Animation Help: Character falling from portal/hole?

[sillyanimate]

Hi, I want to make a character fall from the sky, from a portal.....

I think I can do it with masking the problem is that the hole needs to show the character and another mask to hide the character body when it falls out of the hole...
(I am not making sense)

Any ideas or suggestions?

[slowtiger]

You don't even need a mask for that. Just draw a hole, then copy the part of that image which covers the body and put it in front of that. Same technique for doors etc.

[hayasidist]

or swap layer order if the whole character is behind (and partially obscured) then in front of a hole - i.e. if you don't need to have them transition "limb by limb"

or you can make the "hole" in two parts with the character in between such as:

hole FG
character
hole BG