STA Blog

Lila Mali

Lila Mali

Summer Projects

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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!

STA Presentation!

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Presenting at the STA Presentations for the first time!

April 11th were the 2025 STA presentations and I can fully say I had an amazing time presenting, meeting other STA’s, and seeing all the work that goes on at LAITS. Everyone is so talented and it was a wonderful experience.

I was very nervous presenting for that first time, I was given the benefit of presenting with my fellow STA, Shanda! There was definitely a cushion with the pressure be up there with someone else and overall I think people enjoyed our work. We presented our work on the IPE Illustration and Animation Project which was a project I’ve posted about before that has taken up a lot of time but none the less it’s definitely one of my favorite projects I’ve worked on.

Here are some of my slides from the presentation!

The STA presentation was such an amazing experience that I am so grateful to have been a part of. The community at LAITS is so supportive and welcoming and it’s also very encouraging to see all the different levels of talent in this department. I only hope to meet and connect with more talent here and in the future!

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.