How to open a closed circle path in After Effects

This video tutorial shows you how you can open a closed bezier path in After Effects:

Written version:

If you want to create a circle path that can be opened later, you should first make sure you are creating a bezier path.

If you simply drag a circle with the circle shape tool, you will not create a bezier shape but a parametric shape.

You can see the difference if you take a look at what’s inside the ellipse path in the timeline. This ellipse has size and position controls, but not a path stopwatch, so we know it’s a parametric shape. We can’t open parametric shapes and we can’t select single vertex points from them, so let’s delete this circle.

To create a bezier path instead of a parametric shape, you hold down alt, when you start dragging. We’re also holding down shift just to make a perfect circle. Looking at the contents of this ellipse we can see a path stopwatch but not the size and position controls which means this is the right kind of path for opening.

In order to make this path non-closed, we first create an extra vertex with the add vertex tool. Then we select these two nearby points, and choose layer –> transform –> mask and shape path and uncheck “closed”. The path is now open and we can start modifying the circle.

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