the first thing we're going to do is add a little bit of motion to this photograph as if the camera was panning across the scene. So what we can do is basically do a position animation of the background. But if we do that and we move the background from side to side, our dog is left in the middle floating there. So to lock the dog to the grassy hill. So if we move the grassy hill, what do we have to do? We can parent it to the grassy hill. So now if we take the pick whip for the dog layer and attach it to the grassy hill. When we moved the grassy hill from left to right, it moves as well and the shadow since it's attached to the dog also moves. So now with that all set up, let's set a position for our starting point and let me just move it over to the side and then let's go to the end of our composition and drag to the left. So if we play through this we get a little subtle motion. And I love that subtle motion. I don't really need to see the dog right now and it's taking a lot of band...

width from my computer. So just to make things speed up, I'm going to turn off those layers. So cool, we got a little bit of motion. But in a natural environment, if you were looking at, you know, if you're sitting on this hill, this tree wouldn't be completely still, there would be a little bit of wind, you might see a little rustling in the grass down below, a little bit of movement in the leaves. So let's add some movement to add motion to something that is still, we will use the puppet pin tool first. Let's duplicate the grassy hill. And the reason is just so that if I do something to this layer, I can always go back and delete it and it just makes it easier to manipulate the puppet pin area. So choose the puppet pin tool and now start placing pins around these branches. So I'll put one here here and again, make sure that you have this grassy hill layer selected and then here, then also along here and I'll explain why in just a second, maybe here and here. If you press you on your keyboard, you find the key frames for all of the puppet pins that we've selected or added. And we have this puppet with the mesh and all of these pins. And so what is happening is we've told after effects that at this point we want these pins to be here. Let's zoom in. So let's zoom in on these leaves so we can see a little bit better. Okay, so what happens when we move one of these pins? So let me go forward in time. So we're creating a new key frame. Just use the selection tool and I move this, see what happens the entire photo kind of warps. If I actually zoom out, you'll see that the entire photo itself is warping and we don't want that. We just want this area of the photo to move. So to do that we're going to create a mask and we could have done this first but I just wanted to show you how that works. So let me just create a mask around these branches like so just around the edge of this branch as well. Okay, complete our mask. So if we turn off our bottom layer, this is what we're working with. I always like adding a little bit of feathering so press f on your keyboard and increase the feathering just so it's a little bit more natural when it's blended with the image in the background. Okay back to our pin tool, press u on the keyboard. What we want to do is move all of these key frames to the very beginning of our video clip. Then we'll go forward and this has got to be very subtle. Let me Delete This one that I had created and let's just move these pins from side to side. So now because it's masked out the entire image doesn't move. Just move it just ever so slightly and go forward and we'll move it back just ever so slightly. The reason why I put in all of these other pins is think of them as joints of your body and think of these as your arm. If I didn't have these pins set up then the entire image would move, but these are locked in place. So you have your shoulders locked in place, here is your shoulder, here is your elbow, here is your hand or your wrist, so you're able to move your elbow up and down or your wrist around without actually moving your shoulders. So these are kind of your anchor points and we need those to make sure that this part of the image isn't being warped because if this image warps something like this, then it looks weird with the background, we don't want that, we just want this part of the image to move just these branches down here. Let me extend these key frames just so that's really long and then play through and this is going to be render intensive. The puppet tool is render intensive, so if you have a slower computer, this might take a little while for it to render. So I'll render it out and then we'll see it play through. Alright, now it's rendered through. Let me close this layer down, I'll just rename this leaves and now just select off of that layer, so I don't see the pins or anything or the mask. And now just playing through. You see just subtle motion as if you know, the wind blew that branch and maybe it's a little too much, actually, we might want to make it a little bit more subtle in a future lesson, we'll be diving into the puppet to a little bit more and showing you how to use it in another real world project. But this is just sort of a teaser into how that works. Alright, so that's enough for this lesson. We added the motion to the photo, painting across motion to these leaves. Now, in the next lesson, we'll use it a cool effect to add a little bit of motion to these leaves in the background.

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Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Lesson Info

49. Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Lessons

Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates

Understand the After Effects Workspace

Starting a New Composition

CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage

Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline

Using the Basic After Effects Tools

Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors

Working in the Timeline

Layer Properties

Quiz: After Effects Basics

Animating in After Effects

Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations

Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral

Using the Graph Editor

Challenge - Bouncing Ball

Solution - Bouncing Ball

Quiz: Animating with Keyframes

Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects

Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths

Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients

Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag

Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers

Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear

Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers

Easily Reverse Complicated Animations

Playing with Time

Blend Modes

Stabilize Shaky Footage

CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts

CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time

CC 2019 Content Aware Fill

CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates

Quiz: Important After Effects Skills

Intro to Motion Graphics Projects

Clean Lower Third

Logo Reveal Animation Bumper

Colorful Transition

Text with Mask Path Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Weather App 1

Weather App 2

Weather App 3

Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects

Flat Animation Challenge

Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene

Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect

Removing Green Screen Background

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect

Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge

Intro to 3D

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Build Out Your 3D Composition

Animating Our 3D Scene

Create Stars in After Effects

Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)

Using the Rotoscope Tool

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation

Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool

Easy Screen Replacement with Masks

Replacing a Screen Version 2

Screen Replacement with Mocha

CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin

Quiz: Rotoscoping

Using the Puppet Pin Tool

Animating Your Puppet Pins

Animated Blinking Eyes

Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds

CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool

Quiz: Screen Replacements

Applying Text Animation Presets

Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn