Previously in my career, I was a senior visual effects artist for Hypgnosis FX in Beaconsfield, Quebec. There, I held several responsibilities and contributed my efforts to several projects. Below, I am showcasing a couple of shots that I tracked, integrated, lit, and rendered the final output in seperate passes for the compositing artists. When these shots were originally created, our studio was using mostly Softimage XSI for the 3d asset creation, and we used boujou to track the film footage. For this demonstration, since I no longer have the original breakdowns, I have recreated the shots using Autodesk Match Mover for the camera tracking since I do not own a license of boujou. Hope you enjoy.

First, I started off by bringing in the footage into Match Mover. The footage had enough high contrast points so I did not need to perform any color correction to get better track markers. After that I masked out the elements in the footage that I did not want the system to track.

After that, I manually tracked high contrast points on the footage, ensuring that the track markers held a stable track with as minimal to no visible slipping in the shot. After that I solved for the camera and created my ground plane in relation to how the imaginary ground plane would have laid in the scene by selecting a few of the tracked points and generating my y-axis up from those three points. After that, we took the tracked and exported the locator nulls and camera data to our 3d application, where we were able to set up the animation, and lighting and rendering for the final shot. Pretty straight forward really.