Our live-action shot featured camera movement: a pan to the right. We now create a camera move in the computer to match the camera move on the set. To help with this, animatics artist Kevin Baillie notes landmarks in the plate shot, then creates generic CG shapes (such as a sphere or a cube) as placeholders to mark their counterparts in the virtual set. In a case such as ours where there are no landmarks to speak of, a specific patch of grass or any other fixed reference point can be used.
Then, by aligning the placeholders to the real reference points over a series of key frames, Kevin marks out the camera move and the computer does the rest, following these markers. The result is a matched camera move. The placeholders can then be switched off.
