Viral videos aren't only about achieving an artist's vision; they also serve economic needs. After all, ad payments are falling apart, and there are more restrictions on allowed content. One of the most popular genres is that of impossible shots, ranging from tiny paper balls to basketballs. Some of those shots are legitimate, accomplished only after weeks of practice, but the channel of Captain Disillusion explains that most are fake and easy to fabricate.
A twelve- or thirteen-year-old stands in the middle of a basketball court, turns his back to the hoop, takes the shot, the ball goes in, and he starts screaming as if it were the greatest achievement of his young life. The video ends up on YouTube, and four or five million views later, he decides to turn that into a mini career. Sounds great, right? Of course, there's a small detail: the shot is completely fake. The kid isn't a latent basketball legend, but rather has some video editing skill, something anyone can learn in a matter of months. While there are legitimate channels that pull off amazing shots (like Dude Perfect with 21 million subscribers), the rest present us with an illusion, and no one better than Captain Disillusion to break it down:
The videos are divided into three basic components: a clean shot from a stationary angle with little movement in the background, the filming of the first shot (the ball is digitally erased), and the recording of a correct shot from close range that respects the original angle. If in the first shot the ball leaves the frame upward, all you have to do is join both videos. If conditions are more adverse, the process requires generating a spherical map, a basketball, and even a net, whose movements can be simulated. The last step is to animate the ball's transition (real-digital-real), or why not, directly animate it from start to finish.
Then there's the other route... which is practice. Captain Disillusion reduces it to time, effort, and probability. One of the problems with impossible shot videos is that they don't represent the success rate, and we only see the final result, processed and digested. Captain Disillusion helps us break with that by sharing a 21-minute video that shows the 37 attempts he needed to get the ball into the cup. If you have enough patience, who knows? You could be the next big YouTube star... for a week or less.
