Cutting out a Moving Image

This week in the After Effects workshop we worked on cutting out a moving image and using the mask tool to animate said image.

I brought some royalty free looping video clips and a pre-made illustrator background in order to make the process quicker. I made a simple layered background of a landscape and chose a running horse for my moving image as I thought this would be aesthetically effective in the final result.

After importing that into Adobe After Effects I stretched out the timeline to make it easier to edit frame by frame. I used the clipping mask tool to trace around the moving image every couple of frames when it moved into a different position. This basically cut a hole in the image and moved frame by frame with the looping animation.

The next step was to remove the original animation and fill the cut-out section with a solid colour which would effectively show up against my background. I then imported the background layer in order to put the two pieces of imagery together and see what effect this resulted in. At this point I had a coloured background with a horse which remained in one position with consistently moving legs. To resolve this I moved the image out of frame and added position keyframes to give the effect of the animal's legs moving and subsequently carrying it from the right to the left of the screen.

Below is the final example of what I achieved in this week's After Effects workshop and although I found it challenging I did enjoy creating the final outcome. If I were to do this task again I would refine the drawings of each frame and ensure that it loops perfectly as the final piece does not quite loop accurately as there was not enough material to trace around.



The Running Horse from Elissa Boswell on Vimeo.