Shapes, Masks, Mattes - "Star Power"

For this one, I knew I wanted to mess with the star shape. I find them alarming myself and figured I could really put my fear of them into an animation.

So, using a mask, I created a cute little plump star. I put him in a corn field for that horror movie feel. Although, I do like the bird chirping. I give the video some quiet time in order to disarm the view (muhahahaha!).

I was fortunate to find a picture of a farmer hangin' with his sheep. Classic. In photoshop, I used a mask to pen him out of his background, them slapped him into AE. I also separated his head into a new layer.

From there, I created the star's face, parented it to the body. Then I animated the star's jump and at the midway point, I altered his path to create a sort of scissor look. Once he was close enough to the farmer, I altered the path again to pinch the farmer's head off. Animating the head flying was simple enough, then I had the star follow the same route back to his original position and path.

In the end, I animated some simple paint effects for the blood and threw in a few sounds.

I had some serious render issues with this one. The audio wasn't righty and the video was all janky. After setting the audio to 4400KB, it worked, although the aspect ratio is still a bit off. Meh, I was just ready to move on. Anywho, enjoy!

Shapes, Masks, Mattes - "Star Power" from Casey Redmon on Vimeo.