Happy 2021! Our winter project is DONE and required so much finishing work that I haven’t had time to update my blog until just now. While it would be fun to show you all the amazing artwork that Miguel, Angie, and Athena created for this project, their talent wouldn’t portray the work I’ve put in. Much of what I’ve done these past four weeks has been managerial, a position I now value and appreciate much more. I spent hours organizing and reorganizing materials for the team, reviewing adobe files to ensure that assets were properly labeled and that the animations were seamless, and most importantly, checking in with the team frequently to answer questions. This was a huge, bold undertaking for a few students with very little animation experience but stellar work ethics. I couldn’t be prouder of the end result.
I spent the final week before our project deadline working in Premiere Pro to piece together the various scenes that the team created, which took a toll on my laptop processor for sure. Working remotely made this part of the project slightly more difficult, as some of our timing was bound to be off, but again, I’ll brag on the team. Their patience and efficiency when working through feedback was incredible and made my job a whole lot easier. The videos are a bit too lengthy to post here, so you’ll just have to wait and see once they’re added to Canvas 🙂
This semester, I’ve increased my work hours from 12 to 20 a week, and one of the major tasks I hope to undertake is reorganizing LAITS’s file system. One of the major roadblocks in working remotely on this project was asset transferral, which was something I struggled with in high school as well. When working in adobe software that requires assets t0 be linked rather than embedded, such as Indesign, AfterEffects, and Premiere Pro, every computer working on the project must have the same assets in an easily locatable folder, so that the graphics within the design maintain quality. When you’re in high school working on school computers, all hardwares are connected to the same “drive” so all of these files are easily locatable and need not be redownloaded on a single computer. When working on different “drives”, that solution is more tricky. However, as LAITS has been utilizing Box to save and transfer files remotely, I think there’s a way to make Box the drive to which everyone could link their own desktop files. If linked asset files were easier to open through Box, LAITS could take on a myriad of larger more collaborative projects.
I hope to spend this semester making LAITS better with some small reorganization and outreach. Looking forward to my last few months here and will definitely make them count 🙂