I thought I understood....?

[RMA]

Okay I am making a animated music video for my band. One of my shots will include a silouetted outline of the crowd. Now I have my crowd labeled c1-c4 in the group 'crowd' . each layer is the same exact layer only I've modified each layer to look slighty different and place different in the overall composistion by either scaling or flipped an such. So it looks somewhat like a crowd of ppl at a concert. I would like to animate the fists and hands of the crowd in all the independant layers of crowd. Now when I add bones to the layers to animate I get the the whole crowd layer twisting and turning. Do I not just put bones in the arms of the ones I want to animate? Keep in mind my 'crowd' vector(s) are sillouettes black fill and black outline fill.
Thanks for any advice you might care to share!

[Genete]

I suppose you have all your crowd copies inside a bone layer. By defect all shapes of all vector layers are binded to the skeleton of the bone layer. If you want to bind only the first crowd row you have to release all the other points of the other layers (or bind them with other bones).
To release the points select all (CTRL + A) and go to Menu-> Bones -> Release points. Now the points that define the crowds are not affected by the bones.
-G

[myles]

Change the bone layer properties to region binding, not the default flexible binding - I suspect this is the main cause of your problem.

I'm fairly sure you'll need to reduce the bone strength regions as appropriate so they only cover the parts you want to animate.

Do what Genete said about releasing selected points for the body of the crowd, or add some independent non-animated bones to pin down the body of the crowd. Genete's solution is probably better.

Regards, Myles.