STA Blog

Current Sta

Week 3

By

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)

Hey everyone. This week I’ve mostly just been finishing up the last of my Pages trainings. I finished the 3 personal sites I made after they were deleted.

I also wrote the professional email that was sent to update my progress on my personal site and then started migrating some of the sites from the old CMS to this one. Here are a few of the sites below.

This week I started migrating actual pages and will continue to work on that.

Animation Refresh Notes

By

Animation Refresh Notes

Completed Icons:

 

In-progress Icons:

  • Quiz
  • TA (rebranding)

 

Currently, we are working towards completing the last two animations in the animation refresh project.

For the Quiz icon, we are focusing on the timing and sequencing of the different frames in the animation. Once that is complete, this animation should be completed too.

The TA icon is undergoing a complete rebrand. The icon looks too similar to the chat icon and we want to distinct between them. Therefore, Rachel will be working on a new design for this icon.

Traveling for free

By

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.

 

 

Week 3: electric booga-tree?

By

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: