Who We Are
LAITS: IT and Facilities Director, Joe TenBarge initiated the Student Technology Assistant program in 2004. STAs are UT students who work on a variety of projects in collaboration with UT faculty and LAITS staff members. STAs assist College of Liberal Arts faculty members and administrative staff with print and web design. From building presentations, to creating audio/visual works, and producing online classes in the LAITS film studios, STAs are instrumental in helping COLA faculty realize their vision for multimedia projects that enhance their teaching and the students learning experience. By the end of their student careers, STAs have portfolios which demonstrate their accrued technical and design skills.
Creative and technically inclined students are appointed as STAs for one year, with the possibility of being rehired as long as they study at the university. Applicants for the program are hired before both long semesters. Interested students may look for postings on Hire-A-Longhorn when positions are available. Positions will have Student Technology Assistant (illustrator or web designer) in the title of the job post.
Faculty & Staff with questions about services, please contact us.
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/laits/contacts.php
I got assigned some new stuff for Russian this week! First was importing character costumes onto a swim cycle. I used the adventurer character and transferred his clothing and hair into the swim cycle file. It was interesting to learn this new step in the animation process.
I also got my first watercolor background assignment. I was tasked to make the ocean floor. I enjoyed getting to experiment with the Kyle Webster brushes.
Original logo + rhetoric:
Marla’s Sketches:
FINALIZED LOGO WHOO
This past week I had a lot of animation assignments, so here we go!
First, I created car overheads with three color variations of each + the taxi overhead:
I also made a trash can with a detachable lid + added angles to the adventurer character:
I also took over an assignment for Bridget. I had to make variations of some fish (this was my favorite one to do):
I also got assigned to make the set design for PSY333D at the end of last week, so here’s my progress so far:
Bridget wanted three versions of the desk skirt:
She also wanted a canvas dashboard graphic:
And for the desk monitor, she wanted a purple tint and various images of children, so this is what I came up with:
I think it might be too cluttered, but without seeing it in context, I can’t be sure.
Finally, I also started my idea for NWAV49!
This is the first version:
and here’s the 2nd version after adding some details (+ a website mockup):
These four designs were sent to Dr. Johns (in their original, noncolor-corrected versions), who approved them! In order: back wall monitor, desk skirt/front monitor, Canvas home page banner, Canvas dashboard thumbnail picture. The only last request was that I swap out some of the pictures so there are fewer duplicate images, especially in the last two designs for Canvas. Once I do that, these should be ready to go!
These are some characters I’ve been working on. When we get an assignment, usually only the front and side views are done and what I have to do is draw and color the other angles of the character using the specs I’ve been given. Sometimes (like with the hairstyle for the first character) we draw objects freestyle, and other times, for the sake of efficiency and continuity, we can reuse object designs from other characters (the hair for the professor was copy-and-pasted from another character, I just changed the fill color so it wouldn’t be completely identical). It’s been really fun working on these designs, even though there was a bit of a learning curve to using the program at first!
Like last week, I mostly worked on animations/illustrations for RUS412. For illustrations, I finished my second illustration of Oleg counting sheep:
I briefly looked up the origin of “counting sheep” and it apparently comes from a Spanish/Islamic story, Disciplina Clericalis and Don Quixote. Interesting to know that it’s now known in both the U.S. and in Russia!
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Here are the animations I did over the past week; the first is the mother/child walk cycle that I touched up:
He is now being dragged instead of walking backwards, his arm is pointing futilely, and there’s a dirt cloud spreading under his feet. Poor kid.
The second animation I did was this man rowing a boat.
I traced frames like these from a rowing animation video that Tate linked. I just screenshotted 8 moments, making sure I got all the extreme poses to use as keyframes.
At first I did it in only 8 frames, but the rowing motion was too fast so I had to add 4 more frames to slow it down. This is probably the most complex animation I’ve done for RUS412 so far!
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I also worked on a few things for This is Democracy, such as a favicon for the podcast site and a bookmark. It’s been fun trying to incorporate my initial design into different formats!
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And finally, here are some designs I’ve been working on.
For the STA patch, I made these three drafts. My favorite one is the teardrop design!
I started with a pentagonal shape because I wanted it to be 5 points/5 sides for the 5 LAITS colors. But then I saw the teardrop-looking graphic for the Liberal Arts Honors on the cabinet at the back of the lab, so I tried to make a drop-shape with the LAITS squares spiraling down. The rotation of the squares was somehow very hard to manipulate because they kept looking weird and didn’t fit the space well, but I think I eventually got it to an aesthetically-pleasing layout.
And just for fun and because I was hungry, I wanted to try the NWAV49 design but with that last tomato/potato idea that Suloni put on the design brief.
I’ve been playing around with fonts, but I keep wanting to default to Bebas Neue!! I feel like I should find a homey font that looks like it belongs in a cookbook or something. After all, this design is more organic than one with a soundwave or spectrogram, which would be more technological and digital.
This week I worked more on the animation assets for Tate. I used textured brush for all the outlines, and clean, flat colors. The bunny is the most time consuming asset I’ve been assigned so far, because I have to separate all of the limbs, ears, and eyes as different symbols, as well as keeping all the layers instinct. Through working on the assets, I/m definitely more comfortable with Adobe Animate now. Thank you Tate for giving me cute assets to work on such as bunnies and bubbles hehehe…
