If you edit videos with Premiere but you stay away from After Effects because you think it's too complicated, I want to show you how easy it is to create a Back To The Future hoverboard effect in only a few steps.

We've got two clips shot using Premiere Clip on an iPhone and imported into After Effects using my Creative Cloud account. The clip of the skateboarder is foreground, and the one without is background. And to work on them, we'll need to add them to a comp by dragging them to the comp icon, choosing single composition, and make sure sequence layers is turned off.

Now we have a comp with a movie of a skateboarder stacked on top of a clean background. These are shot with a tripod to make sure they're steady from shot to shot, which will be important for this effect. To turn a skateboard into a hoverboard, we have to chop off the wheels. So I'm going to use a track matte where we create a mask on one layer that follows the wheels, then use that shape to punch a hole in our skateboard layer, erasing the wheels.

I'll start with a new solid. We'll call it matte. Color doesn't matter. The size just needs to be big enough to cover what we want to remove and small enough to see what we're doing. I'll use the pen tool to draw a mask on the solid following the bottom edge of the skateboard and including any obvious shadows we want to remove. I'll draw a rough bean shape, then adjust with the arrow tool until I'm covering the wheels and the shadow. Good enough for now. We'll fine-tune this later.

Next we track the skateboard, which we want to do from the first frame. We'll use After Effects motion tracker to analyze the scene and generate motion key frames for us automatically, then apply them to the solid so it moves with the skateboarder. One important step—the solid will attach to the tracker data using its anchor point, which is currently the center point of our solid here. We need to move that to the point where the wheels meet the skateboard, because that's going to be our target in the tracker.

The quickest way is to use our anchor point tool and just drag the anchor where we want it. Once we've done that, click on the foreground layer with the skateboarder, then go to the tracker panel and choose track motion. See these two squares and the little plus sign? The inner square should surround the thing we want to track. Let's pick the angle where the wheels meet the skateboard. After Effects tracker loves right angles. The outer square will define the search area from frame to frame. We'll make that a little bit bigger. And the plus sign defines the point where the solid will attach which happens to be where we just set the anchor point a second ago. Remember?

And now we track. Solid arrows track forward and backward as quickly as possible, and the outer arrows track a frame at a time. If the tool loses track, just click again to stop, go back a couple frames, adjust the tracker again, and continue the track until we're finished. Once that's done, click edit target. Choose our matte layer, then click apply, accept the defaults in this next window, and the solid is now following our skateboard.

The track looks good, but the skateboarder gets bigger as he gets closer. So we need to solid to get bigger too. So we're going to animate the scale of the object. Select the solid, twirl open its transform properties, find scale, and on the first frame turn on the stopwatch to enable animation for scale and also set our first key frame. Now we move towards the end of the comp. Now we make the shadow bigger by increasing the scale value, just scrubbing the numbers herein the scale property. Now you can see the shape both scales and follows the position of our source. Once we're happy with the track, we want to punch a hole in the foreground layer using the matte. To do that, we make sure we can see our layer modes in the timeline, select our foreground layer, and under the track matte column choose alpha inverted matte. This uses the transparency of the layer above the selected layer, inverts it, and uses that for new transparency on our foreground layer, effectively punching a hole. We're getting there. The wheels are gone, but we can see a hard edge from our mask shape. Fortunately, we can use our mask feather tool to soften the side edges of our matte while keeping the top edge sharp.

Now all we need to do is to add a fake shadow to sell the effect. I'll use the same steps we used to generate the track matte, to make a shadow shape, and soften the edges, then set the layer mode to multiply and set the transparency down until it looks good for our scene. Once we have it looking good, I'll use the parenting tab in the timeline to attach our shadow to our matte. Now the shadow inherits the position and the scale of our tracked solid and follows our hoverboard. And we have a finished effect.