Week of 9/24

This past week I’ve worked on two animations for Russian.

The first one, featuring the Adventurer climbing a hill, had more work involved than the other animation. For the climbing animation, I had to create a “climb cycle” of sorts for the character. I wanted to make him look like he was absolutely dying, and then the camera zooms out and it turns out he’s on this tiny hill that’s not even that high. I also had to animate the cute rabbits (drawn by Duo) hopping around, silently judging this fellow.

Next, I did this edit of a baby crawling on the floor. All I did was add a drop shadow to the baby and animate the Glasses Boy sleeping. (Also Tate told me the Glasses Boy and Awake Girl had a baby???)

project: Updating Anthropology Virtual Labs
completion status: Started September 2018
staff guidance: Estella Sun
STA team members: Bridget, Valerie, Emily, Chloe, Duo
description/plans: Transfer all the text and images from the old Flash website to a new site that can be accessed by future students.
To be completed: ASAP

I also started updating the Anthro V Labs. The lab I was assigned is super long and has a ton of videos that I can’t embed, so it’s a bit frustrating.

Here’s an example of what the new site looks like compared to the old site:

And here’s what it looks like behind the scenes:

Finally I worked on some PSAs for video title cards telling everyone to vote!

project: Voting PSA cards
completion status: Started Sept. 19
staff guidance: Tate Gibson, Suloni Robertson, Mike Heidenreich
STA team members:
description/plans: Design video cards to tell online students to vote!
To be completed: Sept. 24ish

Vote y’all!!!!!

Week of 9/17

I made a couple of new animations this week, most of them have been edits so there wasn’t a lot of asset creation or intense animation involved. The first one I did was the cafe owner picking a mushroom in the park:

For this first part, Tate had already put in the mushroom and the cafe owner bending down, so I just added the cafe owner’s side and 3/4 back walk cycles and facial expressions.

For the second part, I had to make the mushroom “pop” out of the ground, so I just used the “squash and stretch” technique for the mushroom where it elongates as the cafe owner pulls it out, and then bounces a bit to redistribute the mass. Now the mushroom appears more juicy and soft rather than stiff and stale.

I also edited this animation of the Glasses Boy going up the escalator. The original file had the boy facing the other direction while going down the escalator, so the edit was simple since it was just to reverse everything so that he’s moving upwards instead of downwards.

To do this, I just had to go in and reverse all the motion tweens, then change the staggered timing of the background and the lamps so that they move downwards, giving the impression that the character and the escalator are moving upwards when in fact they are not moving at all.

Then I worked on some COLA IDs. They were all taken with interesting compositions so the subject was either too zoomed in or off-center in the originals. I couldn’t fit them into the 200×300 formats for the portfolio pages so they ended up being 200×150 or 200×200.

I’ve also been working on a rotoscoping tutorial for a future STA Basic Training! Hopefully it will allow STAs to get more comfortable using Animate. Currently I’m doing it in Word but I wonder if I should do a screen recording video?

Finally got to do some illustrations for Russian again! I edited this kid playing in the sandbox.

I feel bad for him that he doesn’t have eyes.

September Update!!! (Weeks 9/3 – 9/10)

I worked on this animation for RUS412 most of the time:

GIF

The kid is so devious! I was struggling with keeping this animation short because if the kid just got off the bus and went straight for the trash can, it’d look a little weird. So I had to sort of play with some nonverbal gestures between the mother and child, which added some time into the sequence.

I worked on editing this animation yesterday:

Originally the scene was with the Glasses Boy character saying bye to the Mom and the Kid, but I had to replace him with the Gramps and Granny who were standing in the back row. Now they’re the Glasses Boy and the Awake Girl.

I also edited a bunch of COLA IDs (here are just a few):

I also did the basic training STA vocab flashcards (see post below).

Also, I started working on the rotoscoping tutorial for a new STA training “module”. It’s my first time making a tutorial for this job so it’ll be interesting!