Fantasy Football ads dissected

I am a big fan of creative commercials, especially ones with technical feats that make you go "how did they do that?". Being in the visual effects industry and having worked on set for some visual effects shots by ILM, I try to dissect the videos to determine which techniques they used based on my own experiences. Some of the more interesting commercials (which really don't sell anything) are the Fantasy Football ones where players do outrageous feats (yet they could be "real" with enough skill and a lot of luck) in order to convince you to choose them from your fantasy team. Here are a selected few, see if you can figure them out:


I had my guesses on a few, and it turns out I wasn't far off. Once you figure out how they hand the balls in and hide the transitions it really isn't that difficult. Surprisingly, not as many virtual balls were used as I expected (ILM can create fake hand-held balls that you would not be able to tell the difference, but here all balls in hand are real). Here are the same commercials dissected:



Fascinating!

I was considering adding a sports category to my blog, but it seems my only sports posts tend to be funny commercials or science rants...