[Michael Szalapski]

It is possible! Think in layers. Your background is one layer and your actor is another layer. You can create a layer that goes between them that has the cleaned up/removed areas.

What are you replacing the treetops and the fence with? Just blue sky? (An example frame would really help us give better suggestions too, by the way.

How much of the actor goes across areas you plan to replace?

Basically, you will need to rotoscope your actor. However, don’t rotoscope all of him! You only need to rotoscope the parts that cross over the replaced parts.

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[Michael Szalapski]

Can you get it to work when the scales of the layers are different? And when the scaling of the shape groups are different?

If you can, I could see this being fairly useful.

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

[Michael Szalapski]

What puppet are you talking about? We don’t really have enough information to help you. Please tell us a bit more about your setup. Perhaps a video or a few pictures to demonstrate your problem?

– 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]

Alternatively, you can use the CC Cylinder effect. You might need to precomp the text layer and mess with the size of that precomp to get the cylinder to be the radius you want and then animate the text moving vertically in the precomp (expressions to give you control in your main comp would be good). 🙂

– 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]

Yeah, if that’s Element, you can only have eight lights. You’re going to have to have lights move to new locations after you’ve gone past them. Using hold keyframes should work just fine. It’ll be like a game of light leapfrog. As soon as you pass a light and it’s not being used, you can move it to the next position ahead. 🙂

– 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]

There’s this one: https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/disintegration/

I don’t understand the problem though. You can have it disintegrate and then fly the particles across the letters. Then, when you reverse it, they’ll be flying in as you describe.

– 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]

While that Spotify video is definitely just rotating around a point further behind the letters in z space, you could also use the CC Cylinder effect on your text (but you have to expand the layer boundaries on top and bottom so that the “cylinder” that’s being wrapped is a lot more than just the letters.

– 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]

If you flip the cube’s normals you should be able to see it from the inside.

– 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]

Timewarp isn’t what was suggested. Try Time Remapping instead.

– 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 newer versions of AE should be able to open projects from After Effects version 7. See this Adobe blog post: https://theblog.adobe.com/opening-after-effects-projects-from-previous-versions-and-saving-back-to-previous-versions/

– 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.