In my last few weeks as an STA, I’ve helped finish the Texas Beyond History rebuild animations in Canvasser, redesigned a website for LAITS Computer Support, updated a professor’s website, and contributed to training the summer STA’s in our content management system Cascade.

This is the new website I helped design for the Computer Support page. Previously, the content was a table with some text and links inside of it, but they wanted a redesign that was more visually appealing and contained more useful information. All my edits were within the source code feature of Cascade using HTML. Unfortunately, I couldn’t touch the CSS, so I had to figure out how to make an adequate page with only HTML and Photoshop.

This was the last interactive animation I finished with another STA.

This is an old website I helped update for Professor Pangle. Dr. Pangle has had this website running from 2005, but since he had written a new book, he wanted the website to include his new book as well. However, the trouble was that his website ran off old HTML and CSS files, so he needed our help in updating it. The other pictures are examples of the code I had to look at to update it. All in all, the code wasn’t very complex, so it only took about 20 minutes to get the changes he needed in.

Finally, since the summer STA’s needed to be briefed on how to use Cascade, I helped update a training document for readability. Since the document was created, Cascade CMS had underwent a massive update making the new version look completely different from the old one. I went through the training–that I had to do when I first started–and updated it to make sure it made sense for the new version of Cascade. I also included pictures to help future STA’s find the buttons to click within the system.

This was the first batch of photo id’s that I processed for the COLA Database. Aidan gave me a tutorial on some adjustments and cropping, and I’m waiting to hear feedback on whether I need to edit more or if I can push these images to live.

In the past couple of weeks, I worked on two more animations for Texas Beyond History Kids. One of these was an animation called ‘kids-sandals’ where I had to recreate an animation of the main character–Dr. Dirt–walking across the screen using still images. He would periodically shout certain phrases with various images attached, so I grouped these images together to make it easier to work with in our tool Canvasser. Other than the long animation, ‘kids-sandals’ was a lot of work but didn’t need much creative thinking.

The other animation I worked on was called ‘detectives into the past’, and I worked on this with two other STAS–Nick Lavigne and Rodrigo Villareal. The entire animation was 30 frames long, so we divided the work amongst us. In the end, I did frames 10-21 over the course of two weeks. This animation required me to use a feature of Canvasser I wasn’t familiar with before called ‘Var’. The Var feature of Canvasser was the first time I had to use conditionals within the program.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve finished two more additional animations for Texas Beyond History. One–Hueco Kids Discover–was started by another STA. During recreation, I found that some backgrounds and images were either not available or needed editing. Because Suloni walked me through the basics of Photoshop a couple of weeks before, I was able to recreate these missing elements myself.

The other animation I finished was Cabeza Lost. At this point, I have become comfortable with combining Photoshop and Canvasser to create these animations.

An unexpected obstacle came up when Canvasser and our folder permissions were changed while I was in the process of recreation. Because the structure of how Canvasser functioned changed, I had to look at the JSON code to see where the problem was. What I had trouble with was with the new ‘Import Images’ function of Canvasser, and when I looked in the JSON code, I found that the paths for these newly created images were not lining up with the paths of the old images.

In the end, I was able to work with Nick and Reuben to figure out the new system and finish the animation!

Since starting work on Texas Beyond History in Canvasser, I have learned more efficient ways of animating that let me better complete TBH Hueco Discover after finishing the “Where” page. Below are pictures of some of the final frames for both projects. For Discover, I had to learn and use Photoshop to recreate background images and flashing animations too.