Page 4 - Animating the Mask

Sometimes it it necessary to animate the mask to follow the actor. In this case I needed to do this because the instance of me on the top right needs to appear behind the instance of me on the bottom right. This happens as that character goes to move out of the doorway. At the same time the character on the bottom begins to move also. So, I needed the mask on the bottom character to follow him out of the doorway.

To do this, scrub through the timeline until you reach the point where you need to start animating the mask.

Uncollapse the timeline for the clip for the actor on the bottom right. Uncollapse the mask layer. Click on the little stopwatch icon to turn on a key frame. Now, every time you make and adjustment to the mask, a new key frame will be created on the timeline for you.

Next, lock the other two instances of Doorway.avi so you don't select them by accident. That's always a pain.

Now you must follow the actor frame by frame and adjust the mask to follow the actor as tightly as possible until he goes beyond the doorway. A good method for this, is to try to jump ahead 5 frames or so, adjust the mask and check the frames in between. Then, adjust them accordingly. Use the arrow to simply click on a single point in your mask, and can the use the arrow keys or the mouse to move that point around. You can select multiple points and move them all at once. Like, I mentioned before about these mask paths. It takes some practice. Just know that you can adjust this mask point by point for every single frame to make it as accurate as possible.

Go on to page 5: Finalizing the Clips and adding in the lightsaber clip