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Lila Mali

Lila Mali

March and April Progress

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Whats going on with IPE now?

I am so so so happy to report that as of last week, all the IPE case study animations are now complete!!

This project has been a crazy journey for me. I’ve had such a wonderful time working on it and everyone I’ve worked with for it was super kind and helpful and it’s so satisfying to see the project come together. Because the deadline was approaching, De’sha took on making 2 animations for the project. Here are the ones that I worked on.

I would like to reflect more on how these animations came together as it was a process I was very new to.

Shanda did an amazing job on the Illustrations for this project and was super wonderful to work with. When animating, I realized that there would be a lot of modifications as we were working with old audio that had to be updated. Usually you need official audio before animating but we were able to work with what he had.

Sometimes, animations would take longer than usual solely due to having to illustrate animation segments that made sense visually. There were medical terms I would have to look up in order to accurately display them. Once the first 2 animations were made, I started to get into a groover of getting them out faster as I had an established workflow. There were many times deadlines had to be moved for this project hence why it was my sole priority for this semester. Sometimes I was scared I would miss a deadline, but with the help of the team, everything turned out.

Overall I’m super grateful I got to work on this project and was able to be given a position to communicate with other teams and employees. I feel this project not only made me grow as an animator, but also as a worker and a leader.

STA Presentation!!

I was chosen to present at the 2025 STA presentation!! I’m suer honored that I was chosen and can talk about my work. I was assigned to talk about the IPE project, but with a little twist. Shanda and I will actually be presenting this project together, which I’m pretty sure hasn’t been done since 2020! As of this post, I will be presenting the project in 2 hours and I’m nervous, excited, and looking forward to it. I’ll update how it went in the next post.

February Progress

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February Progress

February was a busy month for me as I got a bit behind on my major project, the IPE animation for Dell Health. But luckily I have some good news!

We’re halfway there!

We now have 4 out of 8 IPE animation done! I believe with the current progress, we’ll have all animations done by April 1st. Here’s one of the completed animations to show how they are looking so far.

I realize that the main challenge I come across with the animations is delivering the narration through the visuals in an engaging way while also being clear to understand. Sometimes there are terms that are too specific or broad for me to display in an icon or a looping character animation.

We also have yet to get completed client reviews on the first pair of animations sent over so hopefully that won’t impede the process.

That’s all I have for February to be honest. Given my timeline, this will most likely be the project I talk about in March too haha. But I look forward to seeing it come together!

December and January

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Been a while since I’ve updated my blog but there’s been a really big project I’ve been working on since January that I’m excited to talk about!

MSAI Logo and Animation

I was tasked with taking on the MSAI logo creation and animation this month and it actually went in a different direction than I was expecting. Here’s the logo that was finalized.

The animation actually had to go through some iterations. Here was the original concept.

After showing to the PM, we realized that it came across as plants growing from the brain rather than the nodes being stimulated by the brain. After a meeting to discuss a new direction for the animation, here’s what we came up with.

This was actually not only a preferred animation from the client, but it was also a pretty simple animation to complete which I’m really happy about.

DELL IPE Online Course Creation

This project has been quite fun to work on as it emphasizes my focus, character animation!

I’ve been working with Shanda to make animation for Dell’s IPE Online Course where they’ve requested for us to animate specific lecture slides for them. These are essentially medical scenarios they would like animated. This project will most likley last a couple months as they’ve requested 6 animations that span to be 5 – 8 minutes so right now I’ve been focusing on making reusable animation assets that can make our project pipeline faster.

Shanda is the Illustrator on the project and has done wonderful work to make the characters! Here’s the lineup.

With all these characters, here’s some of the animations I made beforehand to prep for the slides.

Since then, I’ve been making an After Effects template that can be used as a master file for all the animations needed.

Those are my main updates for now. Next I wanna finish up the animations assets and make a project tracking sheet for this project for the whole semester.

November Projects

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Icon Animation Training!

My last few shifts, I wanted to brain storm a new animation training for the video team and thought that icon animation would be a good next step to start understanding how to prepare assets in Illustrator and animate them in After Effects. For the training, I animated 4 icons that my supervisor De’sha found. Here’s how they turned out!

I’m not used to animating pre made icons so I had a lot of fun with this project.

Character rigging animations

In the mean time, I’ve been taking time to learn more about character animation in After Effects and have been assigned to work with pre made character rigs. Here’s the image I worked with and the animation I made from it!

There’s still some training I need to complete but I’ve been really liking this project so far!

CSMS animation

To finish from my last blog post, I completed the CSMS logo and intro animation. Here’s the final.

October Updates

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Animation Training!

Recently, Shanda and I were told about an upcoming animation project that has an emphasis on character animation, my main speciality! I haven’t been able to get a lot done on this project, but I made a practice rig in Adobe Illustrator to get prepared. It’s pretty simple, but here’s how it looks.

Next, I’ll be working on a female rig with more characteristics such as facial expressions and maybe accessories.

New Logo Design

I was assigned to make a new CSMS logo for their class Distributed Systems.

This was a bit tricky to figure out since there weren’t too many references provided to base a logo off of so I made a few draft designs.

They emphasized distribution amongst computers but we decided that two computers made the logo feel too busy. My supervisor provided me with some better icon references and I started to go off of those.

This project is still in the works, but these new designs worked well with the clients so now we can decide and start animating.

September and October

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Been a while since I updated my blog so there’s a lot to go through! I’ll start with my first assignment.

ARH Custom Stinger Animation

This assignment was pretty fun as I was requested to make an animated stinger intro for a TA. The class’s style uses animated images which I don’t work with frequently but I think the style is very charming. Here’s the finished stinger. I really like how it turned out!

STA Posters!!

Our team was requested to make new STA team posters and to make it a special surprise, they were going to be inspired from real movie posters! This was an especially fun project as emulating movie posters is always very charming and I was given the task to make posters after The Breakfast Club and Clue.

The Breakfast Club was surprisingly challenging as the students in the poster were wearing very similar colors.

We eventually decided to change to a different poster type and change the colors of the students clothing.

My supervisors helped a lot with the coloring and changing the STA shirt colors but eventually it was good to send. Next was the Computer Support poster. Here are some of the iterations.

These were fun to do and I love the computer motif

GOV Intro

This was a pretty basic animation assignment. All I had to do was to reboot an existing intro with new assets. I ran into some issues but it came out well. Here’s how it looks.

CSMS Logo Animation

New CS Logo animation! These assignments are always pretty intimidating at first since the topics are hard to visualize, but I was given helpful reference images and a good dirstcion to go off of. Here are some of my initial concept sketches.

The client really liked the look of the graph logo and I got started on the animated intro. Here’s how it turned out.

I really like the graph animation and the client did as well!