STA Blog

RBTL and Cascade

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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!

German Frame

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German Frame

I’ve also been working on a project for Stacy involving completely replicating this website using wordpress:

 

I’ve learnt a lot about CSS/HTML in this project which is cool because that’s probably the career I want to be a web developer in the future. It’s a little different working with WordPress because you don’t really get to create the HTML elements you are more working directly with the CSS to kind of “hack” the website into looking the way you want. For example the top portion with the green quarter circles, I used WordPress widgets and modified the CSS for them to have that green quarter circle background. The code for that was:

This is essentially the process for every part of the website.

Changes…

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Many things have changed since I finished Rockshelter. I got a new interactive assignment but also a whole new project! I’ve been spending half my time collaborating on a website for a French class with a different section of LAITS (more on that later).

On to the interactive: the challenge here is that it’s a long one. More than 30 slides! This is why we split the work between Bryan, Nick and I. Here are some pictures of my slides. I can’t show the video but I added some more animations than the original to make it fun for the kids.

You get the gist. The kids have to take the little armadillo on a journey to find the secrets of ancient poops! I think it’s pretty fun how you get to move him around the screen sometimes and it was fun to make.

 

U10_1 Scene Illustration

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I’ve been busy working on scene U10_1!

Scene description: Polina and Oleg are sitting inside a homemade pillow and blanket fort. They’re reading a book by flashlight.

I started by roughing out a composition in Photoshop.

 

After some feedback, I decided to reuse the living room scene background.

I started placing in the puppets and began to roughly draw in the overall structure for the blanket fort! I wanted there to be multiple blankets and to make it clear that it’s being held up by various objects that may be found in the living room area… such as tables and chairs. I also edited the living room scene to make it look like it was taking place at nighttime.

Started blocking in colors and repositioned Polina so I could add the flashlight she’s supposed to be holding. I also thought adding Christmas lights would add a fun, dreamy touch to the scene. I also added in a stack of books as a fun extra detail.

I finished adding in the extra lights and added a glow. I also gave the blankets different prints to make the scene more playful and colorful.

After some more feedback, I added more lighting and some shadows to create more contrast… I also changed the background so that the lamp would be lit as well. I also changed the time on the clock and aded some stars and the moon outside in the center window.

I finally added some finishing touches and made some minor adjustments to the lighting… I tried to make the lights more “glowy” and adjusted the shadows so that they would make more sense with the light sources… I also added some lighting to the trees outside as an extra detail, which I feel really pulls it all together!

 

This was a really fun scene to illustrate! I really wanted to capture a playful, dream-like feel… Almost a little nostalgic? I hope I was able to convey that!

Clio Feature Update

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Coming back and watching Clio become adopted by so many people across UT is a surreal feeling. I’m glad to be back on the team that created it, where I’m working on new features that will make the software even easier to use, as well as feature upgrades/bug fixes for the version in production.

Progress on RUS407 Animations and the Finalization of the Oleg Family Tree!

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Hello world! First and foremost, I now have  a completed Oleg Family Tree! I have posted that file here along with some of the earlier drafts to show some of the process. And I am getting close to wrapping up all of the basic symbols and animations for RUS407, I have included some of the progress I’ve made there as well. The dog walk cycle has been looped with three different colors so it can be used with three different dogs. There are also some set pieces and I added a range of eyebrow movements to give the characters more expression. I have learned so much from working on both of these projects, I’m looking forward to working on illustrating the Oleg scene that the Family Tree will appear in as well as finalizing some of these RUS 407 animations! Oh, and I also completed an STA blog picture! I have included that illustration at the end.

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