Animation: Preparing a mouth to animate in After Effects

There are a few ways to animate mouths in After Effects but this way I found is perhaps the easiest. It’s a little bit technical to begin with as it requires the use of time remapping. The thing is you don’t need to know what time remapping you only need to remember the sequence of things you need to do to make your character’s mouth move.  First things first though I need to prepare the mouth for animation. I Select all the mouth layers and cut them to paste into a new composition. I go up to the composition layer and select new composition.

I label this composition Mouth and then paste all of the mouth layers into it. Next I want to cut all these layers down so they will be just one frame long. I do this by pressing Alt and ] together (making sure my time line is set to 0).

Now I want to sequence them so that they run one after the other. I go up to the animation tab and from the menu select Keyframe Assistant from which I choose Sequence layers from a sub menu.

Now my layer run one after the other. Finally to neaten things up go upto the composition settings and with my time line set on the last frame click on the trim to work area tab. This will trim my Mouth composition to the length of the five frames that make up all my mouths.

We are now ready for time remapping which I will detail tomorrow.