Actually, when I first saw the ufotheatre video, I didn't think of any fancy computer graphics or animations. Though I worked (and partly still do work) in the TV business for more than 10 years and would have access to high-end stuff, I figured it would take ages, even for very skilled people, to produce such a video by means of a computer, 3D software or anything like that. The camera movement is just too jerky, and almost every single frame would have to be fixed manually, let alone the rather complicated matter of motion blur etc.

I had the impression it was done, or could have been done, by means as old as cinematography itself: A simple glass plane at something around 45 degrees in front of the camera. This has been done 100 years ago, and obviously, it still works pretty well. And it saves a ton of time, the videos took me less than an hour, no post production was needed (except for the idiot titles). These videos are right from my amateur digital camera, no image editing done. The orbs are nothing but a primitve Flash animation running full screen on an old 19 inch screen, I think you can even hear me hitting the space button to start the playback.

This, and an amateur-like setting of the camera's white-balance, focus, stupid use of the zoom, lowering the camera before actually turning it off etc. produce a way more "real" feeling than most sophisticated computer animations could do. I couldn't even find a simple glass plate, so I used an opened plastic CD case as a transparent medium to film through.

The only real problem is focus, since the mirrored image of the orbs is very close compared to trees and the sky. This can be solved, in part, by using a bigger glass plane of good quality at larger distance to the lens, which also does not produce two mirror images of the orbs running on a screen left or right of the camera.

And that's when I spotted something quite remarkably in the original ufotheatre video: The zoom and focus issue. Look again at the ufotheatre clip. First, the "mother" orb, is pretty much in focus, because the field of view is very wide, thus eliminating the focus problem. That's normal photographic physics, in a wide shot close and distant objects are more likely to be in focus than in a tele shot. But when they zoom closer, the "mom" orb gets blurry, exactly what I experienced while trying to produce the fakes.



All this is no proof that the ufotheatre thingy was faked, or was faked in the same why I did it, but the zoom issue makes me think that it could have been done exactly that way. There's other possible explanations, but Occam's razor would go for this one, I guess.