, as discussed below, the video was a hoax directed by Canadian visual effects artists Aristomenis Tsirbas ("Meni Tsirbas") of MeniThings Productions in partnership with the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. Meni was responsible for direction, animation and lighting. Gnomon School students were assigned concept design, modeling and texturing. All the elements of the video are CGI ("Computer Generated Imagery"), including the landscape, sky, car and power-lines.
Sections below:
2. Stories and claims relating to this video
3. The real background to this video
4. Relevant online discussions
1. The relevant video
Koi UFO Video 080 appears to show someone driving on a road through a desert when a UFO flies over the car and towards some power lines before a large UFO mothership suddenly appears and then disappears.
Screen shots from the video are included below for ease of identification:
2. Stories and claims relating to this video
The video was originally uploaded to Youtube in October 2012 by MeniThings Productions.
The original caption for this video claimed the following:
"Shot October 2012 while driving through Santa Clarita. There were two crafts. After sighting the first I stopped the car and ran into a field for a better look. What happened next was unbelievable".
One copy of the video on Youtube has over 1.5 million views as at October 2014.
3. The real background to this video
In fact, as discussed below, the video was a hoax directed by Aristomenis Tsirbas ("Meni Tsirbas") of MeniThings Productions in partnership with the Gnomon School of Visual Effects.
Meni Tsirbas was responsible for direction, animation and lighting. Gnomon School students were assigned concept design, modeling and texturing.
All the elements of the video are CGI ("Computer Generated Imagery"), including the landscape, sky, car and power-lines.
Meni Tsirbas' entry on the IMDB website indicates that he acted as a digital artist on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Enterprise, various movies (including Hellboy and Titanic) and other projects.
On 17 February 2013, Meni Tsirbas uploaded a further video to Youtube. This video was entitled "UFO Over Santa Clarita VFX Breakdown" and had a caption which stated "A behind-the-scenes look at the viral video "UFO Over Santa Clarita". While most assumed that the UFO's must CGI while everything else was live action footage, in reality everything is computer generated". This video showed the 3d models used for the various elements of the "UFO" video and included extensive credits listing those involved in the creation of the Santa Claritia UFO video.
A few screen-shots from the "breakdown" video published by Meni Tsirbas are included below.
The WPTV website published an article in February 2013 which reported that Meni Tsirbas had admitted that the viral video was a fake.
The "Wired" website published an article in July 2013 about this video, which included an interview with Meni Tsirbas about his creation of the video. That article stated that the Santa Clarita UFO video was a "painstakingly crafted joke" by Meni Tsirbas, and that "Tsirbas and his team spent about four months mimicking the look of an accidental extraterrestrial encounter captured on a smartphone". Tsirbas told Wired that “The point of the video was to prove that CGI can look natural and convincing”.
Tsirbas also told Wired that “Everybody assumes the background and car are real, and that the UFOs are probably fake, especially the over-the-top mothership at the end. The general reaction is disbelief, so I usually have to prove it by showing a wireframe of the entire shot to prove that nothing is real". Making the photorealistic car and desert environment was "even more difficult than crafting the alien crafts, and took the lion’s share of effort...".
One of the subsequent viral CGI videos produced by Meni Tsirbas' is entitled "Flying Car - Leaked Video".
4. Relevant online discussions
The most extensive relevant discussions online are in the comments sections for the above videos.
Amusingly, most of the comments on the video explaining how the hoax was created simply give the comment "fake" without showing any recognition that the video they are commenting upon was about how the original video was faked. Some of the comments (seriously or othewise) maintain that the original video was genuine.
