I’m eating lunch at the kitchen table with a video playing on my phone. A whole miniature city is built on a studio floor, with a blue screen behind it and a crew working cameras on long booms. A voice shouts “action,” and a model plane plunges into a harbor in a ball of fire. The caption says this is how Hollywood makes its disaster movies.

I love this kind of thing, and I’m ready to send it to my brother. Then I notice that every person on the crew looks exactly the same.

So I looked into it. Here’s what I found.

Those Movie ‘Behind-the-Scenes’ Clips of Tiny Cities Being Blown Up? There’s No Movie Set

AI-GENERATED — A crew of lookalikes and a model plane hanging from strings.

In August 2026, Lead Stories warned about a wave of viral videos that claim to take viewers behind the scenes of a movie’s special effects. They show a big set with a blue or green screen, lights rigged overhead, and a detailed small-scale city or landscape in the middle. A crew works cameras on booms and tracks while technicians set off explosions, a wave pool, or an earthquake, and a voice shouts the kinds of things a director would say, like “action” and “cut.”

Most of these videos are not real. Lead Stories found that many were made with AI, and that they do not show real people working on a real movie set. One TikTok video from Aug. 6 shows a fiery plane crash into a harbor on takeoff. Another from Aug. 12 uses a split screen to show both the finished scene and the blue screen it supposedly came from, and the split screen itself is fake.

The videos give themselves away. Things pop in and out of existence: in one tanker-crash clip, a sports car appears from the rubble, and the big red truck cab vanishes when the tanker explodes. In the plane-crash clip, a police boat with flashing lights suddenly flies through the air and splashes into the miniature harbor. The crew members look identical in clothing, build, and face, and many just stand around looking busy. The audio is staged too, with a realistic jet-engine roar for a model plane that is simply hanging from strings.

The accounts behind the clips show signs of a production line. Their thumbnails look alike, as if made from the same prompt, and their themes change with whatever is trending. One account posted animated fruit characters, then videos about parents of toddlers, before switching to special effects. Another posted “insect wars,” soccer stars, superheroes, and matchstick art that goes up in flames.