Easter Break: Matchmove Practice

It escapes my memory as to whether I’ve mentioned this on my blog before, but I’ve decided to focus my specialism in motion tracking. I’ve found that I’m good at it, it’s interesting and fun, and I’m eager to put my best foot forward in the job market as I enter the industry this year. So, while I visited my family in the United States over Easter break, I worked on a project with Dom to refine my matchmove skills and build a solid piece for my showreel.

We chose this shot because it is slightly more challenging, as the camera rotates around the scene, and because it shows a good contrast in depth. As I worked on it, Dom helped me work on some methods to fine-tune my deviation curve, like timeline weight blending and splining. Another big takeaway from this project for me was a better understanding of how to build geo around a tracked scene in Maya. I still need to practice all of the above a few more times, though, in order to really get the process down.

The stage of my process on this practice project so far is placing wireframe cones around the scene to show depth, and my next step will be to add in an animated object- potentially, I’m thinking, a helicopter- in the scene, emerging from the back and landing up at the front, in order to show off the track to the best of my abilities.