Help - Radiating offset outline animation? Radio Waves or other?

@netta_6403 

For this style, cut out the subject and then create duplicates that are filled with a color, scaled up incrementally, and stacked behind the subject.

To create what's shown in the sample image of the person wearing the overalls, use every other scaled Layer as a Matte for the Layer behind it.

To create what's shown in the sample image of the person wearing glasses, alternate the fill color for every other scaled Layer.

Video that walks through the process:  https://f.io/mme7hPhd

- Warren

To center the Production Point on a mask using Radio Waves, you should start by enabling the Rulers and then establishing a center point for the Mask with Guides. When you establish that center point, double-click on the mask path with the selection tool (v) and move the Mask to the layer's center, which is also the default center for the Production Point. When the Mask is centered on the Production Point, change the Producer to the Mask. The last step is to then move the Production Point to the original position of the Mask using the Guides you established.

You'll need this to be a separate layer. You will need to duplicate the footage, Place the Actor Rotoscoped (masked) copy on top, put the Radio Waves layer next, and then the original footage on the bottom so you can have the lines appear behind the Actor as they are in your other images. If your Mask moves around the screen, you can also animate the position of the Mask in the Radio Waves layer to keep it centered around the producer point, but this will require setting up some complex expressions to tie the movement of the Mask to a null layer's position so it matches the movement of the Mask. Using Radio Waves will be difficult if the Actor moves around the frame a lot.

Another option is to create the outlines on a shape layer and then use the shape layer tools to repeat and scale up the path. 

If the Actor is moving, you could tie the expanding shape layer path to an animated mask around the moving Actor with a simple Pickwhip expression and then tie motion tracking data to the original shape layer path/transform path controls with a simple expression. 

I don't have time to post a screenshot for that workflow, but it would start by doing the rotoscoping of your Actor using Mocha AE. This will give you an animated path and a track matte for the Actor that you could use to create the effect. Mocha AE can both track and create a mask for you. Rotobrush would only generate a matte for your Actor to separate them from the background. The effect will require three layers.

Not sure how to exactly replicate the entire thing but I think the best approach is to create copies of the source matte on a solid with Set Matte. On that solid you can perform some operations like Turbulent Displace to animatie in a wobbly way and Simple Choker to make the matte more blobby 'low res' than the actual matte. Then for that copy you could animate the scale on a Transform effect (so the matte stays high res). Copy the entire layer and offset it in time to make it subtract the previous and repeat for subsequent. For each layer you could slightly tweak settings to make every repetition look unique.

The plus side of managing a sort of procedural approach is that if now the matte of your subject changes, maybe another person, the output still works. But the problem is that scaling a shape is not exactly the same thing as expanding a shape outwards in all directions from it's center. so you get unwanted thickness interuptions like in my example if the shape is complex. Perhaps it's doable for your usecase.

The alternative would be like Derek suggested to pre-design them. Doesn't neccesarily need to be Illustrator, you could technically draw the shapes in AE too. This would give perfect control but you'd have to create all the shape repeats individually and animate them which is timeconsuming. Especially if you need to apply the same effect on multiple shots.

Perhaps there are much more performant ways to go about it but I'm not the most clever motion designer out here:)

I'd be tempted to create the shapes in Illustrator then bring them in and animate