Animating Puppet in After Effect

The second assignment we got in digital compositing class was to animate a character with After Effect.
It was kind of like moving a puppet in it.
The character should be in silhouette only,
so it would look kind of like a shadow puppet.

This is the scene and character I designed



and a snap shot from the video



The hat on the girl’s head supposed to be a fish with lion’s head
(OMG that sounds like the Singapore Mer-Lion in Chinese style XDD)
To make this figure move,
I first drew every body part and the lanterns on separate layers in Illustrator.


Then imported all the layers into After Effect,
set up key frames, and adjusted each part separately.