i heard a crack. is that kid okay? >> who doesn't want to believe that you can actually run on water? >> can you believe it? no, you see it in reality. believe it, sunshine. >> video magicians at work. >> it's so goofy and so unbelievable that that's sort of what makes it so funny. >> and their bags full of tricks. >> by the end of it, it was like pulling my hair out. i actually started to have nightmares about the machine. >> how do they do it? >> a good magician doesn't give

away his tricks. >> but we do! "caught on camera: viral videos, how? what? why?" welcome to "caught on camera." i'm contessa brewer. when i look at the web's most popular videos, the ones that go viral, my favorites get me going back again and again to try and figure out the method behind their madness. in this hour, we'll take a look at some truly unique, brain-twisting videos to see if we can unravel their magic and mystery. because we all want to know what on earth made them try that and how did they catch it all on camera? >> a few people have tried it. nobody has ever managed to get anywhere close to what we got like today. >> have you ever witnessed a miracle? >> you have to believe you can

do these things. it's not, like, impossible. me, my boots and i, we're going to make it. ♪ >> in april 2010, an incredible video hits the web, making millions believe in the impossible. >> yeah! ha ha! >> i definitely think it's going to be the next big thing. >> a new sport is introduced called liquid mountaineering, essentially running on water. >> could it ever happen? >> who doesn't want to believe that you can actually run on water? >> and then you see that image of somebody actually doing it and it's exciting. >> you're going one step, going two steps, going three steps. we're discovering it as we go along. >> it feels like the type of documentary you'd see about any

type of extreme sport. >> it showed the background of the athletes and their training and their preparation. >> it's not straight into the water. you know. >> in a curve, in a light curve. >> and by that bend, you're actually not allowing your self to sink into the water, and you want to keep that skimming sensation going as long as you can. i think if you don't actually believe that you're going to walk on that water, it's not going to happen for you. >> believe, maybe, and the help of some magic shoes. >> go, go, go, go, go! >> baby, yeah, yeah! ha ha! >> liquid mountaineering is actually a clever viral advertisement for the high-tech shoe company. >> what gets us those extra steps are these shoes. the original equipment we first started was equipment that would help repel water.

>> the moment that i realized i was watching an ad was when they sort of closed in on the shoe and they say this shoe is how we're able to do it. >> it's like water repellent. like water off a duck's back. >> if this was executed right, then we would achieve a lot of our goals, which was to make high-tech cool, make people think differently, and most importantly, have fun. >> you actually see the athletes failing again and again. >> come on! >> that lent some real credibility to the video. and most people that saw this video thought it was real. it's definitely a fake. >> wait, not real? well, if it isn't real, how did they do that? the piece is shot over the course of a week in portugal and features three extreme sport enthusiasts. >> we needed them to be believable, we needed them to be

athletic, we needed them to be good fun, and the fact that they could act a little bit as well -- >> bon jour. >> -- fantastic. >> being able to walk on water is not a requirement for the cast. so, what went into that biblical special effect? >> they created a wooden platform underneath the water that the guy actually ran on. >> weights are used to hold the structure into place. and another pliable layer is attached to the top of the platform. >> it was a flexible, a bendable platform. so when you see him run, you see him tip back and forth. and it actually looks really, really real. >> when i first saw the guy running on water, i was very nicely surprised because i think the worry was that if people thought it was fake straightaway, then it wouldn't have worked. >> with the effect complete, high-tech launches the video online. >> we wanted a real conversation starter. whether people loved it or hated

it, whether they believed it or whether they didn't, we wanted everybody to talk about it, and that's what happened. >> it creates a splash, racking up millions of hits within days. >> it's so goofy and so unbelievable that that's sort of what makes it so funny. >> i think every boy out there has a dream of doing something like this. and to actually see it online conjured up a lot of memories. >> the viral ad becomes so popular that it spawns countless copycats who quickly find out that liquid mountaineering is pure fiction. >> we don't necessarily suggest you try this. but it's been wonderful to see them mimic us, and i guess it's the ultimate compliment. >> high-tech creates a safer method for budding liquid mountaineers, an online video game. >> we've got sharks in it, bears popping up, and that's just great fun.

>> yeah! >> can you believe it? you see it in reality. believe it, sunshine. >> go! go! go! >> yeah, we're having a laugh, but at the same time, i suppose there's an element of something real in it, too. >> walking on water may be impossible for us mortals, but you can still take away important life lessons from the video. >> be with yourself. believe in it. it's not about the miracle. it's just go for it. >> try to do it. if you fall down, try again. ♪ coming up, a couple of guys and a pair of sunglasses play stump the experts. >> when you watch it, you ask yourself, when did this stop being real? >> the tricks escalated from a

very simple trick to an increasingly harder trick and harder trick. >> how did they do that? >> someone said it's magnets. he had magnets in his head. >> maybe you can figure it out. >> a good magician doesn't give away his tricks. here's a question for you: as nations develop over the next 25 years, the world will have almost twice as many cars. how much fuel will be needed to power them? about the same as today? 50% more? 100% more? the answer is... about the same as today. by 2040, advances in fuels and vehicles could enable about 75% better fuel economy than today. take the energy quiz -- round 2. energy lives here.

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make the best entertainment part of your holidays. catch all the hottest handpicked titles on the winter watchlist, only with xfinity from comcast. saves you money. yay, game night, so much fun. check it. ♪ >> whoa. check it is right. two characters get ready to roll out some pretty wild tricks. >> it's these to sort of charming slackers playing around, and it's sort of a stupid human trick that you can easily imagine somebody who practices all day long because they don't have a job. >> the tricks escalated from a very simple trick to an increasingly harder trick and harder trick.

>> and it gets progressively more unbelievable. and when you watch it, you ask, when did this stop being real? >> a lot of viral videos seem like they're just for fun but are really designed to pitch a brand without really looking like it. >> i was approached by an ad agency. they were doing a campaign called never hide for ray ban. i spent a lot of time on the couch with a pair of sunglasses in my hand and was thinking, what would be a good trick? >> but why settle on just one trick? benzo and his creative partner, steven hampt decide to shoot a montage of startling stunts, but are they real? >> according to the laws of physics and gravity, it's possible in theory. i think it just kind of rode that line of theoretically possible, closely, which is good.

>> certainly, theories abound on the internet. all kinds of viewers have all kinds of explanations for how the boys do it, but the filmmakers aren't talking. >> that was a great catch. >> did you get that? >> got it. >> i like to keep the mystique. you know, a good magician doesn't give away his tricks. there was just a lot more planning that went into it than people might realize. >> unbelievable. >> and there were hundreds of other videos that were created of kids trying to do the same thing. or discussing whether, in fact, it was real or fake. >> i remember there was a comment that someone said service magnets, he had magnets in his head or a steel plate in his head. and there was magnets. and i started telling people that when they asked. it's magnets, totally magnets. >> the most ambitious of the video deconstructors is a silver painted character who called himself captain did i illusion.

>> let's break it down captain disillusion style. >> a combination of two shots. the first is played back in reverse and the glasses are not thrown to the catcher but pulled toward the thrower's hand by an incredible invention, the string. so it's all played back in reverse until the swish pan, where there is a cut to the reverse cut where there was a lean. >> there were moments where he was on to us but never really completely nailed. there were a few instances where he was wrong but he was very confident in his breakdown, yeah. >> the skateboarding is a simple reverse shot using the string and they left you a clue. listen to the sound of the skate board wheels on the pavement, it's backwards. that's right. hey, impressive backwards skateboarding skills. i want to see the outtakes. >> the skateboard was definitely the hardest to figure out how it's done. nobody's gotten it right yet and i won't break the secret. >> that was pretty much the hardest one, the skateboarding one, to pull off. >> totally. >> because it took about 52

takes. >> something like that is really hard. as we get through the video, our own behind-the-scenes methods became more and more complicated. as someone's watching the video and they think they figure out how we did the first few tricks, as we get to the skate-a-pault, then it totally blows that. >> i remember the first time i saw it, the reaction that steve has with his ice cream cone in his hand-made me laugh for about 20 minutes. and that was kind of when we knew we had a hit. this is the best face ever. >> yeah, i had about 12 ice creams. and then the car one was, like, ridiculous. it was like, you know, how do we make it even harder? let's nail them through a moving window on to his face. >> and there's some pain involved in catching sunglasses.

hard plastic hitting you in the face. >> videos that have an element of how did they do that are a real staple of viral videos on the web. and brands have jumped into that concept completely. it's a great way to get discussion going around the video. >> once the video is ready, josh warner and his company take on the job of what they call seeding to help it go viral. >> we have a network of blog relationships that we have with hundreds of blogs all across the web. so, we really know the influencers on the web that will help propel a video to popularity. >> it's a different way to express your brand, and it's a way that's more modern than traditional advertising. >> we have the never hide written in the dust in the car window. it's not a blatant, in your face spot. no logo at the end.

>> that was a great catch! >> did you get that? >> got it. >> but many do notice the ad, including the judges at the cannes film festival, who awarded the bronze lion for advertising. >> i have been making videos for 20 years and always wanted to get into the cannes film festival. and then did this little video with benzo produced it, and it won an award at cannes. coming up, an earthshaking boy-meets-girl story. >> we shot about 2,355 photos. >> with a cool twist on one of the oldest camera tricks in the book. >> so many photos! >> speaking of so many photos -- >> people don't know if it's fake or if it's real and if it's real, it has an insane amount of work in it. >> when "caught on camera: viral videos, how? what? why?" continues.

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craziest i've ever done. ♪ >> it's a simple boy-meets-girl story told in a really unusual way. >> this is sort of like when you have some magical fantasy of a photograph coming to life, where all the paintings always move, and it's people playing with their cameras. so, the story line is also about the sort of medium they're using with all those little photos flickering and changing. >> this is a great example of stop-motion photography. the filmmaker created a bank of frames, and he's actually moving from one frame to the next. >> most stop motion videos are 30 seconds or a minute long and they really kind of punch you in the face. the kind of allure with this one is that it's four minutes long and it actually takes the time to tell a story that moves at a pretty slow pace. >> stop motion. it's a technique where you shoot one frame at a time in rapid

succession, then edit the frames together to create an animated effect. >> i was shooting with a digital slr. and you're able to hold down the shutter and it's able to take something like six, seven frames a second. so, we acted out the entire scene with them moving incredibly slowly so we could kind of get it back up to a normal 24 frames a second. i did use a story board for this. we had to mark down where the five photo frames would be, so when they jumped from frame to frame, we would be able to gauge where one ends and one begins. >> i love when you realize that he takes a picture, it's showing up right above him, and you realize that there's a system to it. >> we just decided to push it a little further and do stop motion inside of the frames and then do stop motion again for the entire scene. >> kind of wonder how he set up the frames, what kind of techniques he used. it would be really interesting

to know. >> the entire scene there at the gorge was actually made up of two photos. we shot this first half here with brian walking on the right side of the frame. and we shot a corresponding scene on the left side here. you can see when you start to combine them together, it started to kind of make the scene. we've got five photo frames on the top and five photo frames on the bottom. we knew that these five photos along the top would equate to being those photos on the top and the five here would in turn be the five we see on the bottom. and as a final step, we dragged it into the size of the photo frames we needed and exported the photos in a sequence one by one. so, you can kind of see how something like that turned into thousands and thousands of photos here that are all the sequence that make the video. we shot about 2,353 photos, give or take. >> but as labor intensive as dave wallace's video is, there's much more. the shots inside those frames aren't digital, they're actual

physical photographs. why bother? >> a company called click pics that does photo printing asked me to create something for them. so, since they're a photo printing company, we definitely wanted to make sure we used real photos. so we sent those off to boston for click pics to print, and they sent them back to me in a giant box with all these photos. >> like a well-oiled machine, they insert thousands of photos into the picture frames, while shooting the whole scene itself in stop motion, one frame at a time, for 11 hours. >> we've had great feedback so far. it's not in the millions just quite yet, but most importantly we have had the demographics that we want to be feeding back feeding back. we've had the photographers that that are going to use click pics get back. >> if this film was done digitally and not physically, it would be less enchanting because part of the magic is the fact that somebody actually did all of that.

>> so many photos! you want to talk photos, meet israeli filmmaker iran amir. >> this idea kind of popped in my head. from the moment i thought about it, i knew i would have to make it. ♪ >> amir calls his video "500 people in 100 seconds." and what is that, a movie in their hands? >> this is a great, great video. you've got all these people being photographed and then there's a whole scene going on within the photograph that they're holding, and you're looking at the people, but you're also looking at the video that they're holding. >> this video was made in two parts. the first part, making the inner music video, was easy. when i heard the song, i knew immediately this is the song i'm going to use. it has a catchy tune, it has

good rhythm, and also, it's exactly 90 seconds, which for me is the ideal length of a youtube video. i used my sister and my brother and my friends. >> it's so perfect that it's really hard to understand how the little picture on the inside could be so smooth and pretty while everything else is flashing really quickly. >> people don't know if it's fake or if it's real, and if it's real, it has an insane amount of work in it. >> the first thought is that he must be using some kind of digital trickery to put his music video inside the pictures. not this time. >> as it turns out, he shot the black-and-white movie. then he had it divided up and turned into still frames. >> so, let's do the math here. amir took his 100-second music video and chopped it up into more than 2,000 continuous still photos that he then took to a printer for hard copies. >> i got the pictures back. what i got back was a giant box

weighing in at almost 20 kilograms, which was almost $1,000 before even knowing if this is going to work. then for the first time, i understood how much work i have ahead of me. >> no kidding. then amir had to go out and get 500 people to hold up each one of his 500 pictures in the same position in order. >> the first two days i went out to the streets of jerusalem, and i came back with nothing. i didn't have even enough courage to ask anybody. and then after two days, i said to myself, well, i'm too deep in this, i spent thousands of shekels on it, i have no choice, i have to do it. >> part of the magic is knowing that there are actually 500 different faces there. that's 500 different people, and that's sort of amazing. >> having people actually holding the frames, it gives a kind of analog charm or an

analog feeling that you can't get in a digital way. my kind of breakthrough moment was after the first day of taking pictures. i went back home, i put it all in a row in the editing software, and i just needed to see four seconds of it, and i knew i have something really cool in my hands. >> what's even more amazing is nearly 1.5 million views in the video's first three months. >> what's really funny about this video is that some of the youtube comments say that it's actually not 500 people, it's 436 people. and to get that level of attention and interest online is really incredible. >> this video was made intentionally to be a viral video, to get as many hits as possible. i do have to admit, i didn't expect a million views. so, it surpassed my expectations. coming up, a photography

studio shows just how complicated taking one single portrait can be. >> we used almost every piece of photography equipment that any photographer would ever own. >> you imagine some mad scientist that put together this intricate system so he could take a picture of a pretty girl. >> when i started it was like, this is fun, this is interesting. and by the end of it, it was like pulling my hair out. i actually started to have nightmares about the machine. tr. a pm pain reliever that dares to work all the way until... the am. new aleve pm the only one to combine a safe sleep aid plus the 12 hour strength of aleve. the mercedes-benz winter event is back,

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after seeing everything, but let me take one last look. sure. take your time. built-in nav, heated seats for mom, dvd with wireless headphones for the kids! and tons of room for the golf clubs! golf clubs, and strollers. shhh ... i love this part. so what do you think? i think it's everything we wanted. great.

hi, richard lui with this hour's top story for you. the family of rafael ramos thanked the community in support for calling for peace tonight. ramos, along with his partner, officer wenjian liu was shot and killed last night in new york city. police officials had new information today about the alleged shooter, 28-year-old ismaaiyl brinsley. he had a troubled history with 19 prior arrests and at least one suicide attempt. police say he posted antipolice

messages online before the shooting. now back to "caught on camera." welcome back to "caught on camera." i'm contessa brewer. the web has nearly as many viral videos as there are creative people to make them. in our next video, a group of talented and very patient people takes one click to a whole new level. hey, rube, how do you take your portrait? ought to be pretty straight forward, right? not in this video, by a small photography company looking to get noticed. >> we decided to shoot a rube

goldberg machine that did a relatively simple task, and that is take a photo in as complicated a way as possible. >> so david and his colleagues at 2d photography designed a photo machine that you can't take your eyes off of. >> we used almost every piece of photography equipment that any photographer would ever own. we used camera bodies. we used lenses. we used little tripods, large tripods. we used light stands. we used lights. we used a conveyor belt, which was kind of difficult to get our hands on. >> this is an amazing video. you have all sorts of actions causing other actions, and you just can't believe that any one person could make all this happen as it's happening here. >> you imagine like some mad scientist that put together this intricate system so he could take a picture. >> i thought of the idea while

playing with a few memory cards on my table, and i knocked them over, and they were like domi s dominos. and that immediately led me to think rube goldberg. the term rube goldberg machine is named after a famous american artist, and he was known for designing cartoons that performed simple tasks in the most complicated way possible. >> getting from concept to reality takes more than six months, 25 people and many sleepless nights. >> it was trial and error. ♪ build an element, pray that it works. if it does, build the next element. and we had 133 elements. >> at first when i started, it was like, oh, this is fun, this is interesting. and by the end of it, it was like pulling my hair out. i actually started to have nightmares about the machine. >> i think the photo booth might have been the most complicated element, actually.

it turned out to be a very complicated series of mouse traps and a very painful thing to set up as well, because mouse traps are super sensitive. >> i think my favorite element of the machine is the little mario that jumps across the screen. >> who doesn't like mario? >> they have hundreds of synchronized, moving parts, and every one has to work from beginning to end in sequence, without stopping. >> we decided not to edit the video and try to get it in one take, just because i think as a viewer, you'd want to see it in one take and not have transit n transitions or different camera angles. there's axes flying around. there's bottles being shot. so you definitely have to learn the timing and learn what's going to happen. i had to choreograph the movements with the camera, so i had to learn, it's almost like dance moves, in and out and twisting and turning. >> it's an amazing amount of work to put together a video like this.

and i have to imagine that there was so many takes that were required to get this right. >> every time i started a take, i would announce, take 93, this is the one. and i was disappointed 98 times, but i was happy on the 99th try. >> yeah! >> i think people really relate to the amount of work that's required to put something like this together. >> from the very beginning, we knew that it was going to be go big or go home kind of deal. >> my parents called me up and said, oh, i saw the video, it's got 10,000 views. that's amazing. i'm like, dad, just wait. >> 3 million views later, the product of david devere's imagination is a viral video smash hit. >> it was fun. i'm happy i did it once, but to be frank, i never want to do another one of these machines ever again.

coming up -- >> 1,000. >> got 77 hours to spare? >> two, three -- >> evidently, this guy does. >> 4,000. 5 -- 5,000! >> they say the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. what would they say about counting to 100,000? >> 10,000! >> clearly, this guy has to get a day job. >> 12,000. 13,000. 14,000. troducing... a pm pain reliever that dares to work all the way until... the am. new aleve pm the only one to combine a safe sleep aid plus the 12 hour strength of aleve. get ready foat the volkswagen engineered holidsign-then-drive event. right now, for practically just your signature, you could drive home for the holidays in a new volkswagen. like the sporty, advanced new jetta

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alright, so this tylenol arthritis lasts 8 hours, but aleve can last 12 hours... and aleve is proven to work better on pain than tylenol arthritis. so why am i still thinking about this? how are you? aleve, proven better on pain. new york has never been cuter. the big apple as a little toy city in a video gone viral. >> it sort of feels like toys

brought to life. it reminded me when you used to play in the sand pit as a kid. and you have these tiny little versions of things. you make little towns and have these little construction vehicles, and that's really where it came from. >> and look, someone else made a miniature chicago. >> this was just a different view of the city. and i was thinking, you know, i'd love to get something that people can relate to and enjoy. >> what's really fascinating about this is you really, really can't tell if it's real or if it's miniature sets. when you first see the boat, it looks like a little miniature boat. it's almost like it looks like it's in a bathtub. >> so, how did these two videographers make tiny little towns out of two of america's largest cities? if you guessed model toys, you'd be wrong. >> they did this through tilt shift photography. it's a method of where you're actually shooting down at an

angle, and it blurs out backgrounds and really focuses your attention on particular scenes and people within those scenes. >> there's sort of two ways people make these tilt shift images. on one hand, people use actual tilt shift lenses sometimes. but then people started figuring out ways to do it in post production. >> the thing that makes it feel like toys, like a miniature world, it's a combination of two things, really. the first thing is when you see the focus is falling off, that immediately cues you to think that it's small. and the second thing is the acceleration. when you look at things like the boats and the helicopter, they seem to bob up and down. that's what a smaller thing will do. >> for his new york miniatures, sam o'hare used a still camera and normal lenses to shoot 35,000 digital images to create his stop-motion effect, then played with focus and color in post production. in chicago, wgn tv producer tony litle also thought tilt shift technique would be a perfect way

to promote his town and his tv station. but instead of shooting thousands of still images like sam, tony created stop motion in his video camera. >> we decided to shoot video instead of still photography just because the process is a little easier and quicker to do. each shot is like two seconds long. the strobe effect is what gives you the stop-motion look. and then the color correction, we mess with the saturation to make it look miniature and toylike. and then the lower layer is the one that has the defocus or blur on it that really helps you focus on the subject. >> tony's bosses at wgn loved the result. their miniature chicago has become a youtube hit. and the station's most popular on-air promo. >> i think i've gotten so many hits on a video like this is because people love their city. i mean, chicago's a great town. >> it's just the pure pleasure of seeing the city look

different. so sort of charming and harmless in a way. >> sam calls his new york video "the sand pit," and in its first seven months, it has more than 750,000 online hits. >> i didn't really expect the response to be as big and as positive as it has been. it's something i thought would maybe generate interest for me and would be popular, but i didn't expect it to kind of explode in the way that it did. >> you almost get to this point where every city wants to have it, because when you're seeing your own city that way, it's familiar, yet different. it lets you see your own city in a different light. gee whiz, i sure do love counting. i wonder how high i can go. let's find out.

one, two, three, four, five, six -- >> and so it will go for more than 70 hours. no flash, no tricks. john harcic is simply going to keep counting all the way up to 100,000. >> 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 -- 830, 831, 833, 834, 835 -- >> this video is legend on youtube. the concept is so simple and absurd that you really want to see if he's actually going to make it to 100,000. >> 2,798, 2,799, 2,800, 2,801,

2,802, 2,803, 2,804, 2,805, 2,806 -- >> one of the comments on youtube was from a guy who said he went to spain for the weekend and came back and the video was still playing. clearly, this guy has to get a day job. >> i shot the entire video on a little ipod touch. it has a front-facing camera and just shoot it whenever i had free time. the majority of the video was in my bedroom, but parts of it were just all over pittsburgh, parts of it were at my school. i actually shot part of it at my sister's wedding. i was just a little bit bored so just left the reception area, went upstairs and hooked up the ipod and counted a little bit. >> 80,011, 80,012. >> it took about three months to make the whole video. >> how john does it certainly isn't very complicated. the bigger question is why, for pete's sake?

>> i went to college for tv production. and our final assignment for the final class was to make just an experimental film, and the assignment was extremely open-ended. but i also just wanted to do something original and make people question what it is that makes a video entertaining and just do something different. >> the best part is that nobody can ever disprove him because nobody is going to watch the whole thing. you almost wonder if he stuck in little jokes on the inside that nobody ever saw. >> 61,438. 61,439. >> and while some people may think this man needs to get a life, what about all the people out there who are actually watching this? >> i think it became a real contest of wills on whether people could actually watch the entire video. >> when i put it on youtube, a couple people pointed out little mistakes i made. i know i missed 99,991. >> 99,990. 99,992.

>> people keep leaving a comment telling me i missed a number. throughout making the video, there were several phases. at the beginning, it was kind of like peaceful and actually kind of relaxing to do it, but near the end, it just became like torture. i actually started having nightmares of me just sitting there counting. part of the reason i originally did it was to do an easier project so i wouldn't have to write a script, i wouldn't have to hire actors and stuff. but about halfway through, i realized it was actually much more work to actually sit there and count to 100,000. >> 99,796, 99,797, 99,798, 99,799, 99,800 -- >> john's torture doesn't stop with the counting. his simple concept hits a technical road block when it comes to get his video to go viral. >> youtube has a 20-gigabyte limit, so it's tricky getting 70

hours of video down to 20 gigabytes. most video in any programs actually have a timeline limit. most of them are 12 hours, so i had to do a bunch of research to find a program that was able to do it. >> so, there it is, his pride and joy, his claim to more than 500,000 views and still counting. >> that's sort of the magic of the internet that it can be something you do that nobody else did. it might be counting to 100,000 and maybe nobody else wants to do it, but it's his forever now. >> 99,998. 99,999. 100,000. >> i have had lots of complements when people tell me i missed a number. >> coming up, two kids from germany run into trouble with a magic trick. and then it gets worse.

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two kids attempt one of the oldest tricks in the book. >> let's start the magic trick. we can do the old table cloth out from under the stuff on the table trick. >> they tried it again and again. >> everybody knows what it is to be the kid trying to do this trick and failing a whole bunch of times. >> you keep expecting for something to happen. >> and then something does. >> oh, my god, the kid gets crushed.

>> you have to sort of scream the first time you see it. >> holy crap, is that kid okay? >> you're wondering what the happened. >> don't worry, nobody was hurt in the making of this video. in fact it is not a magic trick but a marketing trick for the gop variety theater in germany. >> gop is an entertainment for all senses. you sit there and look with wide eyes. it's very fascinating. we have five theaters in germany and we have about 700,000 people coming to our shows every year. >> however, the theater wants to attract a younger demographic. they hire film makers to create

a video too grab people's attention. >>. >> translator: we researched you tube and found out videos of children and accidents are very successful on the internet. so we thought, let's do a combination of both. >> the use of kids was a nice thing. because kids are so innocent. how could they lie to you and make a fake viral video? they can. >> dominick enlists his brother and cousin to star in the piece. >> translator: it was roughly explained to me that we would be doing a table cloth trick. >> reporter: they do multiple takes attempting the trick. >> we laughed a lot because we had to do everything over and everything broke. we like ed that. >> translator: the first three videos we made support the credibility of the piece. >> then the film maker set up

for the real ta da moment, which is made up of two shots. >> first we filmed the two kids in the room. the table is set with just the table cloth, no dishes and sven pulled the table cloth. >> they are sent out of the room as the directors prepare for the second shot. >> we secured all cables and knocked the shelf over. >> with the living room demolition a success, dominick and max bring the footage in to edit. >> we then super imposed the two videos so it would look as if both were happening at the same time. as if sven was able to pull the table cloth from under the dishes and the shelf was falling on top of mikhail. >> with the magic of editing complete, the film makers are happy with the result. however, they notice one small

mistake. can you see it? >> in the front you see a pen that is slightly moving. so there is a mask that is not running correctly. this could be a hint that the video is fake. >> you need serious attention to detail to catch that one. in august of 2011, the gop theater launches mikhail and sven magic show debuting on-line. it gets 10 million hits and turns them in to internet celebrities. >> it's cool. >> i think it is cool. my father suggested we print autograph cards. >> it went all over the world people in australia and people in south america, they were watching our video. so that was really, really not expected. >> i think this video went viral because it is really well done. it is short, sharp and shocking.

>> there's an immediate feeling of sort of surprise and horror. and then just wondering of where it came from and who made it. >> millions of others feel the same way and trace the video back to the gop theater. after the magic trick gone bad hits the internet, curious patrons flock to the theater in record numbers. and this may not be the last you heard from young sven and mikhail. >> family members have said to me, sven, you have the potential to be an actor. >> i want to move in that direction so i can be an actor one day. >> the next time you click on a viral video and laugh out loud, cringe or shed a tear, remember, there's a lot more to what you are seeing than meets the eye. i'm contessa brewer.

that's all for this edition of "caught on camera." [ music playing ] >> welcome to colorado. >> it's a jungle, baby. >> land of the legal weed. and home to america's latest billion dollar industry. marijuana. this is part of history. what did the end of alcohol prohibition mean to that era, dynasties, right. >> i took everything i had, 401s, iras and dropped it in to this. >> we are in a once-in-a-lifetime position. it is advertise and supply.