These 10,000 Falling iPhones Are A Friendly Reminder That Fake Videos Are Getting Crazy Real

Ah. Remember the good ol’ days of the Internet? When the only fakes we had to worry about were the images and the people? Video was like a safe haven. Sure, there’d be some shakycam footage of a dude in a bigfoot costume every once in a while — but if something looked real and moved at a decent framerate, you could assume it was legit.

As this video so kindly reminds us, those days are long over.

I mean, look at that. While some things start to seem a bit “off” in the second or third viewing, there’s some ridiculous camera tracking, lighting, and compositing work at play here. There are also a bunch of tiny but really impressive details in there — note the little bounces from some of the devices after they fall (and how the bounce differs on the carpet versus the tile), and the scattering of the last iPhones to fall at the end of the video.

And just in case you’re starting to think that these guys maybe, just maaaaybe managed to actually track down 10,000 iPhones (hey, that’s only seven million dollars worth!): this video was made by AatmaStudio, the same folks who made that iPhone 5 concept video (the one with the crazy laser keyboard and holograms) that spread around like mad a few years ago, eventually making its way into a Fox 5 New York segment that portrayed it as the real iPhone 5. They admit their trickery right in the video’s description, but that hasn’t stopped a few intense debates from breaking out in their comments.

As for a domino video that probably isn’t fake: