CHINESE 507 Online Course

An older Chinese online language course has been revived for completion recently and I’ve been tasked as the guy to sync it up! It follows a similar workflow as the Russian online course I’ve been working on. In fact, it’s responsible for establishing some of the norms for making these types of videos at LAITS, which continued on to the Russian online course. Some of the processes are a little dated but I’ve gotten into the swing of things and have already knocked out about about 10 videos since being assigned it a little over a week ago.

Personal STA Presentations Progress

I have made much progress on my own STA presentations as well. I have been assigned two presentations, one for an animated Austin Skyline I made for a live broadcast online AET class, and one for the Russian Online course I have devoted so much of my time to since beginning this job. The Russian online course presentation has taken some time to develop, it has already gone under two major structural changes and about 3 or 4 drafts, but I believe it’s near its completion! The AET presentation was a little simpler for me to break down, especially since there was much less to talk about, it’s first draft is complete and will probably only need a few minor adjustments.

STA Presentation Progress

I’ve mainly been working on preparing for the STA presentation set for April 20th since last posting on the blog. I was first tasked with establishing the Keynote template that every STA will use for their presentation. I started by placing the LAITS presentation background that was provided to me onto the background of the “Master Slides” for the Presentation template. I then established a color scheme based of the LAITS color block in the bottom left of the slide and created a number of line, shape and table styles that reflected this color scheme. I even made a tutorial for using Keynote if there were any STAs unfamiliar with the program.

Some Updates from my Weekend.

This weekend I worked with director Jared Marxuach, an audio STA at LAITS, on his thesis RTF narrative film project, “Gregory”, serving as the production designer. This wasn’t a LAITS related shoot, but it was a super fun set, where I was given a lot of creative freedom and got to work with some great people, so I’m sharing some stills of some of my set design set ups from the shoot!

Creating the “Russian Subway” Set for RUS407 animations

The creation of the “Russian Subway” set definitely yielded my favorite outcome for backgrounds in RUS407 animations. After getting comfortable with set building within Adobe Animate, I wanted to experiment with incorporating hand drawn illustrations with pen, watercolor, and paper into the program as the set design. First I drew the tunnel itself. From my research I saw that many Russian subway tunnels have large archways with ornate designs and big, expansive entrances, which I tried to incorporate in my drawings. After completing the hand drawn picture, I scanned the image into the computer and touched it up in Photoshop, adding shading and contrast to create more depth. Here is a before and after comparison of the original untouched image scan and after I finished touching it up in Photoshop:

After completing this, I exported the image (with the walkway and the back arches on two separate layer) and imported into Adobe Animate and was able to easily add a subway train and some characters:

I then followed a very similar process for creating the Interior of the Subway station entrance. With this illustration, I wanted it to have the same feel as the “Tunnel” illustration, but I also wanted the space to feel more expansive and to play with depth more. Here is the before and after of touching up the image in Photoshop:

And after I uploaded the image into Adobe Animate, added details and my character:

Finally, since I wasn’t entirely sure if these hand drawn backgrounds would match the rest of the backgrounds, I decided for the exterior of the “Subway Entrance”, that I would create this digitally in the animation program, just matching the hand drawn illustration as best as I could:

I ultimately LOVE the feel the hand drawn backgrounds provide, and would be very interested in continuing this style in future animations.

Creating the “Street” Set for RUS407 animations

The “Street Set” went through many iterations as I progressed in the RUS407 animations. With many animations for this project, I would complete the bare minimum for the animation to be “finished”, and then come back, sometimes as much as a month or two later, and add more details. The slideshow below outlines this process:

For the “Crosswalk” animation that came in Unit 11, I wanted to match the street a little more to what a city street might look like in Moscow. I used some images that Dr. Rice provided to as inspiration:

I added buildings, shading and detail to the animation, I think to successful effects. This slideshow breaks down this process: