Everyone knows that you don’t get taken seriously as a motion graphics tutorial guy until you’ve done at least one facial deformation technique. Andrew Kramer has his demon face warp, Maltaannon has his push-pin Trapcode Form tute and so on.
So here’s mine – a freaky face-on-fire tutorial using only the standard toolset in After Effects CS3, 4 or 5 (it may go back even further than these versions, in fact). I’ve even made the project file available if you’d like to just replace the face footage with your own.