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These are all of the posts I’ve created or helped work on since my last blog update. There are also a couple of stories I helped create between these posts as well. I think my favorites so far have been the bulletin board ones, as they feel real, personal, and have lots of small fun details.
The goal of this training is to grasp the basics of Adobe After Effects through some basic animation practice. The instructions were to animate a simple course graphics intro. Here is what I came up with!
I enjoyed working with Photoshop and After Effects to make this very simple course intro. This was a good introduction to the software. I think if I were to go back and revise it I would add some people viewing the art and make the text more colorful.
For this training I was tasked with creating a personal brand/logo. Here are some variations and the final chosen design.
Several elements included in the logo and how they represent me:
For this training I brought the logo I just designed into After Effects to give it some movement! I learned some new techniques like the trim paths feature and how to use the graph editor.
For my first time animating a logo in After Effects I’m pretty happy with this! I like how the star looks like it’s being drawn and the subtle movement of the hand and head. If I were to revise this I would make the logo appear in a more interesting and unified way. Maybe having the head turn around and put some follow through on the hat. I would also like to add movement to the face to give it more personality. Making the eyes blink and the mouth go from neutral to smirking can really bring the logo to life and feel inviting.
Finally, I completed this quick Photoshop training where I got to explore the different textured brushes.
I’ve mostly used Ps for line art and more flat color illustrations, so this was a nice change of pace. I love how the coloring on the orange turned out. I like the movement in the brush strokes and the variations in hue/saturation.
One thing I would improve on for next time is to refrain from using the color picker. This would help develop my color observation skills.
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!
2025 STA Presentation
STA Photo Cut Outs
Made photo cut outs for all new STAs! Like myself ฅ^•⩊•^ ฅ
Lower-Thirds Graphic
For this next project I was tasked with designing a Lower Thirds graphic for the STA presentation.
Considerations
⋆｡°✩ Keep the design simple and subtle, ensuring it does not distract from the video content.
⋆｡°✩ Use LAITS colors or colors from pre-existing graphics for the STA Presentation
⋆｡°✩ Find a graphic and font fitting for the theme: Movies, specifically drawing inspo from the The Peanuts Movie poster
Early Versions
After landing on the idea of a film roll, I started mocking up different versions. Playing with:
• Color
• Logo
• Canister Style
• Film Style
After evaluation, we decided to move forward with the last iteration!
Final Version
STA Presentation Webpage
My next project was to design the STA Presentation webpage!
— 2025 STA PRESENTATION —
This first half of this month was dedicated to the 2025 STA presentations- plenty of projects for the Design team! On top of my project for the event, I was chosen to present! I presented the IPE project alongside Lila with her talking about animation and me explaining the illustrations.
— Horizontal Presentation Poster —
I was tasked with making a single horizontal version of the posters I made earlier in the year for the video team to use in the presentation reel. This was challenging and took longer than I expected since the two posters couldn’t be put together seamlessly without editing. Regardless, I’m satisfied with the final result and was happy to see it on presentation day.
— COFA + COE Arts Integration Course Development —
In the last half of April, I began to work on the course graphics for TD 302 S Arts Integration for Multidisciplinary Connections.
I began working on the Canvas homepage banners. The client requested a total of 4 banners: 3 independent banners and 1 where the 3 banners come together seamlessly. I found this challenging since the client wanted to utilize photos of Nick Cave’s sound suits. These are very colorful and extravagant- so I had to not only ensure that I make 3 banners that come together cohesively, but also make sure the graphics don’t distract from the text.
Below are my first two passes where I explored the sound suit idea and an original graphic:
Some feedback I received:
Here is my second pass with a couple of options:
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.
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.