How fake video of eagle grab fooled the world

Relax, world — your baby won’t get snatched by an eagle if you visit Montreal.

An online video of the massive bird plucking an infant off the ground was acknowledged by its creators as a fake Wednesday.

The admission came as the video was viewed millions of times on YouTube in the span of several hours and was the subject of news reports by dozens of media around the globe.

It was actually produced by students as a class project at a new media training institute in Montreal.

Their assignment: create a viral video and a hoax.

They needn’t worry about their mark. They were promised a 100 per cent score if they got 100,000 page views on YouTube— and within a few hours they had smashed that target 50 times over.

“We had no idea what was coming,” said a giddy Normand Archambault, who created the video along with fellow students Loic Mireault and Felix Marquis-Poulin. “We were all speechless.” The video was picked up by newspapers in the U.K., was tweeted by at least one member of the White House press corps in Washington, and it moved on the international news wires through Agence France-Presse as well as in numerous international publications.

A Mexican news anchor tweeted it. Russian television aired it, much to Archambault’s astonishment.

“Wow, I didn’t know that,” he said when he was informed by a reporter during one of a slew of interviews.

Claude Arsenault, a spokesman for the Centre NAD where the trio studies, said the video was done as part of a project in 3-D animation and digital design. Both the eagle and the toddler were created in 3-D animation and integrated into the film afterward, he said.

The idea of an eagle snatching a baby came up after a brainstorming session. The group had surveyed YouTube to see what people were watching.

“Babies and animals are very popular,” said Archambault, 22. So students combined the two. The group thought “if that works, everyone is going to want to watch it.”