[Michael Szalapski]

You could tie the positions of your circle layers to the points of the mesh warp effect.

You could try using the puppet tool.

You could make this with expressions pointing beam effects between each circle

In any case, you could then use wiggle or noise() to move the circles around.

Or, if you have Cinema 4D, there are some waaaaaay easier ways to do this there.

[Michael Szalapski]

There’s not really a good way to automate the changing sizes as attendees come and go. You could probably do it with expressions, but it would probably be faster to do it mostly by hand (with help from the align panel).

[Michael Szalapski]

How are you creating the dots in the first place?

[Michael Szalapski]

I’d be willing to bet that’s a stroke and not a fill. So it’s just a line with a really wide stroke. You should be able to apply Turbulent Displace or Roughen Edges to it.

[Michael Szalapski]

Fields can do that sort of thing.

[Michael Szalapski]

It might not be a preset. It could be something built from scratch. You should be able to select the text layer and look at all the animators that have been added to it.

[Michael Szalapski]

When did they disappear? Was it just after the recent update?

Do you have older versions of AE installed?

[Michael Szalapski]

AE’s sequence layers command should do exactly that. You can even have it set your opacity keyframes for you.

[Michael Szalapski]

If you didn’t have the older version installed on your machine, how did you “upload” the settings from your old machine?

[Michael Szalapski]

No problem!