http://www.break.com/index/extreme-catapulting.html

the kid gets launched straight up…? Highly unlikely
The guy in the crane didn’t see him.
Also the sign that says ‘Lebensgefahr” (Life Threatening) looks a bit like a xerox copy on a stick.
I say fake.

Also, wouldn’t enough force to launch the guy that fast (and high enough to deploy a parachute!) probably break his legs?  If that happened, a lot of the force would be absorbed and he probably wouldn’t fly very high at all.

Basically, a human body isn’t such a great projectile!  The world record holder for the human cannonball stunt (usually uses a platform that pushes him up with a spring or compressed air, but has a much longer acceleration time inside the “cannon” tube than this lever) is 185 ft 10 in.  And that’s distance, not a straight vertical shot.

Yeah.. I’ll put that one in as faked.. Some bits of it look just a bit too posed, etc..  forget his body being able to sustain that, the apparatus is extremely flimsy. And blah blah blah.. no, it just doesn’t work on many, many levels.

The size of the board and the weight dropping could launch something as high as that.
But as it was said, the fellows knees would buckle easy.

And any miscalculation would send him flying in an un-predictable location. Not straight up.

Besides, the attempt to localize yourself (perfectly) under an earth pounding machine is just foolish.
It can fall at an unpredictable location… besides, don’t those machines generally move as they are packing down earth?

Rather silly video, when I saw him launch I knew it was fake, it looked to animated or “Added” if you will.

As for Tobesters claim the sign is fake. I would not be shocked if it was a real sign. For more desolate places in the world looking to develop, they need to cut costs any way possible, and seeing as they had a so called “Ranger Tower” there, it would not be a shocker if a paper sign was posted up. Besides, it rather obvious that there is construction… tho it is many meters (or even a KM or 2) away.

But if they can fake something like this, then I am sure they are able to put background footage in front of real footage, thus to make the sign look real.

Really for this to work, it would have to be a flexible board quite long. The flex would absorb most of the shock, the end result would not look as spectacular (at first), but it would send someone quite high without damaging their legs. The direction of going straight up tho, I don’t see that happening.

you’re seriously discussing whether this is real?

Very simple physics.  The acceleration would be too much to handle for a human being. I guess it would be about the same as if he jumped down from the height the weight propels him to (without a parachute).
It looks like a fun little video project.
This goes into the same category as the train looping http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvyupNXK-4A

fakefakefakefakefakefake

Well, a person can survive a rather surprisingly high amount of sudden acceleration.  Note that “survive” does not necessarily mean “exist in a happy and healthy manner”; at the very least he’d probably have blacked out and be one giant walking bruise for weeks after.  He’d need to have some sort of an automated parachute deployment, since he wouldn’t be in any condition to pull the cord himself.  Then there’s the little minor problem of him looking to be a bit too low for a parachute to properly deploy in time to slow him appreciably and keep him from smashing into the ground at high speed. . .

We don’t see any evidence that the guy actually survives the whole thing, after all.

But that’s all not really important, anyway, since the catapult’s arm was too short and everything was too flimsy and wouldn’t have launched him much in the first place.

fake i say!