Making circles look tied together with measuring tape

[sandrac12345]

Hi all, I'm working on a Theater piece for a friend of mine, and weight loss is the main part. I want the 2 lead actors to appear "tied together" by the measuring tape. Making it look like the tape is tight around the circles, and in the middle where the circles touch also have some effect of them pushing into each other. I hope this makes sense. I attached a pic as I have it right now. Kinda stumped on how I achieve this.

Thanks for any and all help! Much appreciated.

(Note: the images are not final, so it needs to just be the holding shape that has treatment, so I can swap out images once we get the final ones.)

-Sandra

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

You can try if the Liquify tools help. But on the other hand you could also just draw it.

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/scaling-shearing-distorting-objects.html#distort_objects