It was just another ordinary news day at the BBC and they were reporting a ‘breaking news’ about the May leadership challenge when netizens started to freak out because a child appears to ‘teleport’ into the report! Whoa!
Is that kid a time traveler or someone from a magician family that entered the world of the muggles and was caught on camera appearing on that spot?
In the video, a woman could be see explaining something to the interviewer. Seconds into the clip, a child suddenly appears in the video and simply showed up on that spot without appearing to pass by the woman! Eagle-eyed netizens were quick to notice the child’s appearance.
Shortly after the report, Twitter was abuzz with questions about the child. Many were rather shocked over the ‘incident’, posting that it would be a good idea to track the kid down. After all, in this modern day of technology, everything is really possible, right?
Some saw this as a joke.
“…there has been a glitch in the matrix,” one movie fanatic wrote, in obvious allusion to The Matrix.
Others shared alien-themed GIFs and photos, joking that aliens are most certainly upon us. Some believe this could be proof that time-traveling now exists.
But many were not convinced.
The head of video at British news website The Independent, Tom Richell, shared that this ‘teleporting’ child was really just a glitch in the editing. In short, it was a bad edit from BBC – perhaps they were in a hurry to release the clip as it was, after all, breaking news.
“The edit itself makes use of a transition which uses face tracking and something called optical flow interpolation,” Richell explained.
“The idea is to smooth over jump cuts in interview or talking head segments. Adobe users like me know it as Morph Cut. I think it’s called Flow on FCP. It basically takes the two shots and mashes them together in such a way that the harsh cut between them is smoothed over.”
He encouraged netizens to watch the video again to notice that the woman’s head moves in a ‘weird’ way as the boy appears in the clip.
“Away from the technicals – no the BBC isn’t trying to edit this out of context. I find it *really* unlikely they’re trying to end the vox pop with her smiling either. That would be a totally pointless edit,” he added.
So, there you have it, folks! The kid isn’t a teleporter! He’s just a product of a bad video edit. Oooops.