Pumpkin Character Face Rigging — Joysticks 'n Sliders | AE Portfolio
Three pumpkin characters with fully custom face rigs built in Adobe After Effects using Joysticks 'n Sliders. Each character has independent eye, brow, and mouth controls for expressive talking animation across all three simultaneously.
The main challenge was that the pumpkin faces are geometrically carved cutouts—not organic surfaces—so standard face rigging workflows don't translate directly. Each character's features (jagged teeth, angular eyes, and irregular mouth shapes) had to be rigged as individual shape layers rather than a single puppet mesh.
The bigger problem: all three characters have completely different carved geometries and expression styles (sinister, confused, cheerful), so a shared rig template would cause misalignment
and edge clipping. Rigging all three to talk simultaneously also meant managing three separate J&S controller sets without the timeline becoming unworkable.
I built each character as a fully modular shape-layer rig with separate
Joysticks 'n Sliders controllers for the upper face (eyes/brows) and lower face (mouth/teeth), so each zone could be animated independently without affecting the other. Pose zones were calibrated to each character's specific geometry, keeping movement within the natural range of that character's carved features without distortion. Each rig lived in its own precomp, keeping the master timeline clean and making it easy to animate all three characters in parallel.
Tools: Adobe After Effects, Joysticks 'n Sliders.
Technique: Character face rigging, shape-layer animation, multi-character dialogue.