RUS407 Unit 11 Part 2 Animations

These animations are hot off the press, being finalized just last week! They were assigned much later than the first 3 sets of animations, and while there were only 6 animations for this set, I only had about 2 weeks to get them finished, much less time than I spent on the previous animations. Thankfully, since I had already completed so man walk cycles and set designs from the previous animations, I was able to build upon previously created sets, adding more detail and color and even experiment with incorporating hand drawn set design into digital animation, which I am very pleased with the results of. Here is the video of all 6 of these animations:

RUS407 Unit 11 Part 1 Animations

The animations in the first part of Unit 11 again called for more complex action, set building and linking together multiple “clips” of animations. For these animations, I was able to expand my experience with the workflow of creating animations in Adobe Animate then linking them together in Adobe After Effects. Here is a video of all of the animations for this section:

RUS407 Unit 9 Animations

In this post, I included a video of all of the Unit 9 animations, most of which I completed after working on the Unit 10 animations. These animations were slightly more complex than the previous set of animations, calling for my first attempts at set design and more nuanced movement of characters.

Completion of RUS407 Animations!

It’s official! After about 1 and a half semesters of work I have completed all of the RUS407 animations for the Powerpoint videos! It’s been such a blast learning the ins and outs of this program and working to create more complex and visually entertaining animations that will keep students’ attention while they watch the PPT videos. In this post I included a video of all of the cartoons used for the Unit 10 Verbs of Motion, which were some of the very first animations I completed for the class. Can’t wait to get started on the next semester of animations;^)

On my last day, I wanted to give a quick run-down of the project I was most involved with in my time working as an STA this semester.

 

Two years ago when I started as an STA, I was brought on to spearhead the front-end for Clio, a new type of online class management software that provided dynamic content, user analytics, Canvas integration, and a compelling and fluid design to the paradigm of how we run online classes here at UT.

 

In the year since its completion last fall, Clio has been adopted by over 1,000 users at the University, and is slated to expand into other arenas as well. The expansion, then, necessitates changes in the platform to keep up with the demands of our users. This semester, I rebuilt the grading interface of Clio from the ground up – every part of the grading stack was changed and streamlined into a simpler, faster API-driven platform with a Vue.js front-end that interfaces with our Laravel backend through REST APIs.

 

Part of the redesign necessitated the back-end editors, graders, and other administrative interfaces to have the same visual style as our Material Design-driven front-end. Using Vuetify, I redesigned the front-end of the grading interface, and wrote Vue components that were semantic and re-usable for future Angular-to-Vue migrations.

 

With the help of Vuex, we could maintain global application state and pass data/events between different components quickly and easily. By converting the original Laravel->Blade->Angular design pattern to Laravel->REST API->Vue, we separated concerns and made it easier to make changes to the backend without having to worry about all the implicit links it had to front-end templates.

 

Ultimately, being able to build on the full-stack and creating an end-to-end product in about a month and a half (I started on the project in mid-October) is an incredible learning experience, and will help me greatly in the future as a software engineer. From here on, I will be in Hong Kong for a study abroad semester, and will spend the summer with JPMorgan Chase in New York as a software engineering intern.

 

Before I go, I’d like to thank Suloni Robertson for giving me the opportunity to return as an STA and work on the project that matters to me the most, Chris Pittman for his unending patience and sage technical advice, and Marla Gilliand for managing Clio from its inception.

In addition to my duties with Texas Beyond History and Canvasser, I was assigned to recreate a COLA website using HTML, CSS, and Javascript with Rodrigo. We are being supervised by one of the developers–Stacy Vlasits–and are using Git to manage code changes. This is a much more technical project than TBH, but thanks to my experience with web design prior to this job I haven’t encountered any major impediments yet.

I also updated the Department of American Studies’s banner a few times using our content management system Cascade too!