I figured some people may wonder how I create the effect when my stick figures turn their heads – as the soldiers in Castle III. It’s pretty simple, I’ll guide you through how to make a simple example:
Create a new document ( Ctrl + N ). We’ll start off making the head.
Pick the Oval tool ( O ), and set the outlines to be none, with a fill colour of your choice. I picked black.
Draw the head using the oval tool. You can hold down your shift key while you draw to make it a perfect circle. Name your layer in the timeline to Head.
Add a new layer and name it Eyes. Lock your Head layer and select the Eyes layer. In this new layer, draw a pair of eyes to be used on your stick figure. This should be, in my opinion, in your own personal style. I made something simple similar to the Castle eyes.
A tip: You can duplicate your left eye and flip to use as your right eye.
Make a key-frame in your timeline for both layers at the same frame. I choose frame 35. Make it a motion tween by selecting the layers and select Create motion tween.
Make the eyes go from left to right by positioning the eyes to the left at frame 1, and then positioning them to the right side of the head at frame 35. Press your Enter key to watch. See my progress here:
Now it’s time to add the actual mask. Select your frames in the Head layer and copy them. Make a new layer called Mask, and paste your frames into frame 1 of this new layer. Make sure your Mask layer is above the other layers. You may have to delete extra frames (anything above frame 35 for me ) being automatically added as you paste.
Right click the layer named Mask, make sure you click the actual layer and not inside the timeline. Pick Mask from the roll-list and your layer named Mask is now an actual Mask layer.
Lock all layers and hit Enter to watch the difference.
Here’s the finished result:
Maybe you figured it out already, but I’ll tell you how it works as simply as possible: The stuff below your mask layer will only be visible inside the mask layers stuff. See these example pictures:
This is the mask.
This is what is to be masked.
This is the result.
I hope this helps! It’s a great technique that’s pretty common. You can of course make stuff a lot more detailed but I kept it simple for the sake of learning… or me being lazy :)
