Subtitles of the Movie

In a different lesson, I discussed motion sketch and how to use it to have After Effects generate keyframes for you automatically based on your moving of something in the composition. The puppet tool has a very similar functionality and we're going to call this live recording. I'm going to enable my pins that I already have on this giraffe and I'm going to click anywhere on it and as you see, I have a couple of pins on the neck and the snout and a couple of the other areas, but what I want to do here is hold down on my keyboard when I click on a pin the command or control key and you'll notice that my pins cursor turns into a stopwatch, which means it's ready for me to record. So if I click and drag my mouse, it recorded that motion for me. I'll go ahead and hit the home key on the keyboard and then I hit the space bar. And you see that the neck is moving. Now, the real beauty of using this tool is that I can always go back to the home key or any keyframe and then start another pin as far as recording by holding down the same keyboard command. So what I'll do now is I'll grab this knee, hold down the command control key and I'll move it this way and as we see in the wire frame, we get to see a preview of the former animation. So once again, I make sure I'm on my home key and I'm going to move this leg and I'm going to hit home again just to make sure it's in the right spot and I'll move this leg. And I'll go over here and do the same thing. And now I'll do the same thing with the hump. And we'll give this guy a little animation as well and we make sure everybody's animated because this guy's awfully wobbly. Even though he's a big animal, he's still learning how to eat grass on these legs and not fall into all the tools back there. So I'm going to hit the home key and then I'm going to hit the space bar to preview the animation. And before I do that, I'm going to turn off these pins by just grabbing my black arrow and clicking away from it. Now let's check out the giraffe as he tries to enjoy some nice eatery on the lawn. And, of course, when you know you hit the space bar you're not going to get a full preview, full speed just yet until all the green here is finished rendering. So once it's done we'll be able to see a nice animation of the giraffe in real time. How awesome is that? Another thing about this is you still have keyframes available to you at all times, which you can then change and modify using the graph editor or manually in the timeline itself. So the live recording feature is just a starting point. You can always modify it and change it at any time. But it's a really, really nice way to animate something in real time visually instead of having to do it in such a mechanical fashion.