Watermelon Mirror Trick by Zach King (Recreated in Premiere Pro)

Visual effects or Magic?

If you are new to filmmaking or not you probably know Zach King. He is a VFX magician or as he calls it himself "digital sleight of hand" He started back in the day when Vine was still alive and build his empire out to what it is today. He's videos are always amazing to watch but brain braking to figure out. Zach his cuts are visually invisible and his loops are so clever its always fun to see his new content.

3D vs pracitcal

We strongly belief he used a 3D model of a watermelon to pull of this trick. The moment he goes to the mirror he adds a 3D model in the reflection and so he has a whole fruit when he pulls it out. We are new to 3D and only had 3 days to do this so we decided to do it different. Besides this we try to do everything in Premiere Pro so challenge accepted!

For this practical effect we tried to push ourself. This effect you can easily do with a jump cut BUT we choose not to. We believe this effect is even more impressive slowly instead of doing it fast to hide the cut with your movement/motion blur. So here is how we did it!

For our first shot Lorenzo just acted the whole scene out from the point where the invisible transition ends. But before we put the ball on the table we drop the one in our hand. Grabbed the ball on the table and acted the rest of the scene out.

For our second shot we placed the mirror on the table and again Lorenzo acted the scene out to catch the reflections. Once the ball is on the mirror he froze his actions and Yannick took away the ball. So when Lorenzo removes his hands you see there is no ball left anymore.

Now you just stitch these shots together, add some camera movement into the shot and there you go! Zack Kings Watermelon mirror trick!

Storyblocks

This video was sponsored by Storyblocks. It’s an enormous online library full of high quality HD and 4K stock clips, After Effects templates, collections and much more. We use the library on a weekly base to download overlay effects, like smoke, dust particles, flares,… You can download an unlimited amount of clips for only one price per year so it’s super useful to have.