Fact Check: Viral video showing an octopus destroying a car makes a FALSE claim that it was taken during flooding in New York City
In the last week of September 2023, heavy rains led to the flooding of several parts in New York City. The streets of the city were flooded.
Octopus
In the last week of September 2023, heavy rains led to the flooding of several parts in New York City. The streets of the city were flooded. Meanwhile, a video of a huge octopus crawling onto a car and crushing it has gone viral on social media with the claim that it took place in a car parking lot in New York city because of the recent flash flooding.
The video shows a huge octopus crawling into a car parking area, climbing onto a large white car, and crushing the windshield with its tentacles.
The video is in circulation with the caption “#BREAKING: State of Emergency declared in New York City due to Mass flooding. Be careful where you park your car.”
Fact Check:
The claim is False.
When observed the video carefully, we found that the license plates on the cars were not in English.
Here are the screenshots from the video which show one car number in Arabic, when translated states “Qatar 9807”. The white SUV’s license plate said ‘Qatar @ghost3dee’. And the watermark on the video also states @ghost3dee.
When we searched for ghost3dee, we found an Instagram account by the name Alex Z. The bio says that he is a CG Generalist in Qatar.
The video was first shared on this Instagram account with the caption: “When you park like a jackass, a giant alien octopus comes and crushes your car. Another Churro sim that I’ve been putting on the back burner for a while combines several solvers and techniques, including nested point deforms, fake rbd vellum tricks, and a massive exploitation of vellum constraints. Tet fiber constraints were used to compress tentacles and crush the proxy soft body car that hinges and shakes on 4 static wheels. Again, I didn’t use a single keyframe in the entire scene and kept everything procedural. I’ve learned a lot about sim checkpoints to help avoid resimming the entire timeline just for a small change that needs to happen late in the sim. Although some parts of the sim were challenging, the most time was spent on the compositing stage. I lost faith in AE for the past few years and did most of the stuff in Nuke, which is a major change in my personal pipeline. AE started to remind me of Max with countless bloated plugins upon plugins that make the software crash because of incompatibilities when used together.
Sound by - @audioflag Rendered on farms from - @snaprenderfarm”
The post states that the video was rendered using snaprender.farm. Snap Renderfarm provides designers, architects, animators, motion designers, and anyone involved with 3D graphics with a simple and fast way to get a finished image. Our mission is to give 3D artists the opportunity to focus their energies on creativity, instead of waiting for a long time to render a 3D scene.
We also found that the video was shared on the YouTube channel @ghost3dee by the same artist.
The account has many more computer-generated videos.
Therefore, the claim that the viral video showing an octopus climbing up a car and destroying it during the recent mass flooding in New York City is false. The video is a CGI generated by an artist named Alex Z.