Animated video of eagle picking up a toddler was created more than a decade ago
A video has gone viral in Nigeria where social media posts have claimed the short clip shows an eagle picking up a tot in a playground. But the claim is misleading: the original video was an animation created by Canadian students as part of their class assignment more than a decade ago.
“Eagle did came for the child luck enough the eagle did not go with the child (sic),” reads the caption on an Instagram post that has gathered more than 37,000 likes since it was published on February 22, 2024.
In the scene set in a park, an eagle appears to swoop down towards a baby, intending to carry it away. However, the child’s father charges towards the bird, causing it to release the infant after a few seconds before flying away.
The clip was posted on Instagram by a Nigerian-based account called “Exodus Dan”. The account regularly shares content about football and comic videos with its 17,000 followers.
Comments were mixed: many believed the claim, while some called it fake.
The same video was published here and here in August 2018.
However, the claims about what the video depicts are misleading.
Class assignment
Using the InVID-WeVerify tool, we extracted keyframes from the clip and conducted reverse image searches.
The results led to several news articles dating back to 2012 concerning a viral hoax video called “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid”. For instance, the Guardian published this piece (archived here) while NBC News wrote a debunk on it (archived here).
According to a 2012 report by Buzzfeed News, the video was a product of a class task assigned to students by Robin Tremblay, a teacher at the University of Quebec's School of Digital Arts, Animation, and Design in Canada (archived here).
Tremblay told his students to create a viral hoax video using computer-generated imagery (CGI), specifying that any video reaching 100,000 views would earn the creators an 'A' grade in the course.
Students Normand Archambault, Félix Marquis-Poulin, Loïc Mireault, and Antoine Seigle responded with the now infamous video titled "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid".
Within hours, the video had clocked up 42 million views and became a viral sensation. Major media networks jumped onto the story.
During an interview on December 20, 2012, Félix told CNN that the team conducted research on YouTube to understand what viewers liked to watch, and got to understand it was “animals” and “babies” (archived here).
“We made a lot of brainstorming and we came up with the idea of an eagle catching a baby,” Félix said.
According to the school, both the eagle and the child were created in 3D animation and integrated into original footage (archived here).
