Animating the end shot

For my last shot my plan was to have my alien character jump onto Jeff, our actress. When it came to creating this animation I realised I would have to find a way of having that section of film footage where Jeff falls over and putting that into Maya. I needed to do this as I couldn't just animate it without having the footage as reference, if I didn't have it the animation wouldn't line up when it came to compositing the two elements together. In order to do this I had to take my video footage and export this out as an image sequence. It's much easier to work with image sequences in Maya than it is video. With this image sequence I then attached this onto an image plane as a shader, I could then adjust the image number attribute (as seen on the left) to delay the start of the image sequence so that my animation would work with it. By doing this I could make sure everything lines up with one another and the timings of both the animation and video are synced with one another. All I would then have to do is line up both together within After Effects.

The screenshot below shows the setup I used within Maya. I made sure that I had my rendercam setup and locked off on the right and my perspective / workcam on the right. This allowed me to move around in the world space but also see the effects within the camera view. Because of the way Jeff falls it was hard to animate the movement of my alien, it couldn't achieve and nice full arc. This wasn't Jeff's fault as we couldn't really have someone running and pushing her over at force because she might hurt herself and the crash mat we had wasn't anything substantial, instead she fell over in a way that she felt comfortable with and even so it's a good enough performance. The arc may not be there but I made sure the rest of the animation was up to scratch.

It was suggested that maybe I move the alien back, towards the right to give it more space to jump, however the previous shot shows the alien jumping up close to the camera so by having the alien further away from Jeff it wouldn't make much sense and there would be a delay in the time it takes for the impact. It's not perfect but I still think it fine, you have to adapt and work with what you are given with and I feel like I've done my best with it. In post I will go in and mask out one of Jeff's legs in order to bring it infront of the alien and also add in a shadow for when the alien jumps onto her. This will make the character sit better into the scene, rather than just looking like a 2D image.