Let's Examine That Viral "Dobby" Video
You've probably seen the video of that odd creature walking down someone's driveway by now, so let's take a closer look...
Chances are that you’re one of the millions of people who have watched the video of something odd-looking walking down Vivian Gomez’s driveway. If not, you can watch the video here:
I’ve had so many messages from people asking me to look at this and it began when the video started to go viral on Twitter. I looked, thought ‘it’s someone in a costume‘ and thought nothing more of it. However, the messages kept coming so here I am.
It’s probably a person in a costume. You can buy head masks of the Harry Potter character Dobby the House Elf in many different places (an example is seen here) which is why the video shows something which seems to resemble Dobby the House Elf. It could easily just be a hat or something similar that we’ve associated with the Harry Potter character.
But what about digital manipulation? What about SFX? Could it be a marketing campaign?
I’ve heard all of these ideas in the last few days and I don’t see any evidence of digital manipulation or special effects being used to create this, though I’m not an expert in that field. On the other hand, Captain Disillusion is and he put out an exasperated tweet on the topic:
It can be easy to assume that people have gone to a lot of trouble to create weird looking videos and photos of odd things, but years of researching the paranormal from a skeptical position have taught me that simpler techniques create the most realistic looking content. Fishing wire and people off camera create better fake ghost videos that special effects suites in most cases. A kid in a Halloween costume creates a better weird looking video snippet that hours in an editing suite. Most people don’t have the kind of experience or skills required to make decent looking fake videos which is why they’re usually so obvious to debunk.
That said, it shouldn’t be entirely ruled out that something sneaky is going on here. There are several tell-tale signs of mischief that skeptic investigators of the paranormal look out for when reviewing footage of this nature and a number of things jump out at me about this footage that are worth noting...
We don’t see the full video. It just... cuts off. Any CCTV system- from an old-fashioned camera rig to a more fancier doorbell unit -would continue filming until there was no motion in its field of view. The footage we get to see just abruptly cuts off which is usually an indication that what happens after that specific moment is going to give away what was actually going on. Like a kid in a costume turning around to face the camera, perhaps.
The story doesn’t make sense. Vivian Gomez states in one of the comments on her video that ‘It doesn’t disappear on my cameras and only did when I posted it in case anyone thinks I photoshopped’ and then later states ‘the video stopped when its in the driveway’ which is a different version of events than previously given. We also aren’t given many details to go on and this vagueness leaves this open to suggestion and speculation.
The original poster uses potential misdirection in her commentary. I don’t want to outright accuse Gomez of lying as I don’t have concrete evidence of this, but a number of things stand out to me in her commentary. She states that she isn’t tech savvy and wouldn’t know how to photoshop this but as I’ve already pointed out, you wouldn’t need to be able to know how to create an sfx video if it was just a person messing around.
Sometimes, people who are trying to mislead you don’t answer your question, but offer up something which seems like an answer while missing out the actual information you wanted to know. One person in the comments states that they think it is ‘Bobby’ which I believe is Gomez’s young son. She doesn’t answer this, just points out that the shadow from the door is the creature. This is in relation to people pointing out that whatever ‘it’ is comes out of her house as you can see the shadow of a door opening right at the beginning of the video.
The take away from this is that you can’t trust things that you see on the internet, but I think you probably already knew that.