Thursday, May 23, 2013

Fake or Real? II


And this is one of the most visited videos in 2011, a breathtaking recording of animal interaction in a nature preserve called Kruger, in South Africa. Judge by yourselves: fake or real?


Pretty amazing, huh? But there's always room for some critical reflection here:  Do you think the man may be somehow involved in the way animals interact here? Maybe you wanna think about the dimensions of park safaris like this one...

Fake or Real? I



... I know you guys were all heart broken the other day in class... But believe me, it's always better when we see and face reality as it is, and are not deceived by the appearances, don't you think? Now you can tell your friends that the poor lemmings never commited suicide. It's been a ubiquitous myth, but we buy it no more. And where does that myth come from? In 1958 Walt Disney produced White Wilderness, part of the studio's True Life Adventure series. This documentary featured a segment on lemmings, detailing their strange compulsion to commit mass suicide. But this was all fake! In fact, it was staged: the lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off the cliff by Disney filmmakers! The epic "lemming migration" was staged using careful editing, tight camera angles and a few dozen lemmings running on a snow covered turntable.
As Karl S. Kruszelnicki puts it in his article, considering a company like Disney, where one rodent, namely Mickey Mouse, was Royalty, it's rather odd to think that Disney could be so unkind to another rodent, the lemming...