TITLE: Mocha Story
YOUR ROLE: Director/Lead VFX Artist
MEDIA: Visual Effects
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects, Garry’s Mod
DURATION: 0:18
CLASS: FMX 322
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER / TERM: FA 23
INSTITUTION: University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: This clip is the second half to the initial MOCHA project I did, wherein I edited a piece of stock footage involving a road sign. For this section of the project, I was to use any footage I wished to make a story, of course using MOCHA to incorporate some kind of tracking or text. I opted to create my own footage through a Sandbox video game known as ‘Garry’s Mod’, which essentially allows players to play with the assets that comes with the Valve Corporation’s Source game engine. It was here I opened a map made by someone else, found a suitable location, set up an animated camera and detailed the surroundings to suit the tracking I would do in After Effects. Said tracking was both rather straightforward due to the fact I was tracking a computer screen and somewhat tricky as the screen comes into view, meaning MOCHA can’t accurately track the nodes placed down before that point. In order to get around that issue, I set up the tracking nodes in reverse, applying them to the screen at the very end of the animation and having MOCHA track in the opposite direction. Once it had done so, I simply adjusted the nodes if they strayed too far from where I wanted before applying the nodes and then the text, alongside applying a slightly transparent layer of footage of the computer screen over the text to blend it together.