CREATING MOVEMENT USING THE PUPPET TOOL

The puppet tool is a natural way (and sometimes a weird way) to animate a form.
Create or find a form that you want to move in AE. Make sure that it is separated from its
background, or the whole picture will move. If you have to remove something from the
background, you will need to fill that background in. For this exercise we are working with a
very simple background that I painted in. Also, if the form is complex and needs to make
complex movements, make sure that the parts of the form separate layers, to make it easier to
move them separately.

Make ‘cardinal’ folder on desktop.

Open AE- start page, new project, save as ‘cardinal’, to the folder for the project.

General principles of puppet tool animation:

You place pins that will become points that you use to pull and move the form.
The more pins you place, the smaller the area of influence of each pin, so you will have more
nuance of movement.

There are 3 types of puppet pins:

Basic Puppet pin- places pins on form
Puppet overlap pin- indicates areas or parts that should be in front when areas overlap
Puppet starch pin- keeps areas or parts stiff so they won’t deform.

Import file ‘cardinal.psd’ as composition-retain layer sizes. You can import it this way because I
have prepared it to be a 1920 x 1080, 72 dpi image. Double click the ‘cardinal’ composition
icon in the project panel, and it will open in your layers panel, timeline and composition
window.

Set your pins:

Choose pin tool from toolbar.

Place first pin on the base of the beak- it will look like a yellow dot. Now put your cursor on the
dot, and you’ll see that it moves the whole bird. Place a Second pin on the tail- yellow dot (and
first pin will be a clear circle). Move the different pins with your cursor and notice what they do
to the bird. Because there are just a couple of pins, the whole bird body wants to move.

Above the comp window in the toolbar, you will see the word ‘mesh’. If you check ‘show’, you
will see the mesh that is formed over the form. You can scrubby-slide the ‘density’ property
next to the word ‘mesh’ to make the mesh more or less complex. The more triangles, the
smoother the movement, but the longer the rendering time.
Continue to place pins where you think there should be movement vortices (like joints). You
can also delete pins by highlighting them and clicking ‘delete’. Play around with the form until
it seems to move to make the bird look like it’s pecking the berries, moving rather naturally.
The more pins you have, the more distorted the form might be when moving. So to move
naturally, you generally only need a few pins.

Name your pins:

Open ‘mesh 1’ in Timeline panel, open ‘deform’ and you’ll see all of your pins, numbered in the
order you made them (there will be number gaps if you deleted pins). Highlight the first pin,
note where it is in your form, then click return, and name that pin with a descriptive title (right
arm). It can be hard to see, but you can zoom in (.period key) and move around (hand tool) in
the comp window. Or you can modify the position of the pin to see where it is.

Two ways to animate:

Keyframe animation:
Choosing particular pins, set keyframes for various positions.

Live recording animation (WAY FUNNER):

If you want to easily create movement and set all of your keyframes automatically, hold down
the command(mac)/control (PC) key (you’ll see a stopwatch appear where your cursor is in the
comp window) , then grab a pin and move the form as you want it to move. AE will record all
the keyframes, and you can play back that animation.
You can add more movement by returning your playhead to the beginning, and grabbing more
pins. You will see a ‘ghost’ of the other movement as well.
Open up one of the pin layers and you will see all the keyframes you just made! It’s hard to
refine movement this way, but it’s still an opportunity to get some quick funky movement.

You can do a combination of both!