Hello all! I have here what should be a pretty simple question, but followed up by more general questions regarding layer management and parenting.

Basically, in this sequence, a potato drives up, myself and my friend run from the curb and onto the potato. The potato speeds off.

We have the empty street as a plate, the potato, and my friend and I running on green screen.

The troublesome part was that we didn’t have something green to “mount.” So I had to mask out our right legs. The only trouble was that I didn’t anticipate wanting to add shadows beneath us, so here’s the general idea of the layers I have created, from lowest to highest:

1. Street plate.
2. Potato
3. Ourselves.
4. Duplicate of the potato, With keyframed masks applied such that they hide our “other side” legs.

The problem has come in adding shadows in between ourselves and the Potato layer. Right now, all of the moving elements are Parented to the Original potato so that when I animated the potato zooming off, I wouldn’t have to manage keyframing ourselves after we were “connected” to the potato. But the masking I did now also hides portions of the shadows I create.

The solution I had in mind was simple enough in execution, I want to DELETE the duplicate potato, but take the MASKS I keyframed manually and apply them to OURSELVES, hiding our hidden portions.

Copy/Pasting the Mask from the duplicate potato layer to the layers of ourselves results in it being transformed, and I’m not sure what the best way to go about this is.

Should I have done something differently from the start? I anticipated wanting to adjust our position on the potato, which is why i didn’t apply masking to ourselves directly from the start, but fundamentally, this seems like an easy task to do, I just don’t know the right way to do it.