Lesson 6: Photography

Megan and I did some research on photography earlier in the semester for our STA course program, and I finally had time to put those information together into a KB post.

Some of the topics we researched:

• Photo licensing and copy right law
• How to source CC photos
• How to pick dynamic photos
• Resolution and resizing photos

I also created a short color grading activity and a banner for this module. http://sites.la.utexas.edu/kb/2021/04/14/lesson-6-photo-sourcing-and-color-grading/

STA 2021 Poster

I was assigned to create the STA poster for this year, Mike wanted the theme to be stacks of old TVs with neon lights.

Some inspirations:

We have a lot of STAs on board this year, 71 in total!! I decided to use different color on the LAITS logo for each STA team, design/coding team has orange TVs, video team has yellow TVs, audio team has green TVs, project management team has blue TVs, and operational support team has light grey TVs.

 

And this is the final poster:

Hiiii bl∆g last week Maddy and I met with Marla and Heather to see if there was any work they’d like us to prioritize that they’re unable to manage. Heather told me that Ruben has been working on debugging a new video manager where professor’s lectures are uploaded, clipped, and captioned. She said she’d like for me to become familiar with the tool, and afterwards, I would help in documenting where people’s test-runs go wrong so that Ruben can fix things. The idea here is to have a middle man between the testers and Ruben so that debugging is more efficient.

So…began running through the testing instructions step-by-step yesterday afternoon. The “test” is to see if you can take an entire lecture, chop it into 5 pieces, and then render each video. These steps aren’t super clear, so it took me a bit to find the right buttons. I’m still not entirely sure I ran through these steps correctly, because my first render created a job with 27 separate tasks, and failed on the 4th of those 27. I’m pretty sure I’m only supposed to have 5 tasks, one for each clip that I’m creating. Furthermore, after attempting to re-render, The failed file blocked the new one from beginning to render, so that job just read “queued”.

I spoke to Ruben about this, at which point he deleted both jobs and asked me to try again…this job is still stuck in “queued”. Notice how below, the job numbers jump from 103 to 106. That is because Ruben deleted my first two failed jobs:

 

Ruben has told me that the site is busted. Needless to say I’m impressed with myself 🙂 Hoping that things will be fixed soon. Regardless of this, I think some things should be changed on the documentation explaining how to test the video manager, so I will see if I can improve upon that in the mean time.

More on HealthyHorns

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HIS 315K Course Package, UI/UX Training, Project Summaries, Cascade Help Request

HIS 315K Course Package

Last week, I completed a course graphics package for HIS 315K. We were asked to use the image below, with several historical figures. It is very action-packed, and there is a lot of symbolism behind the behavior and body language of the subjects. Traditionally, the color bar would be placed near the bottom of the Canvas Dashboard and Banner; however, Maddy and Suloni approved a different positioning that would allow viewers to see/understand all the subjects in the picture. That is why the color bar is higher than normal. Also, I was having some trouble with the burnt orange color bars. The color of the dashboard and banner appeared to be slightly different from the canvas callout buttons, despite the hex code being the same and all documents being set RGB settings. At Megan’s suggestion, I tried changing everything to PNGs to no avail. I also tried changing the dpi of the documents at Suloni’s suggestion. I ended up using another suggestion of Megan’s to manually adjust the color of the banner and dashboard from a screenshot, and that worked. Below are the canvas assets and the design menu.

UI/UX Training

I began working on the UI/UX basic training. Here is my wireframe using pen and paper. I chose the Spicewoods Floral mock client, and I will continue mocking up the website on Figma. This website is for a luxury client who wants users to be funneled towards her communication channels. I got inspiration from random clothing retailers online who I felt also catered to luxury audiences.

Project Summaries

I also took a bit of time on Friday to write up project summaries for the Wellness project I worked on over winter break, the KB trainings I have been working on, and a personal project I have been doing with COVID policy tracking. I think the next stage is that they need to be approved. Eventually, they will become some sort of presentation that all STAs are invited to watch.

Cascade Help Request

This morning, I also helped replace a banner for the Department of Air Force Science Cascade page. The new banner is pictured below. I went into the Cascade editor, uploaded the picture to the dept banners folder in units, replaced the old photo, and published the changes. This was the first time I have used Cascade since the basic training last semester, so I had to update the VPN system we use to log in remotely.

 

Outside of work new: I got vaccinated! I hope everything will improve soon, for both those in the US and globally. Also, I realized that the Orange Bike Project on campus, where I got my craigslist bike fixed, is open! So I scheduled an appointment for this coming Thursday, and hopefully I can get my bike fixed again.