Subtitles of the Movie

By now I'm sure you guys are loving the Puppet Tool. I think it's an amazing feature, but I want to show you that there's even more to this Tool. Now, of course the main reason we want to use the Puppet Tool is to create animations, and the Puppet Tool makes it even easier because you don't have to just click on the Pins and then move them and add Keyframes, move them, add Keyframes, and that kind of thing. You can do something called Live Recording, which simply allows you to move the Pins and then After Effects will move the Timeline for you and add the Keyframes automatically. So what I'm going to do is make sure that what I'm not animating is locked. You don't have to do this, but I like to. I have a tendency to click on the wrong thing. And I'm going to zoom in on this character a little bit, let's go to 100 percent, and to get this working, first of all I'm going to go to the Home key on my keyboard to go to the first frame of the animation, make sure your Puppet Tool is active and that you can see your Pins, and then we have to hold down just one key on the keyboard. If you're on a PC it's going to be Control, and if you're on a Mac Command, and that will turn the cursor of your mouse into a Stopwatch. Notice this, once again, Command or Control, click on your Pin and then simply start to move it. The Current Time Indicator will move by itself and if you take a look at the bottom right of this lesson here you see it moving right now. I'll let go of that and we have some Keyframes now and a Motion Path. I'll hit Home on my keyboard and I'll scrub manually to show you the animation. Now I know that is probably the coolest thing that this application has because I can now take any flat image and create realistic motion. Now let's go ahead and do the same thing. I'll return to the Home key and I think I'll animate his chest heaving a little bit. Now the beautiful thing about this is when I add to the current animation I can see an outline so I can follow it. For example, watch what happens when I start to move his chest. Once again I'll hold down Command or Control, and I can keep my eye on the arm as it goes up and down and then have the chest move up and down as well, kind of counteracting it, and I'll let go of that, I'll look at my Motion and then I will go to the Home key and I can manually scrub that. Now he's breathing real hard because something's coming up those stairs that he doesn't want to see. I'm going to zoom out a little bit, fit this in the window, and click off the of Pins and get a really nice Preview by zooming back in and I will simply slowly move the Current Time Indicator so we can see our handiwork. So, this is really handy if you have some 3D animation that has been saved as a flat piece of artwork like this. Once again this character was modeled and textured in Maya and I did the texturing in 3D code, saved it as a simple Flat Targa file, as you see here, and Targa allows you to have the background transparent and I can bring this guy in just as one flat character and then animate it as though it was animated in said 3D application. So, definitely practice that technique and you'll be able to create all kinds of great animations.