Each year, the NBA plays five Christmas Day games where the players all wear special one-game-only Christmas Day uniforms. This spot was released on Thanksgiving to give fans the first peek at the Christmas Day uniforms and to help build anticipation for the five games.

We started with a pre-viz process to figure out which player would shoot to what note/basket and when. The choreography was essential to create something that felt real.

An added complication: not all the players were together on one shoot day and could not be shot on a single green screen. Curry, Harden and Nash were shot together on our main shoot day. Durant, Rose and LeBron were all shot separately. The arena environment is a matte painting.

We used audio cues to prompt the players to take their shots. Each player had an earwig with his individual cue played to him. The audio would prompt them on the time and basket to shoot to. Once we had all the tracks laid out in Pro Tools, the cues were back timed to allow for the time it took each ball to travel to the hoop.

Not surprisingly, the players didn’t make all their shots. But we captured ball elements into each basket from each player, so we could create the seamless action in post.

In the end, all players were rotoscoped and comped into the environment. We found that some speed retiming on the players was necessary for the notes to line up perfectly.

Watch the behind-the-scenes case film for more information.