How can I ptimize or organize composition/timeline?

Question

Basically, I'm trying to make an "animation of sorts" with a character changing emotions via faces. In the link, you can see there's a part of the picture where there are faces (bottom section). I intend to edit those faces to replace the "main's" (topmost subject) face through Photoshop. Unfortunately, the subject will go through many expressions along with that, other characters.

With that in mind, we can see that the timeline will get cluttered with PNG images which becomes hard to handle and navigate. Is there any tip, advice, or solution to this?

ShiveringCactus · Answer

With mouth shapes, a good solution is to precompose the mouths, then have each one be second on the timeline. You can then use Time Remapping on the main comp to choose which mouth shape to display at any moment. If you have the full Adobe CC suite, check out Character Animator as this can generate the time remap codes for you.

Actually, check out Character Animator anyway as this probably solves everything.

If you only have After Effects though, try using Face Tracking on your real person to generate position data for the eyes etc.., then use the puppet tool on the cartoon. and link the points. It's all work to set up, but then it should run smoothly.

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