STA Work Blog

September Update!!! (Weeks 9/3 – 9/10)

I worked on this animation for RUS412 most of the time:

GIF

The kid is so devious! I was struggling with keeping this animation short because if the kid just got off the bus and went straight for the trash can, it’d look a little weird. So I had to sort of play with some nonverbal gestures between the mother and child, which added some time into the sequence.

I worked on editing this animation yesterday:

Originally the scene was with the Glasses Boy character saying bye to the Mom and the Kid, but I had to replace him with the Gramps and Granny who were standing in the back row. Now they’re the Glasses Boy and the Awake Girl.

I also edited a bunch of COLA IDs (here are just a few):

I also did the basic training STA vocab flashcards (see post below).

Also, I started working on the rotoscoping tutorial for a new STA training “module”. It’s my first time making a tutorial for this job so it’ll be interesting!

This week, I was given a new project from Suloni & Stacy to work on a website for a Persian class. At first, I thought it was just uploaded new audio/ video files, but it ended up requiring me to do some coding!!!!!!! It’s been a while since I’ve worked with html, so I had to ask Nick a lot of questions. I was a noob!! But it was really fun and satisfying to see the new changes I made.

<the menu bar before>

<after ~coding~ and making new changes>

Coding was a little scary at first, and I had to get the exact names of things in there, so I made a lot of mistakes and failures. But in the end, everything worked out! It was largely thanks to Nick for helping out! This is the link to the Persian website: https://www.laits.utexas.edu/persian_teaching_resources/vol2_unit4.php

I also finished my ~new~ STA caricature:

I was assigned a project to create an image based on the blueprints of Garrison Hall for the Department of History’s celebration. The specifications were to make it have a “fresh” and “modern” feel.

Suloni and I brainstormed some ideas on how to approach this. We were trying to come up with ways that the client would want this.

This is the original blueprint of Garrison Hall.

I wanted to try to preserve the “sketchiness” of the blueprints without the ever-imposing aging quality that blueprint inevitably bring. I sat around trying to come up with mock ups and think of things that our client might have envisioned.

Top: This is the isolated image from the blueprint.

Middle: This is an idea I had. Not sure if i’m liking the black.

Bottom: This is the one Suloni and I worked on together.

I’ll be working on more mock-ups next shift. Hopefully, I have more ideas!

Illustration Test

Today I started working on my illustration test for the Russian Online Course project. The criteria for my illustration is that it must contain one character, one animal, and a background. Before I began working on my illustration I read through the illustration tutorials for the Russian project. After that, I began sketching out ideas for my scene. I decided to illustrate a girl and her pet cat eating in an outdoor seating area of a cafe. I am not used to illustrating on Photoshop so it took me awhile to get a hang of thing but this is what I have so far.

I definitely need to learn how to use an digital drawing tablet if I am going to continue illustrating because using the pen tool for entire scenes is way too time consuming.

I edited a photo for a professor here at UT in the Asian Studies department!

Top: Original image

Middle: Edited image per specifications

Bottom: Edited image per specifications with a more legible figure description

I got rid of the bleeding words from the page and increased the contrast. For the bottom image, I blocked out the original text in a new layer with white. In another layer I made a text box with the same figure description in an effort to make it more legible.

Slideshow: Vocab Flashcards – From Sea to Sky