How Primitive Building Videos Are Staged

almost every single primitive building channel is underpinned by countless different lies and we've got tons of evidence to prove it now we need to put an emphasis on the fact that this is most primitive building channels and certainly not all of them after sifting through forum post upon forum post about the ways in which these primitive builders lie in order to generate sometimes up to 500 million views per video users continue to mention one name over and over crediting him as legitimate amongst the sea of phonies primitive technology the 10.4 million subscriber channel which is run by an australian named john plant basically invented the primitive construction genre all the way down to the sound design of silence mixed with rainforest noises with primitive technology even stating in a reddit ama that originally it was out of laziness in not putting narration in the videos but then the silent format became popular so i kept it that way when going back to the beginning of these silent relaxing videos it becomes pretty obvious as to why they're credited as seeming pretty legit in terms of authenticity primitive technology cuts no corners in showing how each stage of the construction is completed legitimately for example when examining his very first video he shows the axe had been sharpened a long then being cut by the axe then the logs being crafted together in a way that feels realistic all of this is accompanied by specific captions explaining what's going on in that very moment alongside a full description of the build all the way down to how long the construction process took his builds never includes swimming pools or anything over the top yet feel impressive as they seem to be on the cutting edge of what is and isn't possible to build by hand the legitimacy of some of his more impressive builds such as this brick hut can be supported by youtube comments such as this one which stated i actually know john personally he was a really good friend we live in the same town although i haven't seen him since he went viral i have fond memories of him telling us that he was building huts out bush and had no idea they were so legit before going on to credit him as a pretty authentic guy from a personal relationship standpoint all of this is incredibly important to understand as primitive technologies videos set a baseline for what should and shouldn't be achievable in a natural setting additionally primitive technology has been kind enough to provide us with a statement which will be referred to as we look at the channels on the other end of the spectrum also known as the fakers the fundamental problem with the genre is that with so much time between camera cuts there's plenty of time to set things up illegitimately and with primitive technology's very first video receiving over 44 000 reddit upvotes and 30 million views it's no surprise that copycats with less integrity began to pop up left right and center on these channels the buildings were taller the slides were longer and the water was suspiciously more blue and it's a weird blue color why is it so blue probably because it probably couldn't die or something there's no reason for it to look so blue like that even more interestingly almost all of these channels range from the exact same area being cambodia thailand or vietnam yet often geo-tagged the united states claimed to be living in the united states and have their social blade country set to the united states the overall production and build quality on these channels is arguably far more impressive than the og primitive technology to the point where you have to ask yourself are they really creating these structures out of mud and sticks well when you do a little bit of research the answer to this question is most certainly no the best evidence for this is found when looking at a 5 million subscriber channel called primitive technology idea whose failure to cover up the ways in which they fake their videos make them almost comical to watch take for example this episode titled building underground water maze crocodile to the secret underground house and swimming pool in which the first shot shows two men digging on the surface then in the next frame they're in an eight foot deep trench now if they're digging this deep with sticks how are they avoiding large rocks and potential tree roots from you know the massive line of trees seen just behind them are they being assisted by large machinery well we'll get to that in a little bit but first let's focus on the idea that it's only two people doing these impressively large primitive construction projects if that's what they were attempting to portray it probably would have been best not to include the clip where a guy in a white t-shirt could be seen working on the project in the background yet if it were just these three guys that still wouldn't be that bad however further evidence suggests that they have far more help than this at the start of the week a community post was made on this channel in the hope that someone who'd worked with one of these primitive builders would be willing to share their experience in doing so we received countless emails which were all super helpful yet one email stood out as being incredibly unique that email was incredibly from one of the cameramen who works for one of these larger south east asian primitive building channels his name and the channel he works for have both been blurred out as it'd be a little unfair for him to get in trouble for simply trying to help out but the email began by stating as you may have suspected it's not as streamlined as the video would suggest it is a large operation as you may suspect with a large team of us behind it after we then offered to answer any questions we had about their channel we attempted to figure out how many different people will work on the actual construction part of the project from start to finish to which he would respond it is depending on the scale of the project but no less than one dozen or more before going on to explain that within his team there is a director for the acting done there is also a height architect to obviously make sure the structure will not collapse and will last long enough to film in and obviously afterwards many editors are involved in case an email from someone who works from one of these primitive builders isn't enough evidence it's time to introduce a different channel called photo expression who incredibly stumbled upon one of these primitive construction sites before capturing over eight minutes of footage with a drone we'll refer to different parts of this footage throughout our video but for now it can answer the question of how many people are really working on these sites there's initially a clip where eight different workers can be seen standing around a rectangular hole in the jungle followed by another grainier clip from a far distance where somewhere between 7 and 10 people can be seen building a swimming pool if they were honest about how many people were working on each project it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal but it should be noted that some of these videos specifically state in the description that i've been working hard with my two friends about a hundred days to completely build when in reality it's a whole team working for only three to ten days depending on the project as mentioned in the email response from the cameraman so if they're being untruthful about the time period as well as how many people are working on each project what else are they lying about well how about the incredible fire pits that they seem to create effortlessly going back to the statement made to us by proven technology he seemed to imply that maybe the fire making in their videos was fake it's hardly surprising that he brought this up is when you compare his meticulous method of creating fire in the wild to the fire making of these south east asian primitive channels as mentioned previously it becomes comical they slap a couple of rocks together before beginning an explosive fire on large logs with no kindling whatsoever john went on to state that if they're faked simpler things than they're most certainly faking more complicated ones which turns out to be true as when looking at another video by primitive technology idea it becomes obvious that not only are these guys faking simple things such as fire these guys are also faking the most labor-intensive exercise of all the digging process itself this video with over 63 million views begins as most do a shirtless guy draws a big circle and begins to dig it out only in the next frame suddenly there's spray paint on the ground that they forgot to rub out additionally on the wall of the hole these long smooth cuts can be seen which completely incomparable to the cuts being made by the stick well there's a reason for this turns out spray paint marks weren't the only thing that they forgot to rub out as in the minutes that follow excavated tracks can be seen here here here and here in a different video by the same channel the same person can be seen working very hard digging out a similar hole which to their credit contains no excavator tracks around it one mistake they did make however was that they forgot to take the actual excavator out of the top right hand corner according to the email sent to us by the cameraman one of these channels approximately 70 of the digging is completed by machinery whilst 30 is completed by hand given how much of the work lies in simply digging but men still do plenty of digging as you may guess in small underground spaces it is impossible to fit a skid steer loader in the hole most of the actual construction is done by a high team of specialized builders from my understanding and they work with only intrinsic tools the dirt is removed by skid steer loaders and offloaded elsewhere and skid steer loaders are used in the initial boring process whilst incrementally we filmed the builders doing superficial works on the whole the video in which the excavator can be seen in plain sight then goes on to strangely display the collection of concrete from a river which is the exact same clip we used from the previous video now why would they reuse the same clip twice in two different videos well it's because collecting concrete from a river is completely and utterly bogus concrete doesn't grow in a river according to a civil engineer who had commented on one of these videos earth cement this is incredibly fake cement requires a precise combination of different raw materials and then receives considerable heat treatment in order to make the powder we all know and love slash hate what's even funnier is that every single one of these channels has their own unique method for creating natural concrete this channel's concrete is simply a mix of dirt and water which if you think about it for two seconds doesn't create concrete and rather creates muddy water or mud which is just dirt after the water dries this other channel gets a little bit more creative with it by taking a chunk out of a termite nest grinding it down into powder mixing it with water then concreting an entire pool with this small chunk of termite nest yet neither of these compared to the fakest channel of them all primitive technology life which decides to just skip the concrete altogether and go with good old rocks and dirt however that's not the only suspicious thing about this shot you'll notice when looking at the bamboo that each branch has a suspiciously clean cut on the end compare this to primitive technology the legitimate channel from australia when one video displays what the end of a log should actually look like and you'll notice pretty quickly that these pieces of bamboo weren't naturally cut on site these pieces of bamboo won't either which as displayed in the video were attached together then used to siphon water from a river to the pool only there was no river photo expression found the exact site of this pool then stated in his video that in reality the closest water source was more than six kilometers away instead he found a bunch of blue plastic piping attached to a tap in the ground going back to the email from the cameraman the water for their channel just comes in cubic containers that is transported there a very funny part is any scene where you see them sourcing water from some magnificent waterfall or lake they're actually going somewhere perhaps hundreds of kilometers away and pretending to take it back the video in which photo expression had stumbled upon various completed primitive builds also showed that after these channels are finished building the sites are simply left to rot this video doesn't speak for every southeast asian primitive building channel but in this particular case rubbish was left everywhere including as you might guess cement bags the fact that the videos are fake isn't the most concerning it's the destruction of the land that's concerning now if this was public rainforest you could probably consider this a pretty big deal but according to the cameraman's email at least on their channel every build is done on privately owned land which is leased for the purposes of the video if this is the case maybe photo expression is in the wrong for snooping around and filming on someone else's property we're kidding of course but if the builds are being completed on privately owned land it's a little narcissistic to comment on what they should and shouldn't do with it primitive technology the original legitimate australian channel put it best in his email to us when he said my advice to people who really want to know if the techniques on display are legitimate is to put them into practice and see if you can follow the steps and get a similar result then it's probably legit he added that these corner cutting channels are motivated by money and status alone rather than a true interest in primitive technology but wanting to stay out of internet drama will leave it up to the discerning viewer to decide what's real and what's not

Channel: SunnyV2

Views: 17,979,784

Keywords: primitive technology, primitive life, primitive skills, primitive technology pool, primitive technology weapons, primitive technology fake, primitive survival tool, primitive survival, green text reading, funny, commenta, commentary, commentary channels, poly, polydactyl, primitive, primitive building, survival, survival tech, survival technology, survival builder, survival building, Mr.Heang Update, 100 Days Building A Modern Underground Hut With A Grass Roof And A Swimming Pool

Id: Hvk63LADbFc

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/lolheyaj]

they know they're caught, this isn't the first video on this topic. But they still get millions of views. they won't stop until that stops, which means they probably won't stop.

Edit: not taking sides or saying this shouldn’t be on YouTube. Just that this was already known and hasn’t deterred their popularity. If anything they’ve become more popular since the initial revelation.

[u/GlassPanther]

There are only a handful of legit primitive videos out there.. and the best ones are made by the primitive technologies guy because you can literally watch this fucker build a mansion out of dirt.

[u/jbroost]

Reminds me of all those fake animal rescue videos. Also super staged and so many people somehow manage not to realize it's all being faked.

[u/huxtiblejones]

Man, I was very worried this was gonna dunk on Primitive Technology as a faker and I was pretty depressed. Glad to know he's authentic because his videos are impressive and... therapeutic to watch? There's an entire subreddit called /r/primitivetechnology where people try to do similar stuff to John Plant.

Those other videos are clearly fake, but it's kind of hilarious and sad how many idiots believe them.

[u/RPBN]

This is an untapped gold mine for parody.

​

Get a dinosaur costume for the excavator then have the operator dress up like Fred Flintsone while he digs the hole.

Normal tools with sticks and rocks sloppily duct taped to them.

Cut from the jean short guy furiously digging a hole with a stick to an actual swimming pool in someone's yard.

Randomly add Minecraft digging in the middle of the video for a couple of seconds.

And pointless concrete harvesting from a "concrete bag tree."

[u/Method__Man]

Primitive technology

“Bring in the backhoe”

[u/Honey-Badger]

Whilst this email from the camera man is likely accurate to how these videos are made, it feels weird that there's no evidence presented to say this email is legit. Like, dont get me wrong these primitive tech videos from SEA are obviously fake, I just dont like this debunking video going on about all the evidence he has when his main evidence is 'this guy emailed me saying hes a camera man'

[u/antsugi]

It'd be nice if he stuck to the more compelling evidence that takes 5 minutes to show up instead of an "anonymous tip email" or "friend of good YouTuber" as his introductory argument on legitimacy.

There's plenty of real evidence, just stick with that instead.

This is one of those 10min mark kinda videos

[u/stinkerb]

How they fooled anyone in the first place is mind blowing, let alone 500m people falling for this obvious fake shit.