Traveling the world for free this week

This week, I’ve worked a lot on the stinger animations in After Effects and finding street-level images in various cities throughout Africa for Dr. Gordon’s AFR 303 class.

 

Maddy had the great idea of using Google Street View, combined with basic tourist sites, to find the city skyscraper-type pictures that Dr. Gordon wanted. It was pretty successful, although I spent a lot of time hopping around Accra, Ghana for a good shot. Once I took screenshots, I did some color correction, cropped to the correct aspect ratio, and erased Google’s street names with the clone stamp tool when necessary. Here are some of the edited versions.

 

 

Hello and welcome to my third week blog post! I can’t believe I’ve been here almost a month now, it’s gone by so fast! I really like what I’m working on, so it’s easy for me to sort of get sucked into my work. Often I have trouble getting myself to stop for the day and log off, but it’s a skill I’m working on. Sometimes you need to take a break and just, you know…

V I B E 

…anyway! This week, I spent most of my time creating the stinger animations in after effects. It was a pretty straight forward process, although I had some issues with After Effects crashing when I had too many keyframes visible at once. Fortunately, it was an easy fix (restarting the program), and I didn’t even have to turn the computer off and on again!

The first drafts for the Chat Stinger had a version with extra bubbles, and one without:

With bubbles

Without bubbles

 

We ultimately decided on the second one without the additional bubbles. The extra animation cluttered up the screen a bit too much, and with these types of graphics, less is often more. Next, Suloni suggested I create a version where the “…” on the chat bubble comes back and forth. I initially wanted to have it appear and disappear 3x, but 2x ended up fitting much better within the 4 second time frame of these graphics. This is the current version I have made:

For the Insta-poll animation, I was able to adhere pretty close to the animatic I made for it. The first draft looked like this:

In the second draft, I added in a fade-in, and a little pop-in to the three dots on the side of the circle, pretty much the exact same way I did the ellipses on the Chat stinger. I’m not sure if we’re going to keep that in, but I think the effects adds a little pizzazz to the animation without overpowering the text.

Next week I will continue making changes to this, as well as create the animation for the TA Discussion stinger. I’ve already imported that into after effects, and plan to animate the “discussion” bars growing, as well as possible some sort of entrance transition if it does not make it too busy.

Finally, this week I created the caricature of myself for the STA Blog banner! Here is me and my amazing cat Travis.

Here are some actual photos of Travis to brighten your day:

Project: COLA Website Refresher
Client /Prof: N/A (College of Liberal Arts)
Completion Status: Started August 25, 2021
Staff guidance: Michelle Vanhoose, Chris Rankin
STA team members: Ingrid, Adrian
description/plans: Get familiar with Pages and learn how to use it through trainings before ultimately using it for the COLA Website.
To be completed: TBD (long-term)

Last week I mostly worked on the COLA Web Refresher, especially the personal site in Pages. I had originally made 3 sites, one about me, one about a dinosaurs (personal interest), and then an in depth page on the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Unfortunately, there was a bug in Pages that I happened to stumble upon, which was with the undo function, in which all 3 sites were replaced. Due to this, I had to restart all the progress I made, but at least I found a bug! I also met with Jake about the Epic Similes project, which was really interesting to learn about. Below are pictures of the two sites I was able to finish.

 

 

 

Stinger – Animation Refresh Title

I began working on different draft options for the title on the Stinger Refresh project. Since the icons will have the most animation, we want the title to have a small, subtle animation added to it. I decided the choose between two options so far, a typing animation and a fade in animation.

 

I believe they both bring their own style to the animation, but I don’t want to take away from the main animation with too much movement. With that being said, I believe I am drawn more to the second option. Only because it is simpler and doesn’t take away from the main animation and with the other animations that will be created.

 

 

Stinger – Animation Refresh Survey

Last week I mainly focused on the survey animation for the Stinger Refresh project. For this animation, I wanted to create something that mimicked the movement of bars if the students were actually taking a survey.

For the first draft, I did a lot more motion in the bars and the animation was slightly longer.

 

With some editing tips, I drafted a second animation that is shorter in length. I also made the
bars move more consistently.

Hello!

Well, somehow I finished up my second week as an STA. This was my first full 12-hour week, though it went by impressively fast. I’ve become very comfortable using the Mac that is second to last on the right side of the room. I fear that it will not always be the one I use, but I will cherish it for now.

This week I primarily worked with De’sha and Megan on the Animation Stinger refresh assignment, where we are adding animations to the stinger templates with adobe After Effects. I first created animatics on Procreate to quickly sketch out my ideas for the Chat, Instapoll, and TA discussion animations. I made several versions and drafts for both, but these are the ones we decided to stick with:

After I finished this, I began the actual animation for the Chat Stinger.

I first edited the chat Illustrator file and added in two smaller bubbles that I will later animate in After Effects. When doing this, I made each of the three dots a separate object from the large chat bubble, so that I am able to remove them later in AE when I replace them with masks. To create the smaller bubbles, I:

• Copied the large bubble object, resized and rotated it, and moved it to the bottom left. This location is where it will be largest in the animation.
• Used the pen tool to remove the anchor points for the triangle at the end of the chat bubble, which I felt was too off-center for the smaller bubbles.
• Used the pen tool to create a new triangle closer to the center of the bubble.
• Duplicated this first bubble to create the second bubble, which I placed on the top right.

After this, I imported the .ai file into the main After Effects template we are using for all the stingers. I imported this as a composition, and placed it next to the other animation compositions that already exist in the template (right now, the only other one we have done is the Survey stinger). Inside the composition, I created three masked circles to replace the ones with color in the .ai file. This way, the circles will be transparent and fit over any color background that is used in the template.

 

Next, I went back to the main composition, and edited the text on the left side of the screen to say “Chat Time.” We may change this later to be slightly larger.

Next week I will animate this, as well as the other stingers. I may also change the shapes of the bubbles to be more rounded, depending on if it fits the theme.

Have a great Labor Day weekend!