How to Animate rope+hands

[cristil17595578]

Hello, I am new to after effects and I watched a couple of youtube tutorials but none explained how can I do this. I want to animate this guy pulling the rope:

I don't know where to begin, in the tutorials I watched it's more like playing with the rotation and scale, but if I play with rotation/scale it doesn't give an authentic look. (I want the arms the get smaller while the rope gets longer, just like pulling a real rope)Any hints on how to even animate pull of the rope to give it an authentic look... or what would you do ...thank you!!!

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Each element that you want to animate needs to be on a separate layer. Making the rope move may require some traditional animation skills. In other words, you may have to draw a bunch of pictures. Moving the arm could be pretty easily accomplished with the puppet tool, but the hands may require some traditional animation to make the fingers move.

I'm assuming that the boat or at least the flagpole moves when the rope is pulled. This might also require some traditional animation. It all depends on how you have constructed the boat.