Below is the first draft render I generated using Maya Hardware 2.0 and I am generally pleased with how it is looking and I feel the camera movement showcases the vastness of the canyon far better than the previous After Effects attempt. For the first attempt, I key framed the camera to move past the canyons as it closes up on the protagonists reaction. However, I think exposing the canyon first before anything else will lose the shock factor therefore, I did the reverse camera movement for the second render.
The second draft render below starts close up to the characters eyes as he slowly opens them to react to the environment, before the camera quickly pulls away to reveal the canyons. I prefer the results achieved with this camera movement since it builds a feeling of curiosity from wanting to see what the character is reacting to. Therefore, I plan to continue to develop this shot to use in my film instead of the first draft render.
An issue I encountered whilst using projection mapping was that the projection of the canyons in the foreground would also project onto the canyons behind and this was revealed as the camera moved through the canyons. Therefore, I am going to try to UV Map my artwork onto the objects so that the texture moves with the canyon, which would also enable me to add more canyons to create even more depth.