PEG Creative Director, Jeffrey Pritt, walks through how our team used After Effects to create some special lighting effects in the Vegas Golden Knights Intro Video.

Video Transcription:

Hey everyone, and welcome to How It’s Made, where we walk you through some of the techniques we use to create the looks and effects you see in our final products.

Let’s take a look at what we’re going to be exploring today.

Pretty cool-looking, right? Let’s take a look at it one more time.

Alright, well, it obviously doesn’t look like that when it comes off the camera—so let’s walk through how we created some of those looks.

We’ll start with the shot of the Luxor.

To begin, we’ll jump into our Luxor composition. Here we’ve got two layers, and one of those is a composition full of many other layers. Let’s dive into that and begin at the bottom.

First up: the raw clip straight off the camera. We shot this on our RED at 5K resolution. To accomplish the movement, our team actually filmed it from an elevator on the side of the Delano, looking toward Vegas. That elevator ride gave us a sort of fake jib effect, which looks pretty cool.

This version has already been color graded, so now we’re ready to start adding effects.

Obviously, the beam isn’t something that came out of the camera, so let’s add that in.

To begin, we track an object in the scene—the focal object here being the Luxor itself. We need to find a high-contrast area that’s not moving, like the tip of the pyramid. The sides have lighting that changes, which wouldn’t work well for tracking, and the darker sections don’t give us enough contrast.

So we track the tip and use that to create a reference point that we can link other layers to. You can see it tracing along with the movement.

From that tracker layer, we’ve created the beams that go up the sides. These are the beams you see in the final clip, creeping up and down the edges of the pyramid.

To do this, we used a plugin for After Effects called Saber. Saber is fantastic for creating energy effects and beam lighting. With a combination of Saber and some additional effects layered and composited together, we created this nice orange glow. It matches the Luxor’s color scheme while looking like lightning or high energy.

These beams rise to the top of the pyramid—and at that point, we wanted a big, strong beam to emerge from the top, as if all the energy had combined into a single massive pulse.

We accomplished that using another layer: Luxor Beam Top. This also uses Saber, plus some other compositing effects, to give us that large beam shooting from the top.

At first, it didn’t look quite right—the tip of the pyramid didn’t seem to be reacting to the energy buildup. So, we added:

• An orange tip layer to colorize the top of the Luxor and match the beam color.

• A glow layer to simulate light emission from the energy pulse.

These additions help sell the idea that all the energy is converging and bursting from the tip.

You’ll also see a point light layer. It’s not used for illumination but rather as a reference object. By linking a lens flare to that light and using some other plugins, we create a big glare element on the left and right of the frame. Because it’s parented to the tracker, it moves convincingly—just like you’d expect when pointing a camera at something as bright as the sun.

This effect mimics the kind of lens flaring and dirty lens textures you’d see on a lower-end consumer camcorder—another way to make it feel more real and grounded.

But the sequence still lacked that impact. It kind of fizzled out instead of delivering a punch.

To fix that, we added a layer that creates a ripple and bulge effect around the edges. You can see it better frame-by-frame—it’s the kind of thing you’ll see in movies when there’s an energy pulse. It visualizes that burst effectively.

Even then, we wanted more punch. So, going back to our main comp, we added:

• Position keyframes to simulate a handheld shake—like the camera was reacting to a shockwave.

• A light adjustment layer to simulate the city's lighting reacting—flickering on and off with the pulse.

That combination gave us the dramatic moment we were looking for.

Many of these same techniques are used throughout the rest of the Vegas sequence.

Let’s look quickly at the New York New York shot.

Here we’ve got the Statue of Liberty. It starts as a simple tilt-up, also shot on RED. We added a tracker at the tip of the torch, and a reference light just like before. Then we layered on another light shine effect, added some dust and lens artifacts, and boom—you’ve got a huge bright light source bursting from the torch.

Same thing with the Paris shot. We used the Eiffel Tower base, did some color correction, added reference flares, flickering lights, and simulated handheld movement to give it that amateur, documentary-style look.

Now the Bellagio—this one was a little trickier.

Initially, it looked fine. But if you look closer at the raw clip, you’ll notice:

• The “A” has lights out.

• A strip light on the right side is completely dark.

The more we looked at it, the more it bugged us. So, we had to fix it.

Shoutout to Amanda Ake from our team who painstakingly handled the building "maintenance" in post.

Here’s what she did:

• Toned down the building’s saturation for consistency with the other scenes.

• Used light filler layers to patch the right side light strip. We copied a working section, mirrored it, and blended it over the broken area.

• Rebuilt the “A” using four layers—two to fix light spill, and two with matched typefaces to restore the lettering perfectly.

With those on, it looks flawless. Turn them off? Not so much.

We also added light fillers to the top of the tower, simulating an energy ball inside. Combined with radial blur, it makes the windows blow out, as if something is glowing intensely from within.

Then, the lens flare layers—customized to match the dirty look from earlier shots but still keeping the overall aesthetic consistent.

We also reused our tracker and reference light combo, along with the position shakes and flickering lights, just like in the other clips.

All together, it looks like the Bellagio was fully lit, pulsing with energy—just like the rest of the Vegas Strip—as it joins in celebrating the Vegas Golden Knights on their opening night.

So that’s that. Similar techniques across the sequence help keep it visually unified, but we also varied our execution to suit each scene’s needs. From fixing architectural lighting, to color grading across multiple camera systems, to simulating high-energy pulses—we brought it all together to deliver a powerful visual piece.

Thanks for letting us show you some of the techniques we used to create this great piece for our friends at the Vegas Golden Knights. See you next time!