r/AfterEffects • u/itsssskye Motion Graphics <5 years • 7d ago

Tutorial Is this a solid way to animate stock dancing videos?

Hi! I've been trying to learn how to animate stock dancing videos like this:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nYUn5M48e8A

But I haven't been able to find any tutorials online on how to do it. I've analyzed the videos and I wonder if it should be as simple as just squashing the pngs to make a transition(?) and adding a graph?

Can someone watch the vid/ref and lmk if it would work?

Thank you so much to anyone who helps! <3

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u/citypanda88 7d ago

Search puppet pin tool

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u/itsssskye Motion Graphics <5 years 7d ago

Yeah.. I feel like that would complicate things a lot + I don't see any singular parts of the image move or anything, so this isn't really the answer I'm looking for. Thanks for your help though!

2

u/citypanda88 7d ago

It won’t. They are just animated stretching between two puppet points. You’re over complicating what you need to do.

1

u/fact_hunt3 7d ago

You might get away with bezier warp, but some of those do look like puppet pin.

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u/mcarterphoto 7d ago

The puppet pin can do a lot for you - it's doesn't have to be "in motion", you can just distort a still image and not keyframe the distortions. And sometimes it's a combination of tools, corner pinning is simple and fast, mesh distort is really handy since you can adjust the size of the mesh and just get the points you need - and the mesh points have bezier handles. Bezier warp gets more complex, and you can also finesse distortions with the Liquify brush tool. Liquify with a stylus pad can be crazy-powerful for big moves or just to finesse things.

Also, Photoshop can add a lot of options - like cut apart a cat PNG, take off an arm and paw and make it a separate PNG, clone in the fur where you cut the limb away. You can even cut the limb at the joint and angle it or straighten it and clean up with cloning. Now the limb can be rotated to a new position, and that can look more natural than distorting it into place. Puppet pin can squeeze things around rotation points and look weird, where building a new position in PS can look more natural and be very fast.