🫐 First week back! 🫐

Transitioning Back

Summer break was really fun! I spent a majority with my family, it was super nice to be able to spend time with them. We watched the World Cup together, it was really memorable this year.

Now that I’m back, I’ve been getting used to walking around on campus again and working out my schedule with my job. As everyone is settling into their classes and deciding whether to add/drop, my work as a Design STA has been very manageable!

All week I have been working on the STA cutouts. All it involves in cutting out the background of each photo of the STAs’ and cleaning it up. Photoshop has been the platform I’ve used for it and it’s very simple work!

Usually the flow for me in doing this project is:

• Identify the student I’m going to mask the background of
• Open one file in Photoshop
• Drag the rest of the files of that same student into the same Photoshop file
• Use the object selection tool to select the subject
• Apply a layer mask
• Clean up anything the selection tool missed
• Repeat until all photos are properly masked
• Export all layers into separate PNGs
• Place the files into the right folder

It’s pretty simple once you finish the first STA! It’s a lot of files, but I do have ample time to get it done. Getting back into properly naming files is a good habit I need to keep building, too.

Overall, my first week back has been really good!

My first week of the 2026 fall semester has been a blast. I started off the week by attending one of my shifts here and continued work on the voting PSAs. We are just about finished with them right now, but I will go more into detail regarding the videos later on in this blog post.

I’m taking 4 classes this semester and I’m very excited to learn a lot of new material and skills. I will be taking 3D modeling and texturing, games and interactivity, solo studio, and 2D animation for games. I hope to take what I learn in these classes and translate them into my work as an STA.

This week was filled with making the final edits to the voting PSAs. There are a total of 8 videos, all with varying audios and slight variations to animations. Being able to reuse animations and assets has helped reduce the work load immensely, allowing me to complete tasks much more efficiently.

Register to Vote

Election Day

Early Voting

It’s far too early to start advertising these PSAs, however I’m happy to have them near finished. If there are any changes or edits needed, they will be simple and quick to adjust.