Why the Samsung "Extreme Sheep LED Art" Video is Fake
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 10:03AM in Entertainment Technology, Interesting Show, Off Topic, Weather by John Huntington No doubt you are one of the four million people (as of today) who has seen this video:
It's apparently a viral advertisement by Samsung for their LED TV line, and their tactics were obviously successful since so many people are forwarding this thing around (and I just used their name myself!). I've been amazed at how many people think that some rag tag group of shepherds in Wales were behind this video, and actually arranged sheep on a hillside to create all these amazing patterns, and Googling around I didn't see that anyone had broken it down, so I thought I'd write this up.
Besides the obvious clues ("BaaaStuds" has posted exactly one you tube video, it's sponsored by Samsung, it has very high production values, it has the professionally done "amateur" look, etc etc), there's one key piece of evidence for me. Take a look at the video at 0:31. This is where they supposedly recreate a large graphic of a moving sheep on the hillside by arranging the sheep like individual pixels. The jerky motion immediately looked fake to me, but OK, I thought, give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they really did it but did it as a time lapse using stop motion. But take another look at the video from 0:31-0:46, but this time watch the clouds.
There's a little tiny movement in the clouds at the start, but from then on the whole sky is virtually stationary. I've never been to Wales, but everywhere else on the earth that I've ever been, clouds are rarely stationary for any period of time (and it appears that this is the same situation in Wales, if that's where they shot it: here's a time lapse of moving clouds over Wales ). During all that time that the Baaa Studs are supposedly arranging the sheep on the hillside, the clouds should have at least moved a little bit. And at the very least, the clouds should changed their rate of movement when the frame rate is obviously accelerated around 0:43.
Secondly, to get all that LED animation done, they would have to shoot some (relatively) pretty long exposure times, and you should see the clouds or planets or the moon or something in there, even at night. And with moving sheep, at least some "pixels" should have been streaked or blurry.
I love time lapses and shoot a lot of them, like the one below. Here you can see clouds moving in day and at night. Obviously, these clouds are over NYC so there is a lot more light pollution but nonetheless you should see something (or a planet, stars, etc in that sheep video).
John Huntington
Aha Jake Pinholster found this article from the Telegraph UK that I missed in my Google search. It says, in part:
The creators of the video, for TV makers Samsung, revealed that they recruited Welsh national sheep herding champion Gerry Lewis, and a team of Welsh sheep herders to guide the flocks into position.
However they admitted computer trickery had been used.
Matt Smith, the co-founder of ad agency The Viral Factory said: "The people on camera are real farmers and they were really controlling the sheepdogs. Rather than trying to fake it all we did it for real.
"The sheep herding bit is straight up – no trickery but there is a fair amount of computer trickery and post production work.
"We thought the Mona Lisa was the big wink to people – once they saw that we thought they would realise it was not all real.
"But we have been quite surprised that there is still a debate about whether it is all real and people have been coming up with various theories."
This all pretty much is in line with my thoughts about it, which I didn't totally cover in my quick post this morning. I agree especially about the Mona Lisa part, that was so obviously fake that I didn't even bother addressing it.
John Huntington
Be sure and look at the comments on this entry, "Some Guy in Nevada" has done some excellent work on this!
John Huntington
Not all of these viral videos are fake--I posted an entry on the Honda Insight "LED" video here.
John Huntington
Mark Fortgang sent me more details on the shoot here.
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Reader Comments (4)
Interesting observation, John.
Overall, I agree with the fake-ness of the "walking sheep" section. However, I'm going to toss some "Devil's Advocate" stuff here. You mentioned the professional production values. If I were an advert guy, which I'm not, I would use photoshop/premier to paste in a motionless sky to keep people's attention on the sheep, even if the walking sheep was real. Imagine how chaotic and distracting the clouds would be. I've been to Wales several times, and the clouds and weather are impressive.
The reasons I think that the walking sheep is a photoshop job are:
1) the action at 42:07 (seconds:frame) to 43:24. If you have Premier, import the video and look at the junction of the "hind legs" and the body. You can see some extra sheep "pixels" magically materializing out of the body and passing unhindered through the bodies of their fellow sheep.
2) I don't see any dogs other than two non-engaged dogs up at the top outer corners next to shepherds.
3) The most complex activity is the movement of the legs. Why are there no shepherds down there supervising the action? There should be a bunch of dogs and sheperds managing the leg action.
4) The shepherds are walking in stop-motion, but following cohesive paths. That many sheep doing something complex, and you're gonna get runners. There should have been breakaway dots all over the place, especially at the legs, along with shepherds and dogs following more random paths.
My guess, based on the fact that the shepherds are concentrated around the body of the sheep is that they got the black and green-spot sheep for the head and body arranged, and they marched the flock as one across the hillside. Easy enough with good dogs. They then added the legs in the studio.
The most realistic thing in there would be the Pong game. Having watched enough sheepdog trials, it's impressive how the sheep, dog, and shepherd work together. Given enough rehearsals before filming, and it's feasible. Indeed, there's a sheep bolting from the "ball" at 1:12, which I would expect. The only thing that makes me itch is that it's shot at dusk. Shouldn't the ambient light be getting darker? If the exposure is adjusted to accommodate fading ambient light, shoudn't there be a change in detail/exposure of the sheep?
The mona lisa is definitely faked. There are repeating sheep, and identical sheep from frame to frame suddenly change color. A little paint bucket action there.
I'd like to disagree with the original post. While it may still yet be fake, the reason you gave, being the clouds not moving, is bad, as when you watch the clouds, they actually do move, but very slightly. If you pause the video and move the slider back and forth a few seconds at a time, you can see the clouds actually moving slightly to the right.
Please see "Some Guy"'s thougtful comment, plus the followup link I just posted. I did see and consider the slight cloud movement you saw, but I considered instead the amount of time it would have taken to do that as a real time lapse. I would guess several hours to set up all those animals, and it's definitely likely that the clouds would have moved way farther than that.
Thanks for reading and posting!
OK...I was curious about the clouds. I took the video of the sheep crossing the hillside, and I converted each frame into a 256-color, pixellated gif, my theory being that motion is much more evident if fewer pixels are changing color with a much-more-limited palette. What's interesting is that the initial shot of the head flock and the body flock shows some cloud motion, but once the head and body are together, the motion is much less evident--even absent. So...I haven't decided about the clouds yet. Any motion I noticed in my deconstruction could be accounted to JPG edge-compression artifact shifting with each frame.
I then noticed that the disembodied black head has no shepherds around it. Faked.
THEN...in a fit of geekish overachievement, I overlaid a drawing layer over the video and traced the paths of the shepherds in the initial "separate flocks" section and the "walking sheep" section then overlapped the two tracing layers. Identical paths for each section. The only thing real about this video are a) the cameo shots and b) the initial white flock walking across the hill. Anything showing black sheep is fake.
I was going to do a time-distance analysis of the shepherds walking across the hillside and extrapolate that to an estimate of how much cloud movement there should have been based on the average walking speed of a shepherd versus the average upper wind speed in the South Valleys in Wales...and then I had an epiphany of "WTF am I doing this for?!?" so I turned off the computer and went to bed.
John's right; it's not only fake, it's massively faked. Although I still think it's a fun video, and it would have been awesome had been real.