Even if you are not a professional basketball player, you can still manage to score in a basket with an “impossible” shot. Thanks to Kdenlive, of course, with makes it possible to draw the trajectory of a ball while editing the movie.
Sometimes the special effects are not needed to show something absurd or incredibly imaginative, but only something very realistic but difficult to obtain. For example, when launching an object into reality it is not really easy to imprint the trajectory we have in mind. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that before getting the desired result it may be necessary to repeat the throw dozens of times. To make a metaphor, the illusionist Derren Brown a few years ago had presented a movie in which, without the camera ever changing the frame, he was seen throwing a coin in the air 10 times, obtaining for all ten consecutive times the side of head. The trick consisted in the fact that the movie, although authentic, was presented as an “experiment” made on the spot, while in reality the video was made after a week of shooting in which for several hours a day the illusionist did nothing else than tossing the coin until it got heads at least 10 times in a row. In short, just because something is difficult or improbable does not mean that it is impossible. It is precisely this type of event that, in the films, most affects viewers. In fact, surreal events are clearly fake and the brain of the spectators, deep down, cannot really believe it. Instead, a realistic event, though unlikely, can easily deceive the public’s brain, making them wish that what is seen has actually happened. One of the most common situations is the throwing of an object, for example a ball. How many times does it happen to see a film (usually American) in which a person manages to send a ball into a basket with an “impossible throw”? Maybe the actor is turned from behind or blindfolded, and must throw the ball without even being able to see the basket. But the ball will enter the net anyway, in order to carry on the story. How can we make this little magic ourselves? With Kdenlive, of course. All we need is a video in which the actor, in the position where he must actually be, throws the ball. Obviously, in this movie the ball will go haphazardly and will not enter the basket, but it does not matter. In fact, then we will make a second movie, with the exact same shot, but in which the actor is in a much more comfortable position to throw the ball exactly inside the basket. Kdenlive will then allow us to combine the two films so that the final result begins with the first of the two films: as soon as the ball begins to come out of the trajectory that we imagined, we will make the ball disappear by replacing it with that filmed in the second shot we made ( or the one where the ball really enters the basket). Of course there will be a couple of frames in which we had to completely erase the ball, because it was not possible to use his images from the first video or those of the second. In these frames, which should not take more than half a second, we can reconstruct the movement of the ball to join the two movies using the Kdenlive composite transition. As always, you can see the example video at the following address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ia2nDFlKGg

Times for shooting moving objects
There are two possibilities when you want to shoot fast moving objects like flying basketballs. One consists in the use of very short times to perfectly capture the position of the ball, the other consists in the use of relatively slow times to obtain a blur effect of the object. In our case, the second is preferable: not only will the object appear faster, but it will also be easier to merge the two videos, because nobody will be able to recognize the differences between the ball between one movie and the other. Let’s not forget, among other things, that the international film standard provides 24 progressive frames per second (i.e. 24p digital). Eventually 25 frames, if we want to keep the PAL system, even if the distinction between 24 and 25 frames per second no longer has reason to exist today. So by filming at 50 or 60 fps and editing the video with one of these frequencies, we can then slow down the final result up to 50% to obtain a pleasant slow motion.
Let’s get help from a guide
Kdenlive allows us to fix a guide so as not to lose the reference on the timeline


Let’s prepare an image of the ball
We use GIMP to obtain a clean image of the ball that will have to fly




Let’s hide the ball
Before redesigning the trajectory of the ball, we must clear it




Let’s merge the two routes together
We filmed two different trajectories of the ball: it’s time to connect them



