Special Effects Question

[irishmark]

If you shoot it all really tight and quick you can make it appear to pot all the balls.
The key things that need to be seen are: The initial ipmact iof the white on the pack of balls.
Then shoot each ball being pumelled in to pockets individually (you dont wanna see the white in these - maybe one of them)
Cut it all really tight and it should work -

If you want a wide shot of tghe white potting all the balls - the only thing i can suggest would be a doctored table with magnetic balls and a seiries of magnets under the table - like ur budget can stretch that far!!!!

[Alan Mills]

I just picked up on this thread and here's one simple way I can think of to try doing it. Simple in the technique but I suspect it will bed extremely hard to get it to look convincing.

Film your dude (or dudette) cueing on the pool table with no balls at all.

Take a still picture of each ball that should be on the table, making sure they have an alpha channel background. Import them all into your NLE of choice. Place each image in a layer of its own. then simple animate each layer independently using standard pip techniques.

The ball won't be animated as such and so will not have a convincing 'roll' to them. But if you a UK style pool table the balls have no stripes anyway

If that is no good for you then I suspect you are looking at serious 3D animation using somethign like Maya and then compositing in AE. Give my version a try though, no extra s/w to buy.

remember, I'm just thinking out loud here and haven't tried this in any way, shape or form.

[flamingbs]

You could film the hit in slow motion so it doesn't displace the balls too much, then speed it up in your editing software of choice. Then from there, you could stop-motion all the balls rolling to their respective holes... if it was played quick then it might look ok, especially if you use a fast motion filter so the cuts between the movements aren't clearly defined.

Just another idea.

[CJ-real]

If its possible you can get them to go in and patch it over