STA Blog

Melissa Lam

Melissa Lam

My last post as an STA… :(

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Last STA post!

It’s been amazing meeting everyone in the STA department, and this job was one of the most enjoyable and relaxing parts of my busy semester!

Thank you to Suloni for being the nicest and sweetest supervisor I could ever ask for; I know many times I had to change my schedule around but you were always very understanding. Thank you also to Tate who was the one who introduced me to the job! I’m super proud of the animations we’ve made for Russian and it was a real pleasure working with you. Your animations are so unique and yes, I’ll gladly go follow your social media haha.

As an animator my favorite part of the job was doing the animations, but I also learned a lot about design as an STA. I finished my job where I started – working on designs for the This is Democracy podcast.

The very first draft!!!
A poster
A button
A mug

I got the opportunity to make merchandise designs for Dr. Suri. I already planned to come back and visit after my internship ends in the spring, but now I have even more reason since I’ll have a mug waiting for me!

Thank you again to all the other STAs, everyone was super nice and enjoyable to work with. If you all are still here in the spring I’ll see you then!

Week of 11/27

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Last week I finished some animations and started some that Tate ended up finishing:

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GIF

This week I did a handful of photo IDs. Here are a few:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have a new 200×200 format for Workday photos which is exciting! Thanks to Suloni making some helpful templates, all the photo IDs were easy to edit, and since they were all studio photos, they didn’t really need editing either!

Finally I’ve just been doing some Cascade help and I will start updating the Cascade documentation in the coming weeks.

 

Week of 11/12

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Week of 11/12

This week I just worked on Russian animations!

The cafe owner washing dishes has now come to this:

GIF

I first drew individual frames for the arm moving up and down within the symbol, and then put in the motion tweens of the character rocking side to side. The actual POV shot of the dish washing that Tate made will be inserted somewhere within the 5-6 frames where the cafe owner is holding the dish at the sink.

Next, I started a similar animation for the apple peeling animation!

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Poor man is so tired, I relate…

Week of 11/5

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This week I edited many photo IDs! I also sorted through 26 grad students’ studio portraits and selected the best images for their photo IDs.

I added documentation on Cascade for how to add an image to your profile from the COLA DB. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to Ms. Jamieson.

I also finished the coughing illustration for Russian. Both Kathy and Duo had that boyband member theme going on so I wanted to contribute to that as well. If they’re all members of the same band, they probably infected each other…

 

 

Week of 10/29

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I only worked one day between last meeting and this one so I don’t have much to update, but I’ve continued to compile the scene with the dirty dishes. Here is the progress:

I started with the dirty plates stacking, but the scale was too small. Tate also told me to add more plates on the edge of the screen to suggest that the pile continued on past the camera. I also added more masking on the bowls so the overlapping looks more realistic.

Then I created the clean dishes pile, and put masking on all those bowls and cups too. Unfortunately, Tate told me there were too many rolling pins.

So finally I have the dirty dishes actually “dirtied” up, and I’ve killed off the other two rolling pins! The dirty splotches were just made by a semi-opaque brush with brown, green, and red hues. Well the cafe owner has a lot of work to do… this looks like a not-fun job!!

 

Week of 10/22

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Week of 10/22

Not much is new from last week, but I did do more for the “dirty plates” Russian animation. I made a bunch more dishware types by googling 3D models for references.

I then started piling them on the scene itself; hopefully it looks messy enough? I’ll be making some minor changes after I talk to Tate later today.

I also finished the “Day of Election” and “Day Before Election” voting PSAs. There are just a few changes I made with edit notes from Tate (thanks!). Hope everyone will go vote!

Finally, the other major thing I did this week was help Ms. Jamieson with learning Cascade for the Portuguese Flagship Program. She had a lot of difficulties where she couldn’t access Cascade or the COLA db. But she was very enthusiastic about being able to work on a website! I taught her how to edit the pages, add images and links, and how to add news and events on the COLA db. I also put up the main image she chose for the front page.