“By using the free transform tool, I believe that you are animating the rotation of the layer, and not just the mask. ”
Yep, you’ve got it – the mask itself is what I want to rotate.
The points of the mask itself must be transformed, and not the layer, for the image to remain in the same rotation. If you just need the shape of the mask to rotate, you may need to put the mask on a black solid, and set the “track matte” of your photo to the black solid layer (you need to turn off the visibility of the black solid layer…), then you can animate the rotation of the black solid to achieve the effect.
And that is indeed what I’ve done! Great minds think alike, eh?! ;-)I made a precomp with the fill, a black layer scaled much larger above it with the mask, and used an alpha inverted matte on the fill track matte. This way the corners of the black layer won’t appear when I rotate that precomp in my main comp.
Thanks for your help… It’s been a long week and I’m just tired of thinking.
TGIF!