study task 3 puppet master

Starting this study task of by taking a picture of my friend in a side pose, since i had a thought of making the character jump across an area in the composition i was going to make. i told my friend to stand in a specific pose in order to make it easier to cut him out and be able to place pins appropriately when entering After Effects and using the puppet pin tool.

Opening After Effects up, I imported the cut out picture of my friend and found a simple background online which allows me to animate the character to jump in this space. heres a screen shoot:

Using the puppet tool i placed the points that i want to be able to move and animate the character and made sure the spacing between each point was reasonable which you can see in this screenshot:

After placing each point i wanted to apply the starch pins to the character so that it makes the character have sharp movements rather then wobbly moves, these pins where placed on the legs and arms, because this is where movements are sharp in realistic movements, another screen shot:

I learned that you can control how much you want it to bend and appear sharp which i applied in the above screenshot, I soon then realized that coming to the animating the legs where overlapping which i solved using the overlapping pins. From that i managed to choose and select the amount of area in that the arm and leg gets in front of the body which was quite easy to control and could be very useful if i ever come to using the puppet tool. screen shot:

i then moved on to animating this fully pin rigged character and placing the character in key frames was quite easy to do but then i came across a small problem when animating, which made the arms and legs look weird and was quite hard to understand what was making it bend awkwardly, but i manged to cover it by using the other leg heres a screenshot:

Heres the final animation

In the end, the result of using the puppet tool made it easier to animate a character but id only use this when i need to move simple objects on the screen without needing to create new poses/animated sequences. Alan Becker showcases how he used the puppet tool in his Animation vs animator 4 animation where he cuts out the hands he recorded and uses the puppet tool to make a smooth transition. heres a short clip of Alan showcasing the puppet tool: (go to 1:10 )