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Special Effect Failure / Web Original

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  • In a combination of this trope and Revealing Cover-Up, in this video of a beer-bottle domino experiment, it's quite apparent that the Ï€ sign 40 seconds in is a CG coverup of a rather more infamous symbol in the original footage due to the jitter of the sign.
  • 50 Ways to Die in Minecraft: In Part 3, Death 17, Stu is holding a sword in his right hand and a shield in his left hand, when he swaps the shield for a torch, places the torch, and gives a skeleton the opportunity to shoot him. When Stu places the torch, one can clearly see that his right hand (with the sword) is making the block-placing motion.
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd
    • In his review of Super Hydlide there's a quick skit of him going to a drugstore to get a new save battery for his Sega Saturn. While it's otherwise a pretty solid green screen effect where he actually looks like he's there and even rings the bell on the counter, the entire thing is thrown off by the background being flipped horizontally — all the text is backwards, and so blatantly so that it's hard to miss.
    • Played for Laughs in his review of Jurassic Park: Trespasser when the "dinosaurs" show up who are obviously just people in inflatable dinosaur costumes that look terrible even by low-budget Youtube video standards. It turns out In-Universe they actually are just people in inflatable dinosaur costumes, all video game reviewers who Seamus Blackley has broken mentally and emotionally into becoming his Mooks after getting sick of people trashing on his game for being an Obvious Beta. Naturally he intends to do this to The Nerd as well. When asked why their costumes are so terrible, Seamus snidely replies that "they fit the budget."
  • Atop the Fourth Wall: The King of Worms wears a reflective silver mask, similar to Corporate Commander which unfortunately reflects the cameraman (Lewis) and the equipment on hand (while Corporate Commander just tends to reflect the bright lighting kits). Lewis later confirmed that it's an unfortunate technical problem that he couldn't get around and at the end of the Arc, the King of Worms does meet the camera man who simply laughs in his face as part of the Mind Screw.
    • Atop the Fourth Wall: The Movie, despite its $60,000 price tag, clearly didn't put too much of it into its effects budget.
      • Comicron-1 looks really fake compared to the show, which isn't helped by the constant panning shots of it flying by that show off its low-resolution texturing.
      • The sets themselves also leave a lot to be desired. For instance, the bar at the beginning has a bookshelf off to the side; the bridge of Comicron-1 looks desolate and made of cardboard; and the control room of the Caelestis is clearly someone's basement. The last one being a Call-Back to To Boldly Flee.
      • The makeup used for Mechakara after part of his face is torn looks plastic-y and almost falling off. The endoskeleton itself is clearly a teaching skeleton painted silver with tin cans over its arms.
      • All the chroma keying throughout the film looks like it was done in the mid 1990s and not 2016.
  • The Ben Heck Show does this intentionally, the levitating soldering gun in the 2015 Halloween episode has the thread that's used to lift the gun fully visible, probably to ham up the scene. Also, the bedsheet ghost is obviously CGIed in.
  • While Database Ranger's Power Reviews has pretty good special effects for the most part, a few bits can get pretty obvious.
    • The Phantom Ranger helmet is clearly a CGI model in its earlier appearances, and moves in very jittery way. This was later fixed when the entire costume got a revamp, including an actual physical helmet.
    • As MJnote  has a piercing nearby their right eye, they have to hide it with a band-aid while playing Dr. K. While early on it was barely noticeable, it became more and more visible as the camera quality improved in later episodes. Episode 81 has a shot where the band-aid is clearly half-detached from their face.
  • The "fight" against a possessed Star Whistle in Dusk's Dawn. The amount of wind physics failures goes beyond Artistic License.
  • The Game Overthinker was never known for its good effects. And it's visible whenever Bob tries to use splitscreens in order to interact with himself and his Evil Twin Antithinker.
  • Decker: Invoked. Despite having a promotional video claiming the series will feature top of the line special effects, The specific effects use throughout the series are very unrealistic with the use of low quality cgi and some scenes are certainly done on green screen.
  • In the final review of the overview of both the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series, Freddy vs. Jason, there's a bit where Decker Shado lets doppelgangers of himself in — except the use of split screen wasn't seamless with one: the right side lighter than the left and two: his long hair would wave into the seam, causing what swayed into the seam into disappear. The scene even includes a subtitle asking viewers to ignore the flub.
  • Homestar Runner poked fun of these with the Dangeresque films, with such things as scaling a skyscraper that's really a piece of cardboard on the ground with the camera tipped to one side. And then Homestar drops his glasses on the cardboard.
    • In "Disk 4 of 12: FriendlyWare", Strong Bad plays the titular game on what appears to be a DOS/Apple II computer. However, eagle-eyed viewers can tell that the DOSBox emulator was used instead of an actual old operating system; in addition to the DOS font being its emulated variant instead of its how-it-appears-on-an-old-computer appearance, the "dir" command capitalises and punctuates "bytes" and "bytes free".
  • Lampshade hung in the puppet band segment of The Key of Awesome "Behind the Awesome" video for their Somebody That I Used To Know parody. The segment in question featured five puppets of various types playing a guitar...less than convincingly.
    Dog Puppet: No-one is in contact with the strings/Yet somehow I can hear everything.
  • Lampshaded in Kickassia when N. Bison begins to levitate using superconducting electromagnetism.
    Dr. Insano: ...you do realize you're just standing on your tippy-toes, right?
  • This live-action RPG here. The cartoon graphics go with the live action ones in most horrible way known to man, but dear God the 'combat'. Cartoon enemies flying around randomly sometimes not even on the ground, animation that looks like puppets where used and the live action guy flailing a fake rubber sword around like a lunatic. Thankfully, the video links to the Retsupurae version, which at least has funny commentary.
  • Played for laughs in My Immortal: The Series, in which (among other things) the Slytherin common room is a suburban living room, Ebony's drink of human blood is cherryade and Draco's "666" numberplate is handwritten.
  • In this little number, you can tell pretty quickly that the interior shots are separate models that are either sunk separately, or just had a bucket of water dumped in, and in one shot it's clear that the model is sunk twice. Still, good effort for a $0 budget and a justification of "bordom."
  • Deliberately invoked in the machinima portions of Red vs. Blue, where things such as wrenches, cakes, and wedding dresses have extremely obviously been added after the fact. More serious uses of animation and the all-CG sections of later seasons look significantly better and are nearly seamless at times, to the point that some of the special effects had to be made worse in season 10 for the sake of comedy (in particular, the pile of stuff the Blues have collected as a result of beating Red Team so many times).
    • Season 14 parodied this when the FH 57 Red Team arrives in Blood Gulch during the events of Season 1. One of the members complains that everything there looks "blocky and pre-rendered."
  • RWBY: The unofficial wiki has a comprehensive list, ordered by episode.
    • Volumes 1-3 use Poser and and characters would regularly clip through each other, especially long-haired characters. This became much rarer when the show switched over to Maya for Volume 4 onwards, but still occasionally happens.
    • One incident that was fixed in the YouTube and Japanese release but left in the website and American release is a scene in Volume 1 where Sun's model is actually over the much closer Blake.
    • Ozpin's fight with Cinder has him striking her multiple times with his cane, but the way it's animated, the juggling nature of the hits makes it look like Cinder's dancing in place.
    • In Volume 7, Oscar manages to land a hit on Neo, after first announcing his presence with a yell and then charging up the hallway to punch her. The moment comes across to the audience as Forgot About His Powers because Neo is a character who is known for her razor-sharp reflexes and CQC ability. The episode's writer later clarified that Oscar was supposed to yell, round the corner and punch her in a near-simultaneous action that would genuinely leave her without the time to respond; however, the instructions for the scene turned out to be more ambiguous than the writers realised until after the animators interpreted it to include a hallway run. The mistake was spotted too late to correct. The following episode exacerbates the problem by having Neo completely dominate Team JNR and Oscar, while also revealing just how exhausted and close-to-collapse Oscar is.
  • RWBY Chibi: In "A Slip Through Time and Space", Nora's hair can be seen phasing though the floor as she wigs out on caffeine. A similar error can be seen in the "Cannonball!" episode.
  • This fantastically bad Slender Man Mythos video, ironically titled "BEST HOLLYWOOD SLENDER MAN MOVIE EVER!", features quite possibly the worst costume of the titular character in existence. Since they also managed to mess up video distortion effects, it's all the more obvious.note 
    • Made even more painful by the fact that the costume was apparently really expensive to make, according to Word of God.
    • The movie Windigo, also based on the Mythos, has rather decent effects throughout... until Slendy's final appearance, in which he is seen throwing a poorly rendered CGI truck across the screen and Slendy himself seems to be animated via Stop Motion. Especially blatant as other Mythos videos have special effects ranging from ok (Marble Hornets) to exceptional (Tribe Twelve).
    • The single most common Slender Man halloween costume is a simple black suit and a morphsuit mask, which looks convincing from a distance or at night, but not so much up close, in addition to the fact the masks - in some cases - shine in bright light. Similarly, a full-body morphsuit designed to resemble Tall, Thin and Faceless... would not look convincing from a distance, at night, to a man with bad eyesight.note 
  • More of the Sonic The Hedgehog Fan Film's budget appears to have gone into hiring Jaleel White and various Internet celebrities for the cast than its special effects:
    • Robotnik's airships barely look any better than the Egg Carrier's original Dreamcast model.
    • His E-series robots are modeled pretty well, but move so slowly and clumsily as to seem weightless.
    • Whatever weapon the GUN troopers in the forest were using appears to have been made out of plastic.
    • When an explosion occurs, nine times out of ten it's a translucent 2D graphic overlaid on the screen.
    • Sonic himself lies firmly in the middle of the Uncanny Valley, and not only are his facial expressions basically limited to "eyes open/eyes closed, mouth open/mouth closed", he jumps out of the letterboxing at one point.
    • Sonic hijacks a missile launched at him by Robotnik... a missile with flat-color textures.
    • Towards the end, we're "treated" to an absolutely atrocious CGI rendition of Green Hill Zone.
    • When Knuckles appears, he is rendered with individual fingers, instead of his usual spiked boxing gloves.
  • One of the many complaints against the first episode of Steam Train was that the recording software made the game they were playing run about half as fast as it should be.
  • TedCrusty purposefully uses cheap effects to add to the humor of his videos. Like, just having a stuffed shirt on the ground being called a dead body.
  • The Third Rate Gamer parodies this endlessly, not attempting to make the special effects look real.
    • In his Little Nemo: The Dream Master "review", he escapes the police by bike. It's shown by showing obvious clip art of a kid on a bike (with his face plastered over it) that still has a white background moving in an obviously-fake manner over another picture of a house.
    • In his dual review of Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2, a bomb explodes leaving his "house" intact, followed by a newspaper that reads "Third Rate Gamer Killed by Lame Special Effect".
    • At the end of his Home Improvement review, a dinosaur breathes a fireball at his computer, "destroying" it. The next shot has obvious fire clip art spread on the computer, which is working just fine.
  • Most 60fps animations that you see on YouTube is full of these. Because the animations were made in 24 (or 30) fps per second, an AI is used to turn these into 60fps. The problem is the AI can't make the animations look better and instead it makes them look jankier and uglier due to how the animation was originally timed to their intended framerate. While not as common, this can also affect live-action footage when improperly done.
  • There are scores of fake "restoration video" creators on YouTube who specialize in taking tools, weapons, toys, etc. caked in rust and refurbishing them into like-new condition. The knowledgeable viewer would take note that the restored items always lack the pitting that should result from such severe oxidation, but the most glaring tipoff that they're fake is how this thick, red-orange "rust" tends to completely cover the items, including their wood, plastic and resin parts that, as anyone who stayed awake in junior-high Chemistry class can tell you, do NOT rust.

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