Create a Cute Live Video Animation (Free Project Files)

Do you want to add a little zing to your live footage? Why not add animation to make your video really pop. In this guide, we’ll show you how to make a cute and engaging live video animation. As always, you can download the source files so you can follow along.

The Scribble Effect

• Open up the footage and create a Solid layer. 
• Using the Pen tool, create a mask excluding the object that you don’t want to animate over. 
• Make sure to add keyframes to the mask path so that the mask moves together with your object.
• Go to the effects panel and click on the Scribble effect to add it to the mask. Use the effect controls to play around with the settings until you’re happy with how the effect looks.

The Lightning 

• Create a new composition – in this case, the new composition is square (1080 x 1080 px)
• Draw a simple thunder (or lightning) illustration with the Pen tool and paint it yellow.
• Paste the illustration in the main composition and add keyframes for the Position and Scale. Check out the video for more details on how to do that.
• Duplicate the thunder layer and repeat the keyframing process.
• Add a Drop shadow effect to the illustrations and adjust the distance and color from the Drop shadow effect panel.

The Monsters

• Rename the layers and parent them.
• Add position, scare, and rotation keyframes for each layer. Adjust them until you’re happy with the result. Check out the video for more details about how to do it.
• Duplicate the mask that you made for the scribble effect and invert it. Then bring it above the monster.
• Copy and paste the paw drawings and parent them to the monster character. Follow the video to make the paws appear from behind the live-action character.
• The process is identical to the steps above. Make sure you follow along with the video in case you need any help!

The Stars

• Paste the star into the composition. 
• Add a drop-shadow effect and change the color and distance from the effects panel
• Add scale keyframes to make the star appear.
• Open Animation Composer 3 and select Effects 2D Layer > Cosine Position and Rotation. Apply it to the star layer.
• Duplicate the star layer, flip it and adjust the intensity to  -15 so that the second star moved the other way.

The Splash Effect

• Look for a reference for a splash animation (on Youtube, for example).
• Animate them frame-by-frame.
• Add the mask and duplicate.
• Order your layers as shown in the video.

We hope that you were able to follow through with the article and the video. Make sure you download our FREE resources so you can practice. For more animation tutorials like this, subscribe to our Kashu Academy YouTube channel.

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss free After Effects templates.