That viral video of a 'shark in the swimming pool' from 3 weeks ago still bugs me

I was scrolling through my feed last Thursday and saw this grainy clip that supposedly showed a shark fin circling a backyard pool in Phoenix. Looked fake to me right away because the fin shadows didn't match the sunlight angle, plus the water looked too still. I dug into it for like 20 minutes and found the original was a CGI test from a college student in California posted back in 2022. Someone just reuploaded it with a fake location and it got 2 million shares. Has anyone else tried tracking down the original source on these repurposed hoax videos?

3 comments

3 Comments

emmaking6d ago

Read an article on Snopes last month about this exact thing. They tracked over 12 different repurposed shark hoax videos from a single original CGI reel. The giveaway on most is the water physics - real pools have different ripples than what those renders show. Somebody is definitely making money off these reshares with fake location tags.

the_alex6d ago

What is it about shark videos that makes people lose all common sense though? @emmaking hit the nail on the head about those water physics, that is usually the dead giveaway. People see what they want to see, I swear. Like your buddy Mike, he was dead set on that thing being real and now he can't back down. Funny how pride works, huh.

emery106d ago

My buddy Mike actually fell for one of those fake shark videos last summer, the one where somebody spliced a Great White into a wave pool at a water park. He spent a whole afternoon convincing our friend group we shouldn't go to Hurricane Harbor that weekend because it was "unsafe." I had to pull up the original VFX breakdown on YouTube from a guy named Trevor Chen who did it for his motion graphics final. The funny part is Mike still won't admit he was wrong, he just changes the subject whenever I bring up sharks now.