Character Rig Features

Both characters have similar set ups, but there are some differences. This is because Betty has more movement than William, and she has more assets to control than William.

Common Features for both characters

Inverse Kinematics

At the beginning of the project before I began animating and was just setting up the character files ready to animate, I was comfortable with the idea of animating just the puppet pins on each characters' arms and legs. After animating a couple shots using this menthol of individually keyframing each pin on each arm and leg, I began to find it frustrating when the animation wasn't good enough and I had to go back into each frame and fix them. I decided to try installing the free Duik plug in from here after my first attempt failed a couple months back and I had to purchase the PuppetTools 3 plug in from here. This plug in worked ok but had its faults. When I reinstalled the Duik plug in below, it immediately made the animating process easier although shots that required IK orientation switching between poses during a shot was rather difficult to get right. If a pose that has the arm facing down on the character's side and needed to go above and behind their head for example, I had to keyframe the down position with normal keyframes, then move the arm to its T position (when it was rigged at the start of the animation phase), flip the orientation from On to Off (depending on which side of the body the arm / leg is) and then animate the same way as before with keyframes to place the arm behind the head.

The Duik plug in works by placing all necessary puppet pins on a layer / pre-comp (e.g. Wrist, Elbow, Shoulder) and then turning them into bones by clicking 'Bones' and then selecting the pin that would act as the controller (in this case the Wrist), clicking 'Controller' and then reverse selecting the pins (Wrist, Elbow, Shoulder) and then clicking 'IK Creation'. You can them hide the puppet pins that are now bones as you don't need them.

Here is the IK set up for one of Betty's arms in shot 45

This worked much better than animating just puppet pins and produced smoother animations

Master Control Nulls

When using the Duik plug in, the pins that have been converted into bones stay where they are in the pre-comp and although parenting them to the master null works a little, they don't move fully with the Master Contol null. To fix this, I had to keyframe the arms and legs with the body movements separately. 

Eyes

The eyes were the most simplest part of the characters to rig. This video shows how I set them up.

Betty Features

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YSDrtgI18c

The head shapes, mouths and blinks were all pre-comped and time-remapped to the master character pre-comp. This is easier to animate with than just animating the opacity property of each asset required.

William Features

William does not have any mouth shapes besides his smile and sad layers which means a mask could be combined with these layers easily unlike Betty because of her lips and these can't be animated with the MouthInterior layer as this is a separate layer with a gradient only. I did not have to use this layer for Betty as the mouth shapes I illustrated were enough for the animations. To animate the underneath MouthInterior layer William, I drew custom masks (burps, screams) on the Head pre-comp in the Master comp and keyframed the position property of the custom path.

William's head shapes and blinks were also pre-comped and time-remapped like Betty's rigs.