Study Task - Puppet Master - Puppet Pin Tool

In this blog post I will be walking through my experience with the puppet tool in adobe after affects, what i did with the puppet tool and how i think it could be useful in future projects.
First off I decided to take a picture of myself (top left) and use that as a character asset, I first had to remove the background from my original image using the Polygonal lasso tool in photoshop, this was due to the magic wand tool having trouble differentiating the background of the image and my clothing. After i removed the background of my character asset i then saved that  image as a .PNG file, this is so that there would be a transparency on the background of my image so that the character asset could be placed in environments such as the one I found on google of a dessert scene.
I used the advanced search settings in google to find an image with the correct aspect ratio of 1920 x 1080  (16:9), this would then automatically be the correct ratio for my animation when placed in after affects.
First off in after affects I opened up the puppet pin tool, placing pins on the joints of my character (or image of myself), then once all the pins were in place I decided to use the real-time record option to animate one body part of my character, the real time record option allows you to record the motion a pin undertakes whilst moving it around and holding CMD on a mac (CTRL for Windows).
I repeatedly used the real-time record option to animate each body part as I felt that I had more control over the movement this way.

Once I had all of the body parts moving and had my character pulling some funky dance moves I decided to render out the footage as an image sequence and import it into adobe premiere.

Upon working in premiere I dropped in my background image (with the correct aspect ratio) and then placed my rendered after affects composition into the sequence, I then duplicated the finished composition and altered the scale of the individual characters to give a sense of depth for this psychedelic dance troupe that I had spawned.

Overall I think that the puppet pin tool is a fantastic tool that if given a little more attention and used with a considered approach, could be used to produce some very interesting animation or even visual effects.