Animating Stick Figures

[John Baum]

I would make the “sticks” out of solids, move their anchor points to the joint positions and add parent-child links to keep things together.
I haven’t actually ried this and there may be a problem I didn’t think about, but this is how I would first approach it if I didn’t have access to a 3d program.

[Mike Clasby]

Yep, in AE with moving the anchor point and parenting, then posing the figure at key points then let AE interpolate, you can even use expressions to add movement to music, like bobbing the head (just link rotation to Audio Keyframes). You can make the Sticks with solids or from layered files you created in Photoshop or AI files from Illustrators.
Dan’s tut is great, just set yours up from a front view, the principles are the same.

Dan Ebberts demonstrates
Animating a Walk-Cycle

https://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=/articles/ebberts_dan/layer_looping/index.html

Also, as an option, but not really necessary for your job,
Dan has Inverse Kinematics for figures here:

https://www.motionscript.com/expressions-lab-ae65/ik.html

But you need to follow the directions precisely (setting it up perfectly Horizontal or Vertical is critical).
If you use IK then you just need to move the hands or the feet (or the farthest part) and the other limbs follow naturally.
And this earlier post about a nifty tooning app with easy Inverse Kinematics:

Barend Onneweer
Date: Jul 26, 2006 at 6:40:30 am
Subject: Re: Advanced Parent/Child Properties Question

On another note:

For 2D cut-out character animation have a look at Moho:
https://www.lostmarble.com/

It’s 90 bucks, but features everything I hope AE will one day do in terms of bone skeletons with
inverse kinematics, and bend deforms based on the bone skeleton…

Bar3nd

[Chris Smith]

Other options are doing it in Flash or hand drawing it the ol fashined way and using a simple shareware program to grab frames and show you the onion skin from your previous frames.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com