2025 UT Summer Orientation film

Starting the summer off strong with a really cool big project known as the Summer orientation film! I’m excited for this as I love doing animated graphics and I’m excited to see how this project will look. Here are some of the assets I’ve been asked to work on.

I was also asked to make a title card animation.

As well as some lower thirds.

I have been having a lot of fun with these 😀 I’m thinking of making edits to the title card as I look at other scrapbook animation examples. I wanna play around with it!

Farewell! :’)

AHHHH! This position completely changed the trajectory of my career journey for the better. I’ll always be so grateful to Valerie, Maddy, and Suloni for taking a chance on me (a fine artist with absolutely no professional training or experience in graphic design). I also want to thank De’sha for being a mentor to me since I joined the Design team. I am so much more confident in my capabilities and skills because of all of them. Leilani was also a huge inspiration to me, and I’m thankful for her mentorship and help as I grew into the role–she was always someone I could go to and ask a second opinion from.

To all the current and future design STAs — trust in yourself that you are very capable and have so much potential. It’s hard to see in the moment, but with every project and training exercise, your design skills are growing exponentially. <3

– Marissa

Documenting Summer Marketing

Animated Reel:

This was my first time really creating something in After Effects from scratch (that wasn’t for training). I started with some sketches De’sha and I made– which were crucial in the initial steps of building out each animated segment. (Note: I also copied the style of our pre-existing animated pre-roll)

I created the elements in a way that would allow them to be animated (ex: tassle was separate from the cap, individual dollar bills, etc.) There was a lot of back and forth between Illustrator and After Effects to make sure certain elements were suitable to be animated.

After the elements were built out, I began animating. I think in the future it would be wiser to finalize the transitions between each segment and then individually animate, but whatever process is easiest and most efficient for you is probably fine. I would save the masking of text and certain elements towards the end, once you have the transitions and smaller animations of elements done.

Tips:

• Think of creating a ‘pre-composition’ in the main Comp 1 panel as similar to creating a ‘group’ in Illustrator and Photoshop. Select a group of elements and right click -> Pre-compose… -> Enter a New composition name and click ‘OK’. Then, double click on your Pre-comp to see the individual files within it and apply edits.
• I essentially made each segment into its own composition (Top 3 Reasons, Get ahead, Affordability/Save Money, Be Anywhere, Summer logo)

• Applying Easy Ease/Ease in/Ease out can help objects appear to move more smoothly. Select your keyframes -> right click on the keyframes -> Keyframe assistant -> ‘Easy Ease’

• To create a loop, hold the option key and click on the time clock next to the transformation (position, rotation, etc.) -> click where it says “transform.position” and type/replace with loopOut(). Then all of the keyframes in the transformation should loop infinitely, and you can make adjustments as needed.

Summer Marketing Social Media:

These are all of the posts I’ve created or helped work on since my last blog update. There are also a couple of stories I helped create between these posts as well. I think my favorites so far have been the bulletin board ones, as they feel real, personal, and have lots of small fun details.

March – April Trainings

Animate Simple Course Graphics

The goal of this training is to grasp the basics of Adobe After Effects through some basic animation practice. The instructions were to animate a simple course graphics intro. Here is what I came up with!

I enjoyed working with Photoshop and After Effects to make this very simple course intro. This was a good introduction to the software. I think if I were to go back and revise it I would add some people viewing the art and make the text more colorful.

Logo Design

For this training I was tasked with creating a personal brand/logo. Here are some variations and the final chosen design.

Several elements included in the logo and how they represent me:

• Cat – because I like cats 🙂
• Cap – I wear caps a lot and usually draw myself wearing one
• Pencil – to show that I do illustration
• Star – my cat’s name is Star!
• Red Color – I use red a lot in my art, so using it here makes it recognizable as me
• Kyrartist – My “brand” name!

Logo Animation

For this training I brought the logo I just designed into After Effects to give it some movement! I learned some new techniques like the trim paths feature and how to use the graph editor.

For my first time animating a logo in After Effects I’m pretty happy with this! I like how the star looks like it’s being drawn and the subtle movement of the hand and head. If I were to revise this I would make the logo appear in a more interesting and unified way. Maybe having the head turn around and put some follow through on the hat. I would also like to add movement to the face to give it more personality. Making the eyes blink and the mouth go from neutral to smirking can really bring the logo to life and feel inviting.

Painting in Photoshop

Finally, I completed this quick Photoshop training where I got to explore the different textured brushes.

I’ve mostly used Ps for line art and more flat color illustrations, so this was a nice change of pace. I love how the coloring on the orange turned out. I like the movement in the brush strokes and the variations in hue/saturation.

One thing I would improve on for next time is to refrain from using the color picker. This would help develop my color observation skills.