On rewatching, the main thing that makes me question its veracity is the fact that the men all seem to be acting as if this is the first time they’ve plotted the stunt. Had they acted as if this were something they’d practiced for months and finally perfected, it would have given it a lot more credibility. Instead, they look like a bunch of goons standing around saying… hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…
Here’s what convinces me it’s fake. Go to the frame where her feet are just entering the basket, and play backwards slowly from there to the top of her arc (it helps if you right-click on the flash and choose “zoom in” so you get finer control over the slider). Go smoothly back and forth between her feet going in the basket and the top of the arc, and get a feel for the trajectory she’s traveling on. It ends up appearing that if you played it backwards, she would end up landing on the left side of the hoop. Now continue running it backwards and watch the continuation. At the top of the arc, she suddenly changes direction in midair and goes drastically to the right, where she is “caught” by the throwers.
There’s just no way that trajectory could be real. It’s like she’s thrown right-to-left, and she lands moving left-to-right (or straight down at best, but definitely not right-to-left). Maybe there’s a stiff wind in the gym. 
Galt’s visual interpretation of her flight path assumes that her center of mass is in her gym shorts. If you assume it is in her chest, it doesn’t look that way.
I believe that they really threw her in that arc, but I don’t believe the basket was there when they did it. The proof is that the backboard doesn’t move, as bnorton said.
Lots of assumptions here that it’s an actual basketball hoop which reacts the way a regulation basketball hoop reacts. Couldn’t it be a larger-than-regulation hoop made out of stiff rubber? No danger to the girl, and she’d fit through fine. Wouldn’t make a metallic thud, either. Heck, it might not even actually be attached to the backboard. Could be on wires. Cheaper than CGI. It’s too far above their heads to rule out a forced perspective shot.
Just because the camera is steady and the sound sucks doesn’t mean there’s not more special effects than Peter Jackson fantasy camp.
No, it doesn’t. I’m looking at the overall mass. If you draw vertical lines at her left and right extremities in certain frames (the ones where she’s oriented longways such that the lines aren’t very far apart), you can define a fairly small range that her CG must be within, and this range moves in strange ways…
Fake.
The guy “testing the wind” with his finger is rather contrived, but what really convinced me was the ease with which this could be done, requiring one tiny, easy piece of Photoshopping in one single frame.
I think the guys threw the girl up and down in front of the hoop, and some simple mechanism for someone else to remotely ‘twitch’ the netting on the way down was enacted (eg. a simple piece of string). Then, in the frame where her feet are just past the hoop, the line of the hoop is digitally placed in front of her feet, which would take all of ten minutes and a few pixels.
And yes, this is an advert for crying out loud.
In fact, watching it again, the very fact that the hoop is clearly defined in that frame convinces me that’s what’s been done, since in the frames immediately before and after, the hoop is blurred due to the camera panning.
WhyNot makes a good point - I’ve been wondering about the possibility of digital manipulation; I haven’t considered a phony rubber hoop, sized larger-than-normal, which would certainly address the accident concerns…
Maybe, but that’s still rather a lot of effort to go to. The more I see it the more I think she’s simply in front of a normal hoop which has been digitally manipulated on just one or two frames - on one of them she is clearly skightly bigger than the hoop. The net itself also doen’t seem to ‘oscillate’ properly after she’s supposedly passed through it - it twitches and then stays absolutely still.
But in that blurred frame the hoop is still clearly in front of the cheerleader.
It’s looks like a stupid thing to attempt for real (not that people don’t do stupid things). I’m not even sure such a stunt would be possible, how would you aim, would a small person fit through a hoop ?
I’m torn, but I think it’s fake, to my mind something looks ‘wrong’ with the video from where she straightens out to where she’s caught. I can’t quite put my finger on what, maybe the speed it happens at doesn’t fit, I dunno.
SD
The one immediately following, with her head at hoop level? I’d beg to differ - the whole region is blurred, such that the hoop could be behind her head but appear otherwise given that the frame covers an extended period of time. And again, in that frame parts of her body like her upper back are so far to the left of the hoop that they simply could not have passed through it.
I can stop it on three frames, one with the hoop at ankle level, one at mid-calf level and one at head level. The first two have the hoop in front, but the second one is blurred. The third one is the one you refer to and is too blurred to make out much.
Yup, and her position in the air changes very fast during that part too. You know, maybe that sequence feels ‘wrong’ cos they had to edit out a frame where she was clearly not going through the hoop. Maybe there’s a frame missing between the second and third frames I described.
Ah, yes, I was missing one! Still, again it seems little trouble to merge a frame of her in that position with a still of the hoop (notice something extremely strange going on with the pixels immediately below the white of the board) or just blur in a few red pixels - note that there are only three crucial frames here, and the digital jiggery pokery would take less than an hour. The only difficult part is getting her to descend in the vicinity of the hoop.
What everybody has failed to notice is this:
She looks hot, doesn’t she?
I’m thinking fake, but it’s very hard to tell because the clip has been compressed all to hell, so you can’t freeze frame much. My first impression is that the height of the throw looks out of proportion. If that’s a standard basketball hoop, it should be 10’ off the ground. They fling the young lady much higher than that. Given that she has time for a flip at the top, and then apparently comes down straight through the basket, I’d say that they’d have to have flung her up to at least 18-20 feet. (Assuming this is real time, someone with more energy than I have could use a stopwatch and see how long it takes her to fall and calculate the actual height.) That seems awfully high. Maybe not out of the question, but awfully high. If they were actually a few feet in front of the hoop, the height would be less.
In addition, the backboard should be six feet wide if I’m reading the standards correctly. The girl looks like a little slip of a thing, but as she’s coming out of the flip, she’s almost horizontal and appears to be the full width of the backboard. Again, if the group was actually a few feet in front of the hoop and the action was shot with a long tele, that’s pretty much what I’d expect to see.
Who said we didn’t notice? We’re just restrained, y’know, real gents, … :0
How many points do you get for sinking a cheerleader?
I agree with galt. I don’t think her center of mass follows the proper trajectory in that clip. I believe they really threw her, but that the hoop and the background are superimposed, so that her motion relative to them is what it needed to be to make it look like she went through the hoop, rather than what it really should be.
Also, hitting a metal hoop at that speed should hurt her a lot worse than what they show. And as people have said, they’d be stupid to risk injuring her when the whole thing can be easily faked with computers. Yes, people can be stupid, but surely the company’s lawyers would warn them against attempting a stunt like this for real.
A basketball rim is 18" in diameter.
Fake. There’s no way it’s real unless they’ve replaced the hoop with an ellipse. Human bodies are substantially wider than they are deep, and in the clip we’re seeing her body from the side.