Now I really have seen everything.

 

The videos description;

Since the dawn of time, man has battled the forces of gravity. We've built gliders, wings and contraptions of all sorts. In the end, all it took was a simple giant water slide down the side of a mountain.

 

http://www.todaysbigthing.com/2009/08/05

Holy crap.

AMAZING accuracy

Some videos like that you can feel pretty confident were done in one take.

 

I have no idea how the landing worked out with such a small pool and all the lateral speed. Very impressive though.

No possible way that's real. Not unless this is take #50, and all prior trials are now in the morgue. I suspect everything from when he disappears in the curve of the ramp to when he emerges from the pool is CGI.

No possible way that's real. Not unless this is take #50, and all prior trials are now in the morgue. I suspect everything from when he disappears in the curve of the ramp to when he emerges from the pool is CGI.

 

Jealous much?

It's a viral ad for Microsoft, I wonder if this will crop up on Mythbusters. I seem to remember they covered the Saatchi and Saatchi ad (surfing via dynamite in a river.) But yeah, it's fake.

Thanks for the confirmation snail.

 

I must admit I was suspicious. While extremely cool, I was thinking along the same lines as Mokele.

 

Done like a well performed magic trick. I'll bet that 5 minutes after seeing the vid, 75% of people would swear that the flier had never left their sight.

Cool video!

 

Even if you try it 50 times... a human body doesn't always have the same friction going down a slide... and no way that you can have the same speed at the end of the slide twice in a row (unless you're just lucky).

 

And therefore, the landing is rather unpredictable.

 

If you have ever gone down a water slide, you know that you go (much) faster when you have very little contact with the slide itself (touching the slide only with your elbows and heels for example). And to miss that little pool, you only need a very small difference in your final velocity.

 

If you have a special sledge to sit in, on a track... then perhaps the jump can be repeated. But just an ordinary human body in a wetsuit (why the wetsuit?) cannot go down twice the same way.

http://www.mach-es-machbar.de/english/making-off.php5

Yes, this was created by compositing multiple takes, one of which included a dummy.

(why the wetsuit?)

 

 

it saves them collecting the parts..

 

just in case...

 

as for moloke's hypothesis, why make him disappear from sight if it's CGI? you can apply CGI even if the whole thing was continuous, would be a hard transition to pull off but possible.

Mokele just proposed a hypothesis as to how it was faked, which was fairly close to correct, however rather than using CGI they faked it with a dummy. The parts where he gets onto the slide and after he lands in the water are real, and when he's sailing through the air it's just a dummy. The shots were then composited into a single "take" providing the illusion that it was him all along.

Why on Earth would you bother with painstaking CGI when you could be launching mannequins through the air?

Why on Earth would you bother with painstaking CGI when you could be launching mannequins through the air?

Wait, mannequins?

 

I thought Bascule meant "dummy" as in "we found a dummy willing to be lobbed off a ramp."