18 January 2022 Fact checks

A video of several fans making a paper plane fly is CGI

By Grace Rahman • 1 min

What was claimed

A video of several strategically placed room fans keeping a paper aeroplane flying in a circle shows what happens “when physicists get bored”.

Our verdict

The video was created by a video animator called Vernon James Manlapaz, and does not show a real event.

A video shared by a Facebook page called “Science world” of several strategically placed room fans appearing to keep a paper aeroplane flying between them is captioned: “when physicists get bored”.

However, the video does not show a genuine experiment, but a 3D animation. 

It was first put out on Instagram in 2016 by Vernon James Manlapaz, whose other videos include surreal depictions of animated dinosaurs, skeletons and walking clocks superimposed on genuine video backdrops of streets and parks.

Mr Manlapaz told online publication It’s Nice That in 2019 that he’d studied digital character animation at Vancouver Film School and that his goal was to create believable videos that “bring joy, positivity and relatability to people who see” them.

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Image courtesy of NeONBRAND, via Unsplash.

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This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because the video is not genuine, it has been rendered by 3D animation.