Gijs,
I’ve done a little bit of matchmoving before – actually filming in a green soundstage with markers and moving the motion data over. This was a no-budget compromise 
If the characters were to be visible in anything other than pure silhouette, I couldn’t have gotten away with the methods I used this time – particularly the red wall I shot on. The key and lighting were positively disgusting, but the characters were so small that it turned out alright at the 852x480 resolution I’m working at.
In terms of technique, I’d never try to pull a foreground or hero key on a real (ie paying) production from DV footage… that whole time=money thing. I’d probably shoot in HD/HDV on a soundstage with markers and actually track them because a day’s rate for a camera, lighter and stage will save a ton of headache in the long run.
For this piece, the dolly/crane move was so smooth in the previz that we rehearsed a few times while watching the previz loop on my laptop screen and did three takes of each of the actors (my friend Jeff, and myself as the driver).
Once the keys were pulled in After Effects, I exported them as RGB and Alpha TIFF sequences and created a surface shader node in maya that I attached everything up to – including a brightness/contrast slider node so I could ride the brightness and black point depending on distance from camera. Maya Surface shaders don’t react to scene lighting, but they can cast shadows (which is all I was really interested in anyhow).
I then attached the cards to the center pivot points in the carriage file (it’s a run-in place file that’s referenced in to my master scene), animated the horse rearing in time with the actor and brought that in to my master scene.
From there I constrained the Y-axis on the cards to point at the camera at first, baked the rotation into keys (as a starting point) and deleted almost all of them so I could hand tune the actor’s apparent mass based on what the camera was actually seeing.
I had thought about matchmoving the cards in Shake or After Effects but I wanted them to throw decent shadows … so it had to be in 3D.
You might check into a piece of software called Boujou if you’re interested in doing tracking in a Max workflow – Boujou’s (in my opinion) the best tracking software out there and it works with Max, Maya and others.
If you have any other questions, let me know!
–T
) awesome & amazing! 
Really cool to see you using that ‘alternative motion-controlled-camera method’ that I’ve been thinking about for about a year, but that I never used in production (I mean: filming stuff and matchmoving the stuff in the 3D scene, by moving the plain in the right direction…! 
). Can you tell about your experiences? Do you have anything to say about how to shoot such things to be able to intergrate the nicely into you 3D shot?
