Alien Creeeeeping into the film - After Effects

There are two shots where the Alien creeps out of the darkness, they are both pretty similar with the only properly noticeable differences being the first is a track and dolly shot which I have scaled and keyed to seem like it is moving from a distance towards the camera and a slight reflection in the lens of the second shot (which is a still shot).

I thought adding a reflection to the lens of this shot would add a little extra detail and depth to the shot as well as highlighting that the thing in the middle of the Alien's face is in fact a lens and meant to be some sort of camera-like eye. To do this was initially a little tricky, as I had assumed by importing the footage of Jeff and then flipping it (by applying the 'flop') and creating a mask that sat on the lens of the Alien layer a reflection would be produced. However masking on a 'flopped' layer didn't work smoothly as the footage shown wasn't the footage selected, or fell in a different area. The problem seemed to be resolved through flipping the footage in it's own composition, then adding that composition to this one and masking it, as it then acted like regular footage. I ended up doing this twice , once with the 'Mid-shot' footage of Jeff, to produce the reflection of her face at the beginning, then with the wide shot of her on the ship to provide the reflection of the glowing 'warp point' that's meant to be suspended in the roof. By adjusting the opacity of each of the 'reflection' footages so only one plays at a time and they don't overlap the reflection in the lens is smooth and is present throughout the clip, even if (after the face reflection) it is quite subtle. For future reference it'll be good for me to keep in mind the possibility of having reflections in shots and therefore gather stock footage on the shoot in preparation.

 The Alien footage for this shot was a little bright in contrast to the dark shadowy environment, a slight worry for me was how obvious it was that the body was just a black jumper. To try remedy this I decided to adjust the brightness and contrast levels on an adjustment layer (as I wanted the body to slightly blend with the shadows of the environment). However when doing this it was obvious the face became too dark and saturated when I'd reached a point where I was happy with the body. To fix this I decided to try masking two layer of adjustment levels, one for the body and a separate one for the head, allowing me to have more control over the brightness and contrast of the elements of the Alien. The jerky movement of the Alien meant I had to key the masks to follow it and when previewing the final result this was quite obvious. By adjusting the levels, opacity and feathering the mask I have hopefully made the masking less obvious.