Woah: A Lil Ballas Social Distance Dance

If you’ve ever been to a Raptors home game, you’ve probably been lucky enough to witness the Lil Ballas.

With the NBA season on hold due to COVID-19, the Lil Ballas have been unable to perform for their fans. So they got together over Zoom and put together this killer routine. I was brought on board to help take each individual dancer’s performance and combine them together into a finished routine that helps to showcase just what makes these kids so insanely talented.

With footage from 15+ dancers, I knew I was going to have a challenge on my hands. I also knew I was going to have to incorporate a number of split-screens for the job, and that resizing and individually placing each shot would take hours. Thankfully I had just the plugin for the job: Hawaiki AutoSplit. It made setting up and adjusting all my split screens an absolute breeze. And once I had everything roughed in, I was even able to use its built in animation tools to help make all the split screen sections really pop. What would have taken me days of work before now only took a few hours. Not only that, thanks to the powerful render engine in Final Cut Pro, I ran into very few performance issues, despite cutting on a 7-year old MacBook Pro.

Special thanks to Courtney Drake for bringing me on board.

We the North!