Need to know how to animate the same character in different compositions without having to make a co

[ericpw1791]

I'm kind of new to After effects but i have used vegas / premiere pro for the past few years, and I'm working on this project with a friend of mine that requires animating characters drawn in photoshop. I have the different body parts in different layers and folders, but the thing is the character is imported as a composition (otherwise its merged.) and if I say want to animate the character raising his arm in one scene, that will be the composition for every other scene. Same with the head composition if I want to make him angry by moving the eyebrow, then it will copy onto every single other time he appears throughout the project. I cant split up the folders, because sometimes I have to rotate all 3 globally and not locally by themselves. (like as in the crown rotates its 15 degrees by its own point and the head would rotate on its own, thus they wouldn't be in the same place etc.) So how do I work around this, and what should my friend (character artist with photoshop) do in the future in regards to layers and whatnot? Thanks in advance

[Rick Gerard]

Importing a PSD as a comp is the way to go. If you need different animations in that comp you start by duplicating the comp AE created from the PSD file in the Project Panel. If there are going to be five different animations, duplicate the comp 5 times. Label the Original comp "master", then name the others Scene 1, Scene 2, Scene 3, Scene 4, and Scene 5. Every time you need a new animation duplicate the Master comp and rename it. 

I would also suggest that you keep your comps as short as possible. If the final project is 10 minutes, then break it up into segments that are a single sentence or idea long, render the segments (scenes) and edit the final in your NLE. AE comps longer than a few seconds can get really difficult to manage. The longest comp that I worked on in the last two weeks was 200 frames, The film these scenes are in is about an hour and 40 minutes.