After Effects: Fun Text Animation

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Ricardo Castillo and emotion designer. In this class, I'll teach you how to create a basic text animation in After Effects. You'll learn how to split each character into different layers and add some rotation and opacity animation to make it pop up into existence. For your class project, you will use the principles that are insured in the class and you create your own text animation. So let's get to it. 2. Creating Text: Okay, let's get started. This is gonna be a fun animation and it's not that difficult to do. Okay, so let's click this icon to make a new composition. We're going to do this ten seconds. We're gonna do 24 frames per second. And I'm just going to call this Main Comp. Hit. Okay? Just four sessions is going to create a folder here. What I'm going to add all my columns. Okay? First I'm going to create the background. I'm going to use this shortcut Control Y. And I'm going to select this. Yeah, Like, Dislike, light, yellow kind of thing. What to name this? Vg. Hit. Okay. And now I'm going to add the text, which is just okay. Now this is going to be area and all. Yeah. Everyone this or more like an orange kinda look thing. That's fine. I'm going to look for the aligned tab here. Just like this. I'm going to save control S for saving. 3. Creating Precomps: Okay, so what we want to do is that we want each character to kind of like pop into existence and kind of like have like an scale and rotation animation. So it's like it's been like type in bowl-like in a formal way kind of thing. We're going to do is we're going to pre-comp this control shift C. Yeah. He's calling, call it message. Okay. So now our animation is going to be inside of this. I thought, you know what? I want to pre-comp this one more time just to make sure that I have full control over everything. So I just press Control Shift C again. And now I'm going to call this message animation. I'm going to click on move all attributes into the new composition. Okay? Now let's get inside by just double-clicking. And now we're inside of our message. And you mentioned composition. I shortcut to go back is if you press tab, then you hold it. You feel that you just, sorry, just press once and then you can move your mouse and then you see where you're coming from. So this main com and there's a message animation. 4. Splitting Characters: Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just displayed each letter into its own layer. So I'm going to click here on the message layer and I'm going to press Control D 1234. And I just want to keep to make sure that I keep like an extra year of the region, not just in case on a high, this is going to be our h. Oh, by the way. So what I'm doing insulin use, selecting the layer and then just pressing enter. And now that allows me to type on a rename the layer L. Okay? So right now, like if I hide all the layers, I mean they're, they're slice showing all the other characters will want to isolate each of them. So I'm going to use the rectangle tool to start isolating each letters. Right now I want to create a mask for a. Then I'm going to move here. And the same for L. Same thing for the, let's do the same for the H. Okay, so now if I select this to isolate a layer to see that now it's character, it's on its own layer. 5. Adjusting Anchor Point: There's one more thing that we need to do when to change the position of the anchor point. To that. We select that layer, in this case h. We're gonna select the anchor point tool. I'm going to move this anchor point. So what this is, this is where if we apply any rotation or scale or any of those transformation properties, this is the point from which it will take effect. For example, if I scale and just press S to show the scale tool. Let's change this. You see how It's, the age is a scaling up and down. From this point, basically saying with the rotation and if I press R, we see how it rotates around the anchor point. So basically, by using this tool, we can click the anchor point and we can move it. So for example, if I were to put a line in the center and they start and I wrote ADH, now, it rotates in the center. Same thing if I scale it up and down. I want to place this here. So that way, if I rotate the letter is going to come like this. 6. Animation part 1: Okay, So let's start animating this then. This is gonna be the final position which is 0. So what I'm going to have is that I'm going to have this broadly be income coming from 50 degrees. I'm going to add a keyframe by pressing stopwatch. This creates a keyframe on my timeline. It's basically just recording a point in time, Recording deforestation. So I'm going to move. I'm just saying just pressing space to see kind of like the commonly see how long it takes for this move. I think I want the entire animation to colleges take like are on 1 second navy. So I'm going to create a keyframe here. And then I'm going to change this value to 0. Now we have this, but this is too robotic into static. And it's taking a while. It's, it's, it's kinda boring. We want. What I'm gonna do is that I'm gonna have this kinda like go faster at the beginning and actually go V on this point. It's like I want to do this and then kind of like this. Like the whole idea is to make the age column of ligase something like that. So I'm going to play around with this. So let's see 123 and using the keys of page up and page down to move in the timeline. Remember 23456. Let's see, maybe I can move this to here. This is like minus 22. Minus 22. I can move it like this. Okay, so what I'm going to start going, it's kind of like I'm just coming dividing by two kind of thing. 16 and then I do Simmons, Hey, six. Yeah, this is not going to give me one minute, I think is going to be like way faster than what I thought it was going to be minus 210. And I'm going to delete this. Okay, That's, That's kinda decent. I'm going to assume here and using this in the Thailand to show what I'm doing. So I'm trying to make this move them more like exaggerated at the beginning, then is going to come to a stop after bouncing several times, up and down, up and down kind of thing. And as you can see the timeline, it takes the longest amount of time to the first rotation. But then each tiny rotates again, it can't like does the rotation movement faster? 7. Animation part 2: And now I think I'm happy with this. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to select all these keyframes and I'm going to press F9 to smoke them. You know what, I'm going to show you what this actually doing. I'm going to press Control Z. And I'm going to click here on the graph editor to show you. So this is our animation. There's points. These are, these are the keyframes that we see here. Because they are just, they are linear keyframes right now. It's very robotic. The animation, There's no ease in or ease out right now, is just the perfect motion, basically, just like a machine kind of thing. So what I'm doing is that grabbing all the keyframes and then I press F9, which convert these key Francine two keyframes with curves or Bezier curves. Now, it's smoother transition. I can also play with this. Maybe I want this to happen faster. So what I can do is that I can grab this handle. And then I can make this curve more like a more flat at the beginning. By doing this, it moves, it moves, moves faster. It's kinda tricky, requires mostly Tacoma. Just practice doing this kind of playing with the animation curve like several times. But the meninges are when you have the curve like this. It's like a slowing down. But when you have a flatline like this, then he's taking speed. This game is like, you can see that it's like slowly but surely moving and then sudden movement like wall is now like here. Then it goes to the next queue, friends. It's a matter of choice really depending on the look you're going with. I won this case for this to happen faster and then slow down here for this one. So I got like an okay with the way they looked right now. Although it can come and just make it a slow a little here. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, So I'm going to click this to go back into keyframes. 8. Animation part 3: Okay, so what I'm gonna do now is that I'm going to also adjust the scale. Okay, Let's say I'm going to click on the scale, stopwatch. And then next, I'm gonna go maybe like three frames. And you just got to make it go into 100. Grab these keyframes, press F9 to smooth, then. Commission do it. Maybe. I didn't make this like a couple of keyframes more. Think that's fine. Let's see how that looks with motion blur. To add motion blur, I'm going to click here. Oh, by the way, if you didn't see this, this menu, just click here to toggle between menus and you can see it. So I select this icon here. That's the icon for motion blur. So I'm gonna click this. And by default, this will also be activated when I do this, if not, you can use click at this Enables Motion Blur. Let's see. I'm not sure about this scale animation. So I'm gonna take it up off. I just took out the animation. Now it's just rotation right now. Fair halves if I do opacity, so I'm just showing you opacity property with D and I just click on the stopwatch to animate it. I'm going to make this into a sewer and then one to three to 100. You know what? I like this better than we just scale. So yeah, so right now, if I select our layer, I press U. I can see all the properties that I've been animator right now. So we have rotation, which is this animation group. And now we have opacity, which is the French here, is like yeah. 9. Graph Editor: In this video, I'm going to explain to you in a little bit more detail the animation curve. So here I have two A's and I'm going to animate them. I'm going to animate the position property of them. So I'm going to press P for position. I'm going to separate the dimensions. Right-click Separate Dimensions, right-click Separate Dimensions. I'm going to animate only the x position, which is basically horizontal. I'm going to click here to make a keyframe. Here to make a keyframe, I'm going to go maybe two seconds. And I'm going to select both layers. And I'm going to move here. Okay? You can see right now they move in a linear way. Is not the starting or ending in a different speed. Is this the same amount of movement for each frame? But in this one, in the one that I named smoke, which is the bottom one, I'm going to select both keyframes and I'm going to press F9. Now, as you can see, this one is beginning slowly, but then goes fast and slow. And that's why we now have animation curves in this one. If I go here, you can see that there's this kind of curve happening at the beginning, which means that this slowly starting to move. And then when this becomes more flat than he goes faster, I want to enrich this point is when starting to slow down. Then if we check the other letters, the first one here is this is just a line. It's the same amount of movement all the time. The point that I'm trying to make here is that if you want to create more interested in animation in After Effects, it's a good idea to practice with the animation curves and see how things react when you use curbs in your movement. This is the kind of thing that it's good to just play around with. I really just like, for example, a right now even like I want it all, what will happen if I select this keyframe and then I just move this like this. Well, what's going to happen? All I see, you just see what's happening. It's moving really, really slow at the beginning. And then it goes like super-fast again. Then maybe if I want this to just start really, really fast and you just got to just move this. So it's like superfast here, but it's like slowly here. So let's see what will that look like? Oh, wow, yeah, that's likely really, really fast and you can't slow down while this one is just doing the same thing. So this is kind of like the basics of it off, just like animating things in After Effects, just playing around with the animation curves. I wonder if I can kind of guess. Yeah, I guess I can modify it in real time, but it's still some things. But, um, yeah, what I recommend it to you if you wanted to just learn this very just going to create shapes in After Effects texts and just move it around and then just play with this once again to get here, you just select the property that you want to animate and then you click here on the graph editor and then you can manipulate each keyframe that I could like Alec, make this longer and then I can just maybe I can add another keyframe here where this goes back. Right? Then I collect player and we say, okay, I want this to start like really, really fast. But then I wanted to kind of slow. And then I wanted to kinda like just pick up speed again, but then I want it to slow down and the very last moment. So let's see what that will look like. Yeah. Perhaps if I want this to happen faster, I can just move this keyframe back. I'm going to see what that would look like. Yeah. So yeah, it's I think it's I think the best way to get the hang of this guy just created like just, just shapes, characters, letters then use the position property, separate properties, and then use quake and just creaky friends and just animate then I see what happens when you call, I just changed those fears. You press F9 here and then now I mentioned curves and then you can just animate them. 10. Copying Animation: Okay, I like that one. I'm going to use that. I'm going to make this animation. I'm going to copy it into the other characters. Before I can do that, I still need to move the anchor point. So the animation takes place from this point of the layer. So let me just do that really quickly here. And then this one, I'm going to move it here. Let's move this one right here. Okay? So this is a moment where we do computer magic. We're just going to copy this and paste it into the other letters. Us clicking our old layer and then I'm going to click hold Shift. And then I'm going to select a to select all the layers control, control V. And let's see. Yeah, it's, the animation is working. I'm just going to select this to apply motion blur to all the letters. Okay? That's working per year. I'm going to press N on the keyboard to change the work area of the timeline. Just come and see a looping. I'm just pressing Spacebar to play. Okay. Not bad. I'm going to move this back to where it was. 11. Time Variation: Now we're gonna do now is that we're going to, let's say, kind of like shift the position of the keyframes so it doesn't happen at the same time. I want the edge to come first and they all held and the letter a. So to do that, we're going to do two things. First, we're going to select all the layers. And we're going to move one frame by pressing the page down. Now we're going to hold Alt. And we're going to press the close bracket on the keyboard. The close brackets like the key like above, Enter, above Enter. Okay, so now I'm going to assume in my tile I'm just now we only have one frame of the animation. What I'm going to do now, and just to make sure that when you do this, make sure to select from the edge to the a while holding Shift to make sure it stays in the same order. I went to go into the Animation menu. Key for an Assistant. Sequence Layers. And you just click, Okay. And now it just has moved from older layers. One frame. All we have to do now is just to make our ledgers longer by dragging them from, yeah, like this. Now if we play it, we have this animation. So as you can see, it's not happening at the same time. First the age OLA. I mean, in theory, you could go like, just like a sport, like manually. Just like more than the layers. However, when you are doing this with lots and lots of layers, different compositions, it saves a lot of time doing it, doing it this way. 12. Copies of Animation: Okay, so we have the animation. Now if we go back into our main comp, should be able to see, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And basically now we can play around with it. We can do things like we can press Control D. We can duplicate the layer and hold hidden layer and I'm going to hold Shift. I can move it. And I can do something like this. I can make lady friend copies of the bilayer. Somehow make another copy and hold and drag it down. So basically we're just reusing our animation and just playing around. It's like, it's like we just have a little video that we just created and now we can, thanks for it. Let's see. Let's duplicate this new like a couple of more times. I can select all the layers, Control D. Then I can just move them like this. And I can use, I can hold Shift and then use the arrow keys on my keyboard and I can move the characters. I can do the same for the other side. I can also select like this and maybe move this a little. So it's like there's more variation to it. And just select, Select thing, the layers that are above me, something like this. It looks interesting. Maybe. Okay. Now we have something like this. And now here we can add some more. Like random might think. So like a little here we could just kinda like more fun, different layers. So they start at the same time. Have a different effect. It looks more interesting. So I'm basically just changing by random us different layers to start at different times. That way. It feels more dynamic. In this case. 13. Colors, texture and shadows: Now we're going to adjust the colors a little. And I also want to add a texture to all of this. What I'm gonna do is this. I'm going to press Control Y. I'm going to add a solid layer. It doesn't really matter the color. Now we have a background, we have a solid layer, then we can apply effects to it. I'm going to go into effects noise and grain fractal noise. Okay? I'm going to do here is that I'm going to just create like a texture with this that I want to apply to the whole thing. I'm going to increase the contrast on this. And I'm going to select a different fractal, maybe dynamic, linear. I'm not going to transform properties and lowered scale. Like this. One. Reduce the brightness. I think that should do the trick. Let's see. I'm going to change now at the mode of the layer in stri, ColorBrewer wall, no way too strong. I think I'm just going to cycle into all of this and see what works and what doesn't. So I'm going to just select the layer and I'm going to hold Shift. And then I'm going to select the plus button on the keyboard. They want that he's like where the number keys are. Darken, multiply Color, Burn color. Now classic linear burn screen called calcium here. Overlay. Okay, that looks kind of stuff night or else. Okay. It's going to go with soft light. There we go. Now I'm going to rename this layer texture. And I'm going to proceed from you pass urine is going to lower this a little. Okay. Snow texture here. Okay. Another thing we can do, so we can change the color of some of these layers. So I'm going to select the ones on the top. And I'm going to add like, actually I just got this one layer first. I'm going to add like a corporation or let's do this hue and saturation. Maybe this one can be like What kind of thing? Oh, I got it. I know. I know What are you going? I mean, kind of like just like Jell-O. Just playing around with the saturation and lightness properties here. Yeah, I'm going to press Control C. And I'm going to apply this to the other two layers. The ones in the middle where remain red. Then I'm going to add another hue and saturation here. Yeah, Let's go for this color. And I'm gonna copy this and apply this to the others. Your two layers. It looks more fun. Okay. I'm going to adjust this. I can just have like a 3 second animation. Let's press N on the keyboard. There we go. That is our all our animation. Okay, I just wanted to take the time to call on you just show how powerful this is to have like your Manumission in one composition and then being able to count, I just do whatever you want with an app lady for Netflix to it because right now just apply this color effects to the lawyers that were on top and on the bottom. Right now because I have this with this just the same name he's calling. Difficult to see what it is. Like. The way that I do is I just kind of like select only dislikes at the bottom that I know that I'm selecting whatever is at the bottom. One thing that we can do, for example, if you want to like add like shadows to the layers, you call it, you just click on one. And then we're going to have effects. The worst effects. Let me just look at it here. Drop shadow or introspective. Okay? So I'm going to grab a shadow. I'm just going to drop it here. And then we see the shadow being applied here. And then we can control this year. Can just hear distance. Yeah, something like this. And that's affecting only one layer. But we can then just copy this and then add it to all the other layers. And now all the rest of the lawyers, they will have it. But if you find that it's like very, very so for your computer, like cash or preview animation, make sure to, you can go inside the animation layer and turn off the motion blur. The way it should issue render faster. Just remember to turn that thing back on when you are going to render. 14. Rendering: Okay, We have our animation. We're happy with the way it looks, and we have adjusted how long we want it to last. It's going to be three seconds some other way. And I said dystrophy, then you should I do that for all animations that I do. And then I can change this by grabbing this the end of the work area and I can just move it here. I hold Shift and then it will just like to snap to wherever my call this the timeline indicator is. So I have it at like three seconds and then I just move this whole shift and then it just snaps here. Let me if I play this animation, okay, so now I'm going to save this and I'm going to press Control M. And that will bring us to the render queue, which is basically I'm just telling this to render the Main Comp, which is where all our animation is. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to press cuing me yan core, McDade a moment while bend down when it does, you will see a window like this. From here, you can select this bar, which is the format off your animation. Here. Visually, what I do is just select H.264. Then I give this a name. Initially. One thing that I do is I wonder if there's something they just do like I named my according to the date and then I just variation up so they know when it was made on then which version it is. And I'm looking at something, for example, like 2022, underscore, 0610, just jump then underscore that. Underscore. Search for one. Save that. That way. I know when it was made, I know what it is and then I know which version I'm looking at. One very, one thing that I have there is do not name things as final, because then you will end up with something like final, final, final, final 00 debt and it gets crazy. And we we all have done at some point, it's not a good practice. I do it like a lot of times I tried to avoid it, but yeah, this is better. Okay. So this is looking good, 24 frames per second, which is what we had. After effects here. I usually do this one. I don't really have a reason to do it. I think I just saw it wants in a tutorial years ago on usually it's one works best for me. I just use this number for this. This this I can press. Okay. And then you just hit Starkey and it will just render. That will give you like a pretty here. Okay, it's finally render. Let's take a look. Okay. And does the animation. 15. Thank You: For your class project, you'll create your own text animation and posted here on Skillshare. Thank you so much for taking this class. If you found that useful, I will appreciate our review until next time. Bye bye.