PEG Creative Director, Jeffrey Pritt, walks through how our team used After Effects to create a trick golf shot for a Veroot Brand Video.

Video Transcript: 

Hey everyone, and welcome to another edition of How It's Made!

Today, we're going to be looking at one of those fun situations where we truly did have to "fix it in post." I'll start by showing you the end result clip here:

“At Veroot, we created a vendor management platform designed to meet all your needs. No other software could handle collecting and—”

And one more time:

“At Veroot, we created a vendor management platform designed to meet all your needs. No other software could handle collecting and managing.”

Cool! I’d say that’s a pretty neat-looking end result shot there. So let’s take a look at how we made it.

In this case, the original script in the video actually called for the ball to completely miss the hole. It was supposed to be a comedic relief moment, where our on-camera actor here—well, I could just show you the original. The actor is supposed to come into frame, hit this ball, and it’s supposed to completely miss the hole.

Basically, he’s the last person, full of confidence, trying to hit the ball one-handed—and then totally misses.

Well, afterward, we were asked whether or not we could actually make the ball go into the hole. The master shot didn’t include that, and it wasn’t in the script, but we decided to take a crack at it—and we managed to make it work.

So let me show you how we did it.

First things first, we had to do some pretty complex tracking—primarily of the floor—to get as many points as we needed. This is actually a dolly shot, and we were trying to do motion tracking on top of that, so it took a while to get the perfect track points.

You can see some of the tracking data used here—very complex. You’ll see it down in this bottom area: it’s a multi-point track. So yeah… lots of fun.

Next, we had to make some layers to cover up the ball when it passed beneath them. You can see there’s a floor patch down here that fills in one part where the ball rolled through—that exists to cover a small area at the bottom. There’s also another patch area here that shows the main part of the hole.

And then, of course, we needed the ball itself. So we cut out the ball, and we also added a shadow for the ball. You can’t really see it on black, but it is there.

Essentially, we placed the ball over itself for the first part of the clip. Then, when the ball rolls into this portion of the clip, what we do is have it duck underneath those cover layers. From there, we can make the ball go wherever we want it to go.

In this case, we had it curve back—something that would be pretty much impossible in real life—and drop into the hole. So, our actor, who was supposed to be missing the shot, now looks superhuman.

It’s a different kind of funny. Instead of a total miss, he’s just so good that he can make the ball navigate back into the hole, even when it’s about to roll away.

And that’s really all there is to it. That’s a simplified explanation of a long motion tracking process—we won’t go too deep into that.

Let’s just say: this is one of those times when fixing it in post really did save the day.

Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of How It’s Made with PEG. See you next time!