Spaceship Into Live Scene

I really enjoyed this part of the process because I knew it would bring my video to a stage where I was near to be complete. For me it is one of the last things to do to make the first park of my film complete. I found playing around with the camera in maya a little tricky but once I got used to what to move and when to move, I was able to animate the camera in the correct way to make it look like the ship is coming from behind the building, over it and then down into the scene. The first shot shows the Rubik Cube (Spaceship) coming from behind the building.



For the second shot I had to change a lot of things to do with the camera to make it look like the spaceship would be a part of the scene. I had to play around slightly with the focal length as the shot goes from around 35mm to about high 20's. This slight change in focal length can make a huge difference in how good the ship looks in the scene. the bit that took me the longest was getting the angle correct and how I would move the camera to make it look like it was following on from the shot before. In this shot the ship is already in the scene so I didn't have to worry about chopping the clip up in after affects to make the rendered sequence of the ship go from behind the masked building to infront. Again it just look a lot of playing around and patience until I got it how I wanted.



To finish the shot off I needed a shadow coming from the cube onto the building on the right. I didn't render out any shadows in maya as I felt like doing the shadow in After Effects would show more skills in the whole process of compositing for this module. If it was more animation based module I would have rendered the shadows out of maya.

I added the shadow by simply creating another layer and adding a circle which would end up being the shadow. I positioned the circle onto the building in the correct postion taking into account the position of the sun and by looking at the tiny shadows coming off the actors. I then masked down the edge of the building and changed the mode to subtract so it chopped off any of the circle that wasn't on the building. I added a fast blur the to circle and then lowered the opacity to make the circle more shadow like. Because the Rubik Cube (Spaceship) is moving constantly, I had to figure out a way of make the circle look like it had some movement. I played around with a few effects in After Effects such as Ripple, Transform and Mesh warp but the one that I got closest with was Wave Warp. I also had to animate the effect by changing the angle of the warp to compensate the movement of the cube.