[Michael Szalapski]

Five seconds is not a quick shot in the visual effects world! That’s a long visual effects shot.

Could you explain a little more clearly what you’re doing? Have you considered the Reshape effect? It might be more like what you want. But you’ll probably have to apply it to a copy of the footage with your actor rotoscoped out. And, of course, you’ll need to use something like the Content Aware Fill tool (that’s new to AE!) to delete the normal-sized actor from underneath the newer, skinny one.

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[Michael Szalapski]

Do you mean the shortcut to make the keyframes Easy Ease? F9.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Some of those shots are full 3d animations and some are clever warping. It’s a lot of different techniques going on in each shot.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

See if this page helps automate some things for you: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/data-driven-animations.html

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You probably could do that with expressions and Data-Driven Animation in After Effects [link], but…wow, it would be a lot of code.
Now, getting the bars would be pretty simple. It’s the moving positions that would be a lot.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

The problem is that there’s no way to animate between font styles of a typeface. It would be just a hard cut between the two.

If that’s what they want, fine. In the latest release of AE, you can control bold/italics/etc. with expressions, so you would use an if/then statement on the amplitude of the bass. (You would get that by either using Sound Keys from Red Giant to create keyframes from just the bass OR by going into Adobe Audition and isolating the bass and creating a new track from it and then running AE’s Convert Audio to Keyframes command.)

Actually, I just had a thought, is the piece of text the same throughout the whole video? There might be a way to have it smoothly transition between a bold and normal font type, but it would be a massive pain if the text is changing frequently.

Now, you could animate the thickness of the text’s stroke with AE’s normal text animators (driven by an expression) and get pretty similar results. The effectiveness of that technique would vary depending on your typeface, of course.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

What have you done to isolate the issue to those specific scripts?

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You might be able to do this using expressions to drive points on a mask to follow the face tracking data.
What might be easier would be to get some very green face paint and then just key everything but your mouth.
Actually, depending on your skin tone, you might be able to just put some rather vibrant red lipstick on and use the paint bucket tool outside your mouth to fill the outside with alpha…

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

It’s a bit on the complicated side, but…you could set up a two layers with the effect, but with one set the lines a little thicker. Then, use some sort of random square pattern (perhaps created by a layer of Fractal Noise set to be blocky instead of cloudy) to mask the thicker layer to only show in some areas. Then blur the whole thing a tiny bit and then crush the alpha channel.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Does Tint work? You might need to apply Levels or Curves before it to bump the contrast somewhat.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.