The shaking manhole

Along with the green screen shots, I was given some shots to render and then composite.  The first being the close up shot of the manhole, which suddenly begins to shake.  Not only was I required to render this manhole and composite it with live action, but I was required to animate the shaking.

My team members stated that the manhole needed to be shake in a subtle but menacing movement.  Here is what I came up with.

Next, I rendered this in the mental ray format and I then masked out the lambert texture around the manhole.

The thing about this shot is that the dark shades on the manhole do not match the brightness of the ground surrounding.  I amended this by applying a Curves filter to the live action footage so that I could alter the brightness and make it darker.

In the outcome, the footage looked overall much darker and this suited the mood that we were trying to convey in this shot.