Create 5 Versatile Text Animations In After Effects

1. Introduction: Hi everyone I'm Kaitlin Kirk, and I'm a full-time motion designer at Kaitlin Kirk Design. In this class you'll be learning how to create five versatile text animations in After Effects. When you get into animation you always imagine animating all kinds of cool characters and scenes, but what I've learned in my years of experience is that almost every project requires some type of text animation. Whether it's an explainer video, a commercial, or a social media post most pieces are going to need some call out texts, some lower thirds, or even some bullet points. I'm sharing with you my favorite ways to animate text. Things that are fun, trendy, and can be used in a wide variety of ways. This class was designed with the beginner in mind, but it'll definitely help if you have some foundational knowledge of After Effects. Things like the user interface, and how to use key frames all that good stuff. That's you and you're ready to add some text animations to your toolkit let's dig in. 2. Downloading & Installing Scripts: Hey. Welcome to lesson number 1. In this lesson, we actually won't be animating anything, but instead, we're going to be installing some free scripts that'll come in handy throughout the project. Now if you already know how to install scripts, feel free to just pass through this lesson. The links to download those scripts are available in the project resources. However, if you've never installed a script before or maybe you just need a refresher on how to do it, stick with me and I will walk you through that process. The very first thing we're going to do is save and close our project. When you install scripts, you actually have to restart After Effects anyways, so we're just going to go ahead and close out of it. Now, like I said, you can find the links for these scripts in the project resources. The first one here is called DecomposeText. Both of them will be available through aescripts.com. You'll also see that both of them are technically name-your-own-price, and so they'll have a suggested price here but you can always go in, and type in 0 to get them for free. Now if you find that you are using this script all the time, and you love it and it's great, and you want to come back and pay for it, that is a great way to support the people who make these scripts. In our case, they're actually both made by the same person. But once you get your 0 typed in, you can go ahead and add to cart. Then you'll pull up the other link, which is for SequenceLayers. Enter in a 0 or pay for it if you like, and add to cart. Now at this point, you're going to need to create an account with Aescripts if you don't already have one. Just to keep from showing you my personal information, I'm going to kind of speed through this part of the process, but you'll just hit "Proceed" to checkout. Now once you've placed your order, you can go to My Downloads & Licenses to access those scripts, and there's a link to it right here on this final checkout page. Then you'll see those two scripts that we just downloaded here at the top. You're just going to need to press "Download" and then this button. I'm going to save them to my computer in my Downloads folder and then I'll go do the same thing with DecomposeText. From there, you just need to open up the location of those files on your computer. Now you'll just need to extract those files. I'm going to do that really quickly. Now they're both available. Actually installing these into After Effects is super simple. You just need to go to the location on your computer where your script files live and drag them in. If you're on a PC, you can follow along with me. If you're on a Mac, it'll obviously be a little bit different, but I'm pretty sure the file structure is pretty similar. I'm going to go open up my Explorer, go to my C-drive, Program Files, Adobe, After Effects, Support Files, then I'll scroll down here to my Scripts, and then finally, into this ScriptUI Panels folder. This is the folder that I can just drag these into. You'll want to go in and find the.jsx file and just drag it in. Hit "Continue" and voila, your script is installed. I'll do the same thing for SequenceLayers. Again, it's the jsx file. Hit "Continue". There we go. Now I'm going to go ahead and open After Effects back up. Since you guys will be starting with a new project, I'm also going to start with a new project here. My very first step is going to be saving this project. So I'll go to File, Save As. I'm going to call this TextAnimations_StudentProject. You can obviously call it whatever you like. The last step here with these scripts is to get them available to us inside of our workspace. To do that, we'll go to Window, and then you'll scroll down here to the bottom until you find those two new scripts. The first one is DecomposeText, a pop-up over here. The next one is SequenceLayers. Yours may appear in a different location. You can feel free to dock them wherever you like. Obviously, everybody's workspace looks a little bit different and this is just how I like mine to be set up. As long as you've got them available to you to use during this project, then we should be good to go. The next window that you're going to want to make sure you have open is this one right here, which is called Create Nulls From Paths. This is now a default script in After Effects. It has been that way since October of 2017 so if you're using an older version of After Effects, you won't have it and you will need to update. I'm currently running the most recent version of After Effects as of September 2020. Let's move on to our first text animation, which is the dramatic reveal. 3. Technique #1: Dramatic Reveal: In this lesson, we are going to be learning our first text animation technique, which I am calling a Dramatic Reveal. This is a technique I like to use pretty often in slower-paced pieces, so imagine some kind of slow, moody music. I'll use it a lot for titles, and even for lower thirds. Let's get started on making this ourselves by creating a new composition. Before I even create that composition, I am a big fan of having nice, organized projects, so I'm going to start out by creating a folder. I will call that folder "COMPS", and then I'm going to make a new composition inside that folder using this icon here. I'm going to call this "Text Animation 01". Now, I am working at full HD, so we're working at 1920 by 1080, and I'm working at 24 frames a second, which is what I like to work in for all of my animation projects. I'm going to keep this at ten seconds long. We really probably don't need it to be that long, but we're going to roll with it. I'm also going to leave the background color set to black. That composition is now living in that folder there, which is nice. We're going to start out by actually adding a background color. Now, as you saw in that composition window, you can always do this in your composition settings if you'd like. I prefer to use solids. I just feel like it gives me a little bit more control. I'm going to go to "Layer", "New", "Solid", and I'm going to go in and select a moody, bluish, purplish, medium gray blue, for some drama. Next, I'm going to add some text, which you can do pretty easily by just double-clicking your "Type" tool. That'll bring the cursor up. Of course, feel free to use whatever sample text you want here. I am just going to use the name of this technique, so Dramatic Reveal. Now, if I want to alter the font, which I do, I'll go over to my "Character" panel. Feel free to use whatever font you want. I'm going to stick with one of my favorite Adobe fonts, this "Bicyclette", and I'm going to use a regular weight. You can also size it up, size it down, whatever you want to do. Then before we start animating, let's go into our paragraph box and make sure that this is center-aligned. Now, the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my "Align" tab and I'm going to align it to the composition. Make sure this is set to "Composition", which it should be if it's the only thing that you have selected. If you wanted to, which I do, you can also go ahead and line up this anchor point. You can get to this tool, the "Pan Behind" tool by pressing Y, and then you can grab your anchor point, hold "Ctrl", and snap it there to the middle. I like to do that just in case I'm going to be scaling, or rotating, or anything like that. That is the point from which all of that stuff will happen, so I like to get that in the middle, just as a good housekeeping thing. I'll go back to my "Selection" tool. Now, we are ready to get this animated. What we're doing to create this effect is a combination of a tracking animation and an opacity animation, so it's pretty simple to create. Let's start by animating our tracking, which is the space between the letters. We'll go in, we'll scroll down to see all of our options, and you'll have this little "Animate" button over here. If you don't have it, you can click this button down here in the left corner to expand, and it should be there. Hit this little triangle next to "Animate", and then go up to "Tracking". That will add an animator to your layer, which will now allow you to animate both the tracking type and the tracking amount. If you want to play with this tracking amount, you'll see that that's the effect that we're going for. That is the parameter that we are going to be animating. Quick note, the reason we have it set to be center-aligned text is because if we had it left-aligned, it wouldn't track the same way. Now, there are uses for this type of tracking as well, but for now, we are going to keep it center-aligned. I think I want this animation to take about two seconds. That's a little bit longer than it takes in this first sample one, but the sample one was created for a very specific purpose, and the slow dramaticness didn't really work for that. This one, we are actually going to make very slow and very dramatic. I'm going to go forward two seconds, and I'm going to drop a key frame by hitting the stopwatch because this is what I want this to look like when we finish animating. Then I'll go to the beginning of the composition and I'm going to increase the tracking. I'm going to increase it until those end letters are just off screen, and then let's go ahead and preview that. We're going to add some easing to these key frames by selecting them both, and you can either right-click "Keyframe assistant", "Easy Ease", or you can just hit F9. Now, let's go ahead and preview that. It's already looking better, but what I don't like is that I really don't want it to hesitate at the beginning. I don't actually like the ease at the beginning. The ease at the end isn't quite slow enough for me, so I wanted to come into this end point a lot slower, and come out of this starting point a lot faster, so I'm going to go into the graph editor. I'm going to select that parameter, so I can actually see my graph. Then I'm going to grab this end key frame, and I'm going to grab this little yellow handle, I'm going to hold "Shift", and I'm going to pull it to the left. If I don't hold "Shift", it will move up and down, which we don't want, so I'm just going to pull it way over this way. Then I'm going to grab this first key frame, and to make it faster, I'm going to make it steeper. This is about what your curve should look like. Let's go out of the graph editor, and now, let's preview. That's feeling a lot nicer. Now that our tracking is animated, we just have to add an opacity, a fade in, because we don't want it to be visible here at the beginning. All we're going to do is we're going to click our layer and we're going to press the shortcut for opacity, which is T, and we're going to set a key frame. Now, I want to see my other key frames so that I can line it up, so I'm going to select that layer and hit U, so that I can see all of my key frames, and then I'm going to move that 100 percent opacity key frame to the very end. I'm going to drop this opening opacity down to zero, so that you can't see it. Let's preview that. That already looks pretty good, but just for good measure, let's go ahead and just press F9 on those two key frames and make them ease key frames; can't hurt. That is looking pretty nice. I'm pretty happy with that. Now, before we move on to the next technique, I want to touch on how this could be used a little bit differently. Let's think of the case in particular where maybe, you want to use this as a lower third. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this layer just to show as an example. I'm going to change this to a name, maybe size it down a little, move it down here to the corner. Then like I showed you guys earlier, if you go up to "Paragraph" and change it to left-aligned, instead of tracking in from both sides, it will only track in from the right, which tends to look better when you have something on the left side of the screen. Alternately, if you wanted to put it on the right side, you'd want to right align the text. But anyways, that's just another way that you can use this technique. That is it for this one. Let's move on to our next text animation technique called a box wipe. 4. Technique #2: Box Wipe: So this next technique is called a box wipe. In this example you'll see there's no text there. The box wipes it on in a lighter color and as it wipes away, it leaves your final text there in a darker color, in our case. To do this, we are, of course, going to create a new composition. I'm going to leave all my settings the same of course, call it text animation 02. Now I'm going to add a solid for a background color. This time I think I'm going to go with something a little more bright and fun like a magenta, and I'm going to add some text. Like I said, I like this font, I'm going to stick with it. Might scale it up a little bit. I'm going to align it to the middle, and then I'm going to move my anchor point just as a good measure. I think that looks good. Now, in order for this to be wiped on by a box, we need a box. So I'm going to create a shape layer. To do that, I will grab my rectangle tool, and I'm going to make sure that I don't have any other layer selected at this time. If I had my text selected and I wanted to make a box, it would make a mask instead, which is not what we are wanting right now. We want a shape layer. To ensure that all your layers are unselected, press F2, and then you can zoom in here and you can make a box. You'll see that created a shape layer. I'm going to go ahead and rename my shape layer by pressing enter and call it rectangle 01. I'm going to center it up in the composition, and then I'm actually going to grab the text and I'm going to center them together to each other vertically. You'll see when I selected both of those layers, it automatically switch this to selection, which is what I want in this case, so that works for me. Look like they're already pretty much lined up. But now, obviously I can't see my text right now, and I know from this example that I'm going to need another layer of text, right? The white one, the navy one. So I'm going to go ahead and duplicate my text layer, control D, and I'm going to bring it up above my rectangle. Now, let's go ahead and change the color of this rectangle. It actually is working pretty nicely with this color, but to do that, I'll go up here with the fill. I'm going to use my Eyedropper tool to select this color and then just move it to a lighter version of it. So like lavender. Then let's hide both of these top layers using the eye ball over there, and let's make this a darker color. Let's go in to character, open the color settings, and then go down to a nice dark purple. Make those visible again, and now we're ready to start animating. What we need to do is animate the path of this rectangle. But shape layers when you make a rectangle, they by default make a rectangle path instead of just a regular path, which means you're only able to animate the size, position, and roundness. We want to animate the actual path points. So I want to right-click rectangle path and hit "Convert to Bezier Path", and now I have path keyframes, which is what I need. Everything else went away but I don't need those things right now, so that works. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go 10 frames forward, Shift Page Down, and set a keyframe because this is what I want this to look like in the middle of the box animation. Then I'm going to go to the beginning, and what I want to do is I want to move these path points all the way over to meet the others. So I'm going to grab them, I'm going to hold, as I start moving them, I'm going to hold Shift so that they don't move up and down. I'm going to get him close to these others, but not quite perfect, so that I can zoom in and then get them as precise as possible. This doesn't need to be perfect, but you want it to be pretty close. Now you can see this box animates open. Now we need it to animate left to right kind of closing. So from this point, I'm going to go 10 frames forward again, set another key and now I'm going to move these points to the right, the same way that I just did, but in reverse. Again, doesn't need to be perfect but should be pretty close. Now you can preview that. Your box is wiping but again, it's super robotic. We're going to do the same thing as we did in the last one and add some easing. So grab those keyframes, hit F9. I'm going to go ahead and go into my graph editor. I'm going to zoom in using the plus key, and I'm just going to go ahead and pull all of these to about a 50 percent influence, which you can see on that little box down there that pops up as you pull on them. Holding shift as well to keep them from moving too much. This is another thing, 50 percent influence doesn't need to be perfect, just needs to be close. Now let's preview that. That is looking much more fun, much more zippy and clean. That's what we want. Now, what we need to do is we need to use this rectangle layer to reveal this text. So let's go ahead and duplicate the rectangle, bring it above, and I'm going to go ahead and rename this to Matte 01. Then I'll go into my text layer, under my Track Matte settings, and I'll select "Alpha Matte", which will make this top layer a matte for the bottom layer. Now let's preview what's happening. That's super close to what we want. The box is animating on, revealing the white text, animating off. But the only thing is that our dark text or initial text is already showing up at the beginning, which we don't want. We want nothing there. That's a super simple fix. We'll go forward to the 10th keyframe where the box is fully covering, and since this layers on the bottom, we will just shift it forward to start at that point. That way it's not showing up right here. Let's preview that. There you go, that's what we want. Now, just as a final step, let's go in these layers that are done existing at this 20th keyframe. Let's go ahead and trim them up by holding Alt and pressing the right bracket key. That will trim those layers so that they're not longer than they need to be. This is helpful because if you don't get this rectangle animation exactly perfect on the edges like we were talking about, it's liable to still leave a little bit of an artifact on the screen. So if you just trim the layer, you don't have to worry about that. So yeah, that is a box wipe, that's one I like to use for titles, for lower thirds and even for short bullet points. Now let's move on and learn about a quick move in. 5. Technique #3: Quick Move In: Moving right along, our next technique is this one, or a quick move in. There are actually lots of different ways other than just what you're seeing here to use this one, so let's dive in. Let's go make a new composition. As usual, Text Animation O3. As usual, let's make a solid for the background. Think this time I'll go with a sagey green. Why not? We'll add some text, double-click here. Gong to write, quick move in. Make sure it is center aligned. Align it to the center of my comp, and then I'm going to move it off the bottom just a little bit because that is what I like. Yeah, I feel pretty good about that. What we're doing here is we are going to just do some quick vertical moves in. What we want to animate is the position. Before we do that, I'm going to do my little nit-picky, move my anchor point to the middle thing. Then to access the position parameter, we'll just press the shortcut P. So you'll see position pops up. But I really only want to animate the vertical position of this. So I'm going to right-click Position and hit Separate Dimensions. That will divide it into my X and Y position, which just gives me a little bit more control. I just want to animate my Y position. So I'm going to pop a keyframe on there, and then I'm going to go forward, let's say 10 keyframes, let's try that. Move that keyframe to there. Go back to the beginning, and I'm going to move the whole thing up just enough. Let's preview that. You know how I feel about it, it's robotic. So let's grab these keyframes, F9 to add an ease, go into our graph, de-select this X position. We only want to see the Y. Zoom in. We wanted to ease into its final position more, so hold "Shift" and drag that left, and we wanted to pop out of that beginning position pretty quickly. So let's make that nice and steep. That feels much nicer. Now, we want this to happen one word at a time. This is where our first usage of one of our handy little free scripts is going to come in. You could theoretically take this text layer, duplicate it three times, and go in and delete part of it, and then delete another part. It's complicated and you'd have to then line them up and make sure you didn't mess with your keyframes. In order to avoid that and to keep things as simple as possible, we are going to use our decomposed text script. Now, you'll see you have a couple of options. You can either decompose it into characters, words, or lines. We don't have lines on this one, so our options are really characters or words, and we're going to start by just doing words. Leave this top option selected, original position using expressions. If you find that this script is really bugging down your machine, you can always try this second option, because without expressions, it won't make your machine move as slowly, but I've never had an issue with it. So let's leave it on this option for now and press Decompose. Now I'm going to press "Control A" and "U", to collapse all those a little bit so I can see them. You'll see that what it did is, it broke it into these separate layers. It left your original layer here, which is good, but it just made it invisible. That's what we want for now. Now, they're moving separately, but they're all moving at the same time. So we want to offset them. This is another thing that we could do manually by just moving them, and with just three words, that's not that hard. But we did also download a very handy script for this. So let's go into our sequence layer script. I'm going to move it so I can see all of my options here. I want to offset these buy insert a number of frames. I always prefer to work in frames over seconds in situations like this. So I'll put my timeline scrubber here, at the beginning of the composition because that's where I want these offsets to start. I will grab my layers, starting with the one that I want to be last. Then I will enter a number of frames, I'm going to do two, and I will hit Execute. Now, let's preview it. That is pretty nice. If we wanted to, we could start with a blank screen, which might help here. Let's go forward about six frames and just start them right there. Very nice. The beauty of this and these scripts that we've used, is that we really only had to do this vertical top-down animation once. We didn't have to copy and paste it to each of these individual letters. We just had to animate it once, decompose it with this script, and then offset it with this script, which makes it really fast and easy to do this over and over again. Now, to show you another option with this, I'm going to go ahead and hide these top layers, and I'm going to make the original layer visible again. So this is the one that we animated originally. Instead of decomposing it by words, I'm going to decompose it by characters, again, leaving this top option selected and I'm going to hit Decompose. This will give you a lot of layers, and just to make my life a little bit easier, I'm going to grab all of those layers and make them a different color so they'll stand out. I'm going to go with purple. Now, again, I can use my sequence layers script to offset them. But if I did the same thing I did last time. So if I grabbed from bottom to the top or the last to the first, and I offset them by two frames, that takes a long time for such a short bit of text. So I'm going to undo that, and what I really like about this script is I can actually offset by a half a frame. I could even do a quarter of a frame or 0.8 of a frame, but I'm going to do a half a frame by entering in 0.5, hit Execute, and that is real nice. I like that. Let's do one more experiment here. I'm going to hide all of those again, go back to my original, and I'm going to duplicate my original. Instead of having it animate along the Y position, I'm going to hit "U", so I can see those keyframes again. Actually, I'm going to hit "P", so I can also see my X. Because I want, instead of it animating along the Y position, let's try along the X position. Let's have it finish here. We'll move to the beginning and we'll have it move in from the right, maybe about like that. Let's preview that. We're not robots here, so let's go ahead and add some easing, as you know I love to do. Steep at the beginning, not so steep at the end. That is pretty nice. Then we can do those same two experiments. We can take that and we can decompose it into words. Let's find those layers so we can see what we're doing. Let's make those pink. We can grab them from last to first, go into sequence layers, offset them by, let's do one frame this time, Execute. See what that looks like. Not bad. Then we can again hide those, go back to our original, decompose it by characters, and to hide everything, you hit "Control A" and hit "U" twice so that it'll collapse everything. Find those new layers. I'm going to make them yellow. Go into sequence layers, offset by half of a frame. I grabbed them in the wrong direction. I make that mistake a lot. Remember, grab from the last to the first, have your timeline where you want those offsets to begin, Execute. There you go. If you wanted to, just one more option, you may not like that they're totally visible when they start moving in. You may not like that they just randomly appear, they just pop on screen. I don't mind it, especially in quick snappy animations, but what you could do if you didn't like that, let's go back to our original vertical move. I'm going to move it up to the top here, just so we can focus on it. You could also go in and add an opacity keyframe. So hit "T", hit your stopwatch, hit "U", so you can see everything. I'm going to move that forward 10 frames and drop that to zero. What I might do is actually have it be at full opacity after like six frames. I'm going to grab those, hit "F9", let's see what that looks like. It's a little bit of a different vibe, a little less snappy and fun, but it is maybe a little bit more corporate and professional, if that makes sense. I know it's such a minor change, but it does make a big difference. Then if you wanted to take that and decompose it into words, Decompose. I'm going to make these blue, and then sequence them by maybe two frames. Like I said, it's a very similar effect, but maybe a little bit more corporate, clean, that vibe. As you can see, there are lots of different options here. You could try doing it from the bottom up. You could maybe even try maybe get in from left to right. You'd have to be careful because then your last letter over here on the far right would be coming in first, which is obviously not how we read. So it would have to be a creative choice for sure, not text that's super essential. This is another one that you can use as a title. You could use it for lower thirds, you could use it for bullet points, especially if you had long bullet points, and you wanted to move them in by line, which like we said, is an option over here in decompose text. There's lots of different ways you can use this one. Let's go on to our next one, which is jumpy characters. 6. Technique #4: Jumpy Characters: Our fourth method here is called jumpy characters, and so your characters are going to jump on screen one at a time. Let's dig in. We'll start by making a new composition, of course text animation O4, as I'm sure you could have guessed. I'm going to make a new solid. This time I'm going to go with one of my favorite colors. I really love purple, so I'm going to do something like that. I think that's nice. I'll add some text and that will say, jumpy characters. The animation process here at the beginning is going to look super familiar. It's pretty similar to what we did with quick move in. The main differences here is that we're going to add some overshoot to give it a little bit even more life. We're also going to add some variations towards the end that will really differentiate it. Let's start by animating our vertical position of this word. Let's go into P, and then again, I'm going to separate these dimensions. Now, I want a reference point of where the bottom of my characters are. To do that, I'm going to use my ruler tool and my guides. If you don't have these rulers visible here, all you have to do is press Control R, to pop these up. When you hover over your ruler, it'll give you this icon with the two little arrows and you can pull a guide. I'm going to put a guide where the bottom of my characters are, just so that as I'm moving this around to animate it, I'll have that reference point. Let's just say you had a lowercase y here, you would want this guide to be down here. You just wanted to mark the lowest point where you have characters visible. I'm going to drop a keyframe on my y position, and I'm going to go forward for this one. I think eight frames should do it. Then I'm going to come to this point and I'm going to pull my characters down and make sure they're nice and below that line. I'm giving myself a little bit of breathing room just to give myself some flexibility later. Again, you'll see what all of this is for in a bit. We can preview that. Super boring. Now before I start easing and stuff, I want to create some overshoot. Overshoot is just where it will come in and it'll go a little bit farther than it needs to, and then it'll come back to its home base. I'm going to go forward another four frames and put another keyframe. This is our final resting place. So that key we want to be right there. But this one, we actually want to be a little higher. We'll move that up, and then I'm going to come into my graph editor and ease these keyframes. Grab them all, press F9. I'm going to grab these two and ease them, pull them out holding Shift. I'm going to grab this one and make it more steep. Again because we want it to really pop out of the starting point and then ease into its finish. Let's preview that and see how it looks. It's pretty good. I think he could maybe use a little more overshoot. To do that, I'm actually going to come back into my graph and I'm going to pull that down. It seems a little jerky between here and here, so I'm just going to add one more keyframe, I'm going to go forward to keyframe and give that one more keyframe. Now that's feeling pretty good. Much like in the last lesson, we're going to come over here to decompose text, and we're now going to decompose this into characters. It's there we have all of our lovely characters, and we're going to grab them from last to first. Go to sequence layers, and I'm going to offset these by a half a frame since there're so many characters. Let's see what that looks like. Really fun. I like that. Now, here's where things get different. There are lots of ways that you can have this come onto screen other than just appearing. I'm going to show you some of my favorites. The first thing we need to do in order to do some of these methods is to precompose our animation. So, I'm going to grab all of these layers, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to hit, precompose, and it'll pop this box so I can name it. I'm going to name it, jumpy characters_pre. Now it's represented as one nice layer. What I can do now, and this is why this guide is here, is I can just put a mask on this layer so that you don't see them underneath this threshold. I'm going to come to where my layer is finished animating. I'm going to make sure my precomp is selected, grab my rectangle tool, and I'm actually also going to go to View and select Snap to Guides. That way when I make this mask, it will snap to that green line. Now let's preview that. Now you can only see them when they're inside the mask. Now another option we have, would be for a box to draw on and for the characters to only be visible within that box. Let's do that. Again, let's grab our rectangle tool, this time with no layer selected, and let's make a box. I'm going to press "Enter" and rename this Rectangle 01. I'm going to come into my shape layer options, and I'm going to make this stroke white, and I'm going to reduce the weight of it till it's similar to my letters, maybe something like that. I think that looks good. I'll go to my Align tab, make sure it's centered. I think that looks good. Now what we have to do is we have to adjust our mask to match this box. I'm just going to delete my first mask. Well, let me leave it. Let me duplicate my pre-comp, and then on this one, I'll delete my mask and I'll make a new mask that is lined up with this box. Now I'll give it my best shot by eyeballing it and then I can zoom in if I need to make sure. Really it's only important here at the bottom, and so that should be fine. Now let's preview that. We're going to have an issue. I'm sure you can see what it is. Because we used this guide as our reference point, our letters aren't coming from low enough. What I need to do is make adjustments to my initial animation. I'm going to go ahead and just delete that pre-comp, and I'm going to make my original animation here visible again. All I'm going to do is I'm going to come into this initial keyframe, and I'm going to drag it towards below my box. Let's preview that. Because it's coming from so much further, it might need another couple of keyframes. I'm going to lengthen that space out there a little bit. Try that again. It's pretty fun. Let's grab our text layer, go to DecomposeText, decompose into characters. Grab those layers from last to first, go to Sequence Layers, Execute. We have this very similar animation, but with a little extra motion. Now I'm going to grab those layers again and pre-comp them again, and this time I'm going to call it JUMPYCHARACTERS_PRE2. I'm going to change the color of it so it's easy for me to distinguish, and then I'm going to do the same thing, grab my rectangle tool, make sure this layer is selected and make a mask. Now, it's really hard for me to see when I zoom in if my mask is in the right place, and it's because my mask is white and so is my layer. I'm going to come in, you can actually change the color of your mask by right-clicking, and I'm just going to make it red. Now I can see that it is in fact in the right place. Now let's watch this. Ain't that nice? If we really wanted to feature this text or if this were a lower third or something like that, we could even have this box draw on. Let me show you how to do that really quick. I'm going to hide my text layer, I'm going to go into my rectangle, scroll down my options and hit "Add Trim Paths". Now, under your Trim Paths options, you'll see you have Start, End, Offset. We're going to work with End. Let's go forward 12 frames, insert a keyframe, then come back to the beginning and make our endpoint all the way down to zero. Let's watch that. I don't like the direction it's drawing on, I would rather it draw on this way. It's also obviously very fast. Let's go ahead and go out to 20 frames and see if that helps. Then there's a couple ways we could change the direction. We could either animate Start instead of End, or we could come in here under Rectangle Path, and we could reverse the path direction. Now let's watch that. It's better, but let's add some easing. Hit "F9", and this one we want to ease out of both ends, so the start point and the end point. Let's deselect these graphs, we don't want to see, and let's just pull both of these to be a little bit more dramatic. There we go. Now what can happen is this can animate on, and then our text layer can animate in. Let's move that layer to start where this animation finishes. I'm going to move it up, so that it's just under this rectangle layer. Let's see what that looks like. I actually think our text animation could start sooner. Since it's starting way over here, we could actually start our text animation probably about there. Yeah, there we go. That's another option, and then just to give you one more example of something you could do, let's go back to our initial jumpy characters animation, so this one. What you could do, again, this would be super useful for a lower third or something like that, is you could have an underline draw on and the characters come out and then underline draw off, or you could even have it draw on and stay on. But let's do on and off just for fun. I'm going to grab my Pen tool, I'm going to make sure no layers are selected. I'm going to place a point here, and then I'm going to hold Shift and place a point on the other side. If you hold Shift it makes sure that it's a straight line. I'm going to switch back to my cursor tool, I'm going to rename this underline, and then I'm going to go to my Align window, center that up. If I hit "Control ;" it'll make that guide go away because now it's just in my way. You can see I need to adjust my mask, because the mask is right there, and the line is right here. Let's go into this. Let's actually duplicate this layer. Go to our mask, select our mask, and then we can grab both of these path points and we can pull that down. Now let's preview that, make sure it looks good. It does. Very nice. Now let's have the underline actually draw on. Let's hide our pre-comp and again, select the options for the shape layer and go to add Trim Paths. We're going do the same thing, we're going to animate the end point. Let's pop a keyframe here, let's go forward 10 keyframes, and let's drop this down to zero. That'll draw it on. Let's add some easing, F9. You want this one to ease into both places. Let's make it 12 frames instead. Pretty nice. We'll have the text animation, just follow the lines. Let's move the beginning of it to about here, four frames in for this 12-frame animation, and let's just scrub and make sure that the letters never get ahead of the line, which they do not. Let's watch that. Pretty cool. You can always play around with the timing of this. If you wanted the underline to come fully on and then the characters to animate, you could just put this layer at the end of that animation, and that is totally fine as well. Different things work for different situations, but I'm going to stick with my quicker follow. Then once my animation settles, I'm also going to have my line draw off. But I don't want it to just reverse what it already did, just as a quick example. I don't want it to go back like that. I want it to draw off this way. That just means I'll be animating the start point. I'll drop a keyframe there, I'm going to go forward 12 frames because that's what we settled on for this animation, so it should be similar, and then I'm going to animate the start all the way over to 100. Go ahead and put some easing on those because you know we're going to want to. Looks good, and now let's watch that whole thing back. I think because it's so closely, the timing is only offset by four frames on the way in, it seems weird that everything's comes to a settle and then the line goes off. Let's actually have the line start going off before the characters are even settled. Maybe as soon as there. Yeah. These are all great options, tons of flexibility here. Let's go ahead and move on to our final text animation technique, the stroke swipe. Also save your project. 7. Technique #5: Stroke Swipe: For our fifth and final text animation technique, we are going to do a Stroke Swipe. So you'll see a little stroke animates on, it swipes to the right and reveals our text and animates off. Let's get started. Let' s make a new comp, Text Animation 05, last one. Make a new Solid, as usual. I'm going to go with like a yellowy, a lighter color, and then add some text stroke swipe. Yeah, let's do that in a darker color, maybe like a dark gray. Looks good. You'll see there are two main elements of this animation. One is that the text is being revealed from left to right, and the other is the animation of this little stroke which animates on and moves right, and then animates off. Let's start by revealing our text. I'm going to scale this up just a little bit, move my anchor point, make sure it's centered. So to reveal the texts, we're simply going to use a mask. So have our layer selected, grab our rectangle tool, and then come in here and just draw a mask around the text. Now, I'm going to come in on this right side because these are the two points will be animating, and I'm going to make sure that their endpoint is pretty close to the edge, just so that we're not animating any extra space that we don't need to be animating. So now let's animate that mask from left to right to reveal the text. I'm going to go forward ten frames, let's do 12, and put a key frame on my mask path. Then we'll go to the beginning of the composition and we will move these two mask points all the way to the left until the text is no longer visible. Let's go ahead and preview that. Honestly, this is one that even though we're going to come in here and we're going to ease it, it's still not going to look great until we add the stroke. I think that's actually still a little too fast, so let's come in and go to 16 frames and have the animation take about that long. That feels better. Now, we need the animation of this little stroke. So let's come in here, let's grab our pin tool, make sure we don't have any layer selected, put a point here, hold Shift and put a point down here. Now that width looks about right, we want the width to be or at least I want the width to be similar to my letters, so we'll stick with 11. Then I'm going to come in and change the color of this stroke. I'm going to zoom in, hit this button and use my eyedropper to make it the same color as my text. Now I want to make sure that these two elements are aligned with each other, so go to your Align window, make sure this is set to Selection, and hit "Align Vertically" I'm going to rename this layer to STROKE_01. You'll notice I number everything, and that's just because if I end up wanting another one or I end up needing to duplicate this animation and I hit CTRL+D, it'll automatically number the next one sequentially, which I really like. So that's why I do that. Now what we need this stroke to do is we need it to animate its width, which luckily is a parameter that we can very easily animate. Let's go ahead and hide our texts for the time being so we can just focus on the stroke. We'll come in here, we'll drop down all of our options on the stroke. Go to Contents, Shape, and under our Stroke options, you'll see Stroke Width, which is perfect. That's what we need. Let's go to about our ten frame mark and put a key frame, and go back to our beginning of our comp and animate that Stroke Width down to zero. Let's go ahead and ease those key frames, F9, de-select everything we don't want to see, pull that to the left holding Shift and I'm going to make this also ease. Pull that to the right holding the Shift, and let's see what that looks like. It could maybe be a little faster, I want to see what it looks like at eight frames. Let's go actually just back to 10, go back into our graph and let's just ease it even more. I think that'll work. So it needs to animate on and it's also going to need to animate off. I'm just going to go forward on my timeline, this is kind of an arbitrary guess, but I'm just going to go ahead and make this animation, and then I'll line it up where it needs to be later. So I'll set a key frame here, I'll go forward 10 frames and I'll make it go back down to zero. Grab those key frames and give my key frames some love. So I animate on and then off. That's what we need. Now, let's make our texts visible again. What we need to do is we need this stroke to follow the motion of this mask. So we need the stroke to constantly be right on this line. What I'm going to do rather than try to do that manually and get it to match perfectly, is I'm going to use a script that comes default with After Effects. I'm going to grab my text layer, I'm going to hit M for Mask, I'm going to select Mask Path, make sure that's highlighted, then I'll go into Create Nulls From Paths. From here, I'm going to select the second option, Nulls Follow Points, and you'll see what that will do. What it's done is it's created null layers that follow my mask. So if I select that too, you can see that those nulls, those four little purple squares, are following my mask points, which is really handy. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to parent the motion of this stroke to one of these mass points. Obviously, I don't need all four of these points and I don't really like having extra layers. So these two nulls obviously aren't moving, so I'm going to go ahead and get rid of them. Then I'm just going to pick this top null versus the bottom one, not for any particular reason, and I'm going to delete the bottom one. So now I just have one left, but it is moving with my mask and that should be all that I need. If I go ahead and parent my stroke to this null, it'll move with it, but it's not lined up. So before I parent it, I'm going to hit CTRL+Z, I need to line it up with this mask. So I'm going to go to a point in time where the mask is actively animating, and I'm going to grab that layer so I can see the mask. In order to line this up as precisely as possible, I could obviously just drag it and eyeball it and that would be fine. If you want to do that, go ahead. But to do it pretty precisely, I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to use my ruler tool again. So if it's not there already, hit "CTRL+R" and then you can come over here and you can drag a guide till it's just under your mask point. Then as long as you have View, Snap to Guide selected when you move your Stroke, it'll snap right on to that guide. Here we go. So now that's lined up an d make sure you don't move your timeline scrubber before you do this because this is all based on this specific moment in time. Now, grab your Stroke Layer and parent it to that null. Now it should be moving perfectly with your mask. What we're looking to happen here is we want our stroke to animate on, then our texts to be revealed, and then our stroke to animate off. So right now our stroke is animating on as our text as being revealed, so let's go ahead and move these two layers, our text layer and our associated null forward to where the stroke finishes animating. So it'll animate on, then reveal. Then we want to move these animate off key frames to be lined up with the completion of the mask animation. Let's preview that. Very nice. That will work or if you wanted to, you could have these end key frames for your Stroke Width. You could have those overlap a little bit with the end of the mask animation so that your stroke starts kind of skinning up before it's completely stopped, which I think looks even nicer, but that is just a preference thing. That's it, that is the fifth and final technique. We have learned them all, great job. Tune into the next video to learn what your exercise will be so that you can start putting all of this stuff into action. 8. Your Exercise: Great job getting through all those lessons, but now it is time to practice. What I want you to do for your exercise is I want you to pick at least three of the five techniques that we learned. Then I want you to use the text and the colors of your choice, and I want you to animate that text using those three techniques. Now keep in mind, if you want to, you can do all five, first of all, but you can also mix and match some of these techniques. So in our jumpy characters lesson where we learned about the underlined and we learned about the box draw, you could totally use those techniques with some of these other text animations. For instance, with the quick move in, you could have a box draw on and then the text quick move in from the top. Or you could have a box draw on and then do the dramatic reveal inside that box. Basically, I just want you to feel free to get as creative as you'd like or to just stick strictly to the techniques that we learned, whatever is more comfortable for you. But when you get your project done, please make sure to share it in the Skillshare Project Gallery. I'd love to see what you guys create. As an FYI, there is also a bonus lesson following this. In that lesson, I'm going to show you some kind of real-world uses of these and teach you some tips and tricks for duplicating them. So say you wanted to use one of these as a lower-third and you had 50 lower-thirds in one project that you needed to make, I'm going to give you some tips to make that a little bit easier. So yeah, I hope to see you there and also good luck on your exercise. 9. Bonus Lesson!!: All right, welcome to our bonus lesson. This is a bit of a longer lesson, but it is chock full of good information. What I'm going to show you throughout this lesson, is how to take each of the five texts, animation techniques that we've learned, put them into a practical application, and then duplicate that practical application. I know for me that's a big factor in choosing the text animation technique I'm going to use in a piece is whether or not it's easy to duplicate. If I have a project that only needs a couple lines of highlighted text, I maybe okay, choosing one that requires a little bit more work to duplicate. But if I have a project that needs, say, a 100 lower thirds, I might want to choose one that's really simple to duplicate. Just copy paste, tweak the text. I'm going to show you examples of each of these, some of them are harder than others and will require more tweaking than others, which is just good information for you to have before you commit to them for a big long project. Let's start with our dramatic reveal. What I've done is I've made a simple lower third using that technique. I have this little stroke that animates on and then my text that animates in. Now this one is the easiest one to duplicate. It is literally as simple as changing your text. I'll grab these three layers, my line, my name, my title, I'll duplicate them. I'm going to move them to the top, I'm going to change the layer color just for my sanity. Make sure I make the bottom, the original ones invisible. And then say I wanted this one to be my husband's name instead. I'll type in, that is not my husband's name, I'll type in Derek Kirk, and then I'll change his title to 3D artist. There you go it's literally that simple. This is why I included this one in this class, honestly, because it is so simple to duplicate, its literally just changing the text. Now we're going to move on to our box wipe, which is not quite as simple. What I'm envisioning for this practical situation here is that you've gotten to the end of an explainer video. Let's say it's fallen on profit, and they want to talk about their impacts them and talk about how much money they've raised, how much, how many families they've helped, things like that. The box wipe would work really well for this, it would look really nice. But it, like I said, it's not the easiest in the world to duplicate, but let's just dive in because it's also not that terribly hard. Let's duplicate all four layers, and let's drag them down here out of the way and change the color. Let's say we wanted this next one to say a $1 million raised. The reason this one is so tricky is because we've got multiple copies of both of the main elements. We have our dark text, we also have our light texts, which is a copy of it, and we have our rectangle, and then we have that same rectangle being used as a map. In order to make our lives easier, we're going to use some light expressions to link the copied layers, to the layers that they are a copy of, if that makes sense. Let's start with the text. Right now if we were to change this text to one million raised, this text layer doesn't change. If we were to size this down, that text layer didn't size down. Let's undo that and let's make it so that it will change with it. To do that, we're going to scroll down our options on our top text layer. Under text, you should see source text. Let's do the same thing on the bottom text layer, so that we can see source text in both places. Now to create an expression, you hold alt and you hit the stopwatch. Now that's going to pop up, don't worry about it. We're not actually even typing anything in. All we're going to do is grab this little spirally thing here, this is the pick whip tool we're going to press and hold, and you'll see this blue line dragged out until we get to the source text of the original text layer. Release, and it'll fill it in for you. Now to exit this box. You can either click out of it, or you can hit "Enter" on the number pad, but not the regular inter. Now our source texts is tied to the source text here. If I write some gibberish, I've got gibberish on the top layer two, which is great. However, our size is still not tied to it. If I were to come in and scale this down, that one didn't scale. Let's tie this line to it in the same way. So come to our toplex texts layer, press S for scale. Do the same thing, actually, let's get back to our original texts, "Control Z", and then do the same thing on this bottom layer, hit "Scale" so that you can see scale on both of your texts layers, on your top layer, hold alt, click the stopwatch, grab your pick whip, drag it down to scale. Don't drag it to the layer, drag it to the property, so scale. Now when I change this to say, "One million raised", and then I scale it down holding shift you can see that the top layer followed along. That's what we were looking for. But the next thing is that our box is now not quite wide enough. If we were to just change our box, which we can do since we animated the path. If we just scale this, this way, the animation itself actually still works. But now our matte layer isn't matched, so it doesn't look very good. Undo that, and let's tie the scale of the top matte layer, to the scale of the bottom rectangle in the same way. S for scale, S for scale, alt, stopwatch, grab the pick whip, tie it to the scale of the rectangle. Now, when I take this, and I widen it out a little bit, everything is working as it should be. It's obviously a few extra steps I think using these expressions to tie them together is easier than having to duplicate your text once you've changed it, and replace that layer with this layer, and also do the same thing. You'd basically have to delete your top two layers and recreate them, which you can do if you really are afraid of expressions. But if not, I think this is a much easier way to go about it. Let's do it one more time just for practice sake, and let's find a way to transition in between these two. I think what I want to do, is I want this text to come off in a similar way that it came on. I'm actually going to take our original rectangle, and I'm going to duplicate it again. Bringing it to the very top of this layer, press U to see my key frames, and I'm going to come to the end of this layer. I'm going to pull this so that they line up. Now, this will act as a wipe off of that text. I want it to be white. Then what I want to happen is for this next layer to start animating on. I can line it up to where the exact end of that other layers so that it all happens step-by-step, or I could even push a little more overlap here and do something like that which I think looks pretty cool. I'm going to come in with this rectangle and I'm going to change the color a little to be more something else in the same realm, but a little different, just to mix it up a little. Let's see what we have so far. Our impact, a million raised. Then, let's say the last thing they wanted to say is 5,000 families helped. Let's take these four layers, duplicate them, bring them to the top, scooch them over, change the color, and then unfortunately, we can't make those expressions once and have them work every time. If I were to change this text now, it's not going to change the top text because that top text is actually still looking at this text layer. We'll have to redo those expressions. But now that we've done them and we're comfortable with it, it shouldn't take us very long. Let's come into our top text layer and open up the properties that we need open. Source Text and Scale. Let's open up the same properties in the bottom layer. I'm going to extend this window a little bit so I can see everything. I'm going to grab this. You can see the original expression is still there. If I click there, it should highlight the whole thing and then I can use my pick whip tool to pick whip it to the appropriate layer. I'm going to do the same thing with scale. Bring it down to the scale of the original layer, and there we go. Now, I should be able to change this to say 5,000 families helped. I'm going to want to scale that down just say here and appears to have worked. In this case, I actually don't even need to change that box, which is nice. But if I did, it would be as simple as opening the scale of both of these layers and parenting to that one, which I may go ahead and do just that I don't come down the road later and maybe I have to add another character. Maybe this has to say 5,000 plus. Then my box isn't quite big enough. Then I want to make my box a little bit bigger, and then my map will be in line too just to help my future self in case of revisions. There we go. That's working as it should. Let's do the same thing transition as we did last time. Let's grab our rectangle from the last set of text and line it up with the end of this layer, and then bring in my new layer, let's make that one white, and then bring in my new text at something of an overlap. Then I also want this new box to be the same color as the original box, so I'm going to make sure this is still selected. Come into Fill and use my eyedropper tool. Let's see how it looks. Pretty cool. Again, that one is not the easiest in the world to duplicate, but it is a pretty cool effect with fairly minimal effort. Just maybe use that one on projects where you don't have to duplicate it a trillion times because you'll end up with a trillion layers and it might very well drive you crazy. Moving on. For the quick move in, we're in a much easier position. What I've envisioned here is a call to action at the end of a commercial or something like that. We have, let's do this. Then afterwards it'll say, "Call us today." The key to making this one easy to duplicate is making sure you hold on to that original text layer that you animated before you used decompose text and sequence layers. As long as you have that layer, all you have to do is duplicate it. I'm going to bring it to the top, I'm going to change the color, and I'm going to make it start here at the end of this layer. Make it visible and then I'm simply going to change the text. I'm going to have its say, "Call us today." Then all you have to do is go back into your decomposed text, decompose it into words. Grab your layers from last to first, if you'll recall, with your scrubber where you want them to start. Go into SequenceLayers, offset it by two frames. There you go. That one's done. Let's go to the four second mark, trim those layers up, and let's do one more screen. Come down here again to our original text, duplicate it again. I'm going to change it to green. Let's have this one just say, seriously. Because that's one word, we actually don't even need to do or decompose texts in our SequenceLayers because there's nothing to decompose it into. Let's do it one more time and have this one say, do it. This one we want to decompose into words, bring our scrubber to the right place, and SequenceLayers. Now, we have a pretty cool little call to action. It is probably a little too slow, so you'd want to speed this up, but just another quick bonus tip here. Another way to make this look cool would be to duplicate your background here at the bottom and move it forward so that your background actually changes when your text changes. Let's go into Layer, Solid Settings, and let's make this a nice blue. Then what happens is it's flashing backgrounds as well. Then you could do the same thing. Go back to the green if you wanted when seriously pops up, and then go back to the blue, when do it pops. Look at this. Pretty nice. That one is a good option if you need to use it repeatedly. Just again, I don't like extra layers either, but just don't ever delete this layer that goes invisible after you use the decomposed text script. Hang on to it and your life will be a lot easier. Now we're going to talk about the fourth technique, the jumpy characters. What I've envisioned for this one is just a lower third, just name, no title. This is probably the hardest case scenario to duplicate with the box draw on and then the text. But the key to making it as simple as possible is again, holding on to that invisible layer that results from decompose text. I'm going to start just by duplicating that text layer. I bring it up here, I'm going to scooch it over, and make it visible so I can actually see it. A good tip for when you're working with lower thirds is to always make sure your text is either left aligned, if you're going to be on the left side of the screen, or right aligned, if you're going to be on the right side of the screen. Reason for that being, if I bring up my title safe here, I've got this right where I want it. So I'm assuming this isn't for broadcast, but we wanted to be pretty safe, so it's within that margin. If I were to come in and write a longer name, and I'm going to go with, this is my dog's name, Lava Bean Kirk. Because I have the text center aligned, I'm going to have to move it. Instead of having to move it every time you replace the text, let's just start with left aligned text. I'll go into paragraph and I'll hit "Left Align". Then if I wanted to be back in that location, there's a couple ways I could do that. I could either select all of my position keyframes at once and drag it that way. But that can be finicky. I find that it doesn't always work for some reason. But since we only animated the y position in this case, we are in luck. We can actually just use our x position just to move it over and do a little bit farther. Yeah. Now when I change that text, it will start at the same place, which is what I want. The next aspect of this is to redecompose and resequence. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to do that. I'm going to hit "Decompose Text". I'm going to decompose it into characters. Hit "You" twice, so I don't see them all. Come here to the front, grab them all. I'm going to sequence them by a half a frame. Look at those happy little characters. Now if you'll recall what we did last time is we precomposed those. I'll grab all those and I will precompose them to say and put them in a precompose as Lava Kirk PRE. There she is. Now all we need is that rectangle. I am going to duplicate the same rectangle as last time. It's obviously not going to work for me. In order to change the size of this, unfortunately, I cannot just grab it and change the scale. It honestly looks fine right now, but what it's doing is it's warping the width of our stroke when you do that. You can't see it when I make small changes, but you can see it when I make big changes. See how this one has gotten wider and those have gotten skinnier and the same thing would happen if you do it that way. Just to keep everything kosher here, we are going to use a different way of scaling. First, I'm going to come in though to my text, and I am going to find, let's make that visible. I'm going to make some guides. I'll come in here, zoom into the middle here. I'm going to make some guides to show a center point. You can see I've actually already done this and that's what those guides are for. Those are in my way. Let me go to View, Clear Guides, and then I'll do that again. Control R for ruler. I'm going to get some guides in the middle of this layer. Doesn't have to be perfect, but it needs to be close. That looks pretty good. Then I'm going to grab my box, my shape layer, and I'm going to snap it to those guides. Again, you have to have View, Snap to Guides turned on for that to happen. Now rather than scaling, I'm going to come into my rectangle. I'm going to come into my rectangle path which is here. Remember those parameters that we didn't want earlier? Well now they come in super handy. For this one, we're going to just change the size. If we go in and we just start changing it, it scales up uniformly, which normally would be good, but we don't want that right now. So we'll uncheck this constraint portions box, looks like a little chain. We will only change the horizontal width, we'll get it to where we think it looks nice. That looks really good. You'll notice when you're changing size, it doesn't impact the stroke width. That's why we're using size rather than scale. That is one of the beauties of shape layers. Now this is almost ready. Let's hide that original text layer again. All we have to do is grab our new pre-comp and drop a mask on it. Make sure that mask lines up with the bottom of this layer, zoom in to make sure it does, it does. That should do it. Actually that doesn't do it. We need to offset this layer so that it's not appearing until we hide my guides. It's not appearing until the line is there. See how now it's jumping up and there's nothing for it to jump up from. Let's offset it to start about there. Here we go. Another tip here, when you know you're going to be working with a lot of lower thirds, I like to start out by just going ahead and making one version that is on the left side of the screen and one version that will live on the right. Because if you had someone's face here, you put it on the left. If you had someone's face here, you put it on the right. Typically, when people film for things like that, they aren't recording everyone on one side. More than likely you will need both sides. I like to just go ahead, and like in this case, I would have made another one of these where my text was right aligned. So that, rather than having to tweak it once I get there, I've already got a right aligned version. Just another bonus tip in this bonus lesson. Let's move on to our final technique, the stroke swipe. In this case, I have created a bullet point. Because this is one of my favorite ways to do bullets. Because it looks neat, it looks clean, but it also can reveal a lot of texts at once. I hate watching bullet points come on word by word. I think it gets super repetitive super fast. This is one of my favorite ways to do bullet points, and it's actually not all that hard to duplicate over and over again. Let's go ahead and dive in. I'm going to go ahead and grab all four of my layers and I'm going to duplicate them. Now this is going to seem weird, but I'm only going to actually move my bullet point and my text. I'm going to deselect my stroke and I'm going to deselect my null. Then I'm going to move these down where I think I want them, which would be about there. Now, the next thing I need to do is change my texts. You don't have bullet points that say the same thing over and over again, or at least I hope not. I'm going to come in and I'm actually going to make this one longer. But because it has a mask on it, it can get tricky. If I start writing beyond the mask, I can't actually see it. I'm just going to come into my mask by hitting him, and I'm going to change where it says Add here on my mask to none. That way for now, the mask is having no impact, so I'll be able to type freely. I'm going to say this is an even longer bullet point with even more to learn, such as this interesting fact. I want to show you guys one that's three lines, how you would adjust it for that. The first thing we need to do is adjust our mask animation to fit our new text. Let's come to the end point here, make sure we're on this key and let's grab these two points and drag it out beyond our text. Then let's grab these two and drag it below our text, to make sure everything will be showing. Then we can go ahead and change this back to Add. Now let's grab this keyframe and copy it. Come back to the beginning. Because it's shrinking as it goes back, rather than try to get that perfect and drag those down, I'm just going to paste the keyframe we just copied, and then I'm going to grab these two right points, and I'm going to drag them left until we don't seen our text. I'm going to put some level on these keyframes, re-do it since we've tweaked it, I'll hit F9, and then I'll pull those a little bit. Let's watch. That is looking pretty good. Let's go ahead just so that we're not competing with the first bullet point. Let's drag this one down to where it starts here at two seconds, so that this one comes on and then this one comes on. You'll notice, obviously, this stroke is all messed up, and so is this null. That's because we used the script, the create nulls from path script to have this null follow a mask. Currently, it is following the mask of our old layer rather than our new layer. All we need to do, if you'd like, you could delete this null, you could grab this mask path. Do nulls follow points again? You could delete all the extras the same way we did the first time, or you can come into this layer and hit U twice, and then you can see the code that was created when you pressed that button. All you need to do is change the source layer. This here means source layer. This is the layer that it's currently looking at. I am going to highlight everything between the equal sign and that semicolon, and I'm going to use my pick whip tool again and pick whip it to my newest text layer. You'll see right away that moved your null and it moved your stroke. Now it's definitely closer. The only thing now that's wrong is that our stroke is not long enough to cover all of our texts. We'll go into our Stroke, we'll go into our Settings, Shapes Settings into our path, and we're just going to grab this and pull it down, low enough that it'll cover all of our letters. Now let's watch that. Again, not the lowest effort, but also not the highest. Let's say we had one more bullet point just because practically speaking we probably would. Let's do all of that one more time. I'm going to come in, grab my bottom two layers, and move them down until they're spaced how I would like. I'm going to change this text to say, "This is a short bullet point." Because I knew this would fit inside the existing mask, I actually didn't bother setting that mask to None from Add. Now all I need to do is change my mask path. I'll come to this end point and I'll move it closer. I could move these, but I don't actually need to. So I'm not going to because it seems like unnecessary work. All I need to do now is come into this null layer, hit U twice, grab my source layer information, everything between the equal sign and the semicolon, pick whip it to my new text. Looking good with one small exception, and that is obviously that our stroke is a times a bit too long. Let's come into our path, grab that point, and shorten it up where we would like. Now let's watch it all. A fairly quick way, I won't say it's the quickest way, but a fairly quick way to reveal some bullet points, reveal a lot of information in a short amount of time that isn't just your run-of-the-mill fade on of bullet points. That does it for the bonus lesson. Thank you guys for sticking with me throughout this lesson and throughout all the other lessons. I hope you guys were able to get some valuable information, some practical real-world knowledge from this bonus lesson. Thanks. 10. Need Help Rendering?: Now you have completed your animation and you are ready to render it out. There are about a million ways that you can render things out. There's all kinds of settings we could dig into. But if you've never rendered something before or you're just looking for a quick way to get it completed, I'm going to show you a couple different ways that I would render something like this out. The first thing you need to know is that this up here, this little bar that you can adjust is your work area. The only things that will render are what's inside your work area. Since this composition is 10 seconds right now and our animation only takes about two, we've got quite a bit of dead space on this, and some dead space is fine. But let's just say we wanted this to be five seconds. You can come to your five second mark and you can trim the end of your work area to line up right there. Now you'll only render five seconds instead of 10. To render, you're going to make sure that your Render Queue window is open. If its not there by default, go to Window, come down to Render Queue and it'll pop up. Mine has docked right here. Now once you have that window open, you can grab your composition, which in our case is Text Animation 01, and you can just drag it over. Now, the first way that I'm going to show you how to render, which is the way I pretty much always do it, is by pressing this button here, Queue in AME. But what this will do is bring up a different program called Adobe Media Encoder. If you don't have that installed, it'll have to be installed for this rendering method to work. If you don't want to install another program on your computer right now, I totally understand. I will be showing you a way to not have to use this. But for now, let's not touch any of these settings and let's just hit Queue in AME. That will slowly but surely open up a new program. Here is Adobe Media Encoder, which is just a compression program. Now, the reason I like to use Adobe Media Encoder is because it is the only way I can get an MP4 file, which I like to use for their size. I've got some default settings set up here that I use often, but since you won't have these, let's go ahead and set these up for you. First, you'll hit this left-most blue button. Now to get an MP4 file like I was talking about, you have to have an H.264 encoding format. You go to your Format drop-down menu and you'll have all these options, but you're going to select H.264. Then under Preset, again, I have a few that I've saved that show up, up here. But since you won't have these, let's go down and choose High Quality 1080p HD. Now, you can also select under Output Name. You can select where it will save and what the name of it will be. I'm okay with Text Animation 01. Now if you want to, you can scroll through your video settings and see what they are. The only thing I might change would be my bitrate settings. If you find that this is taking a really long time to render, you could always drop your target bitrate down to 10 or 12 and see what it looks like. These are fairly simple animations, so you don't need a super due step bitrate. That would be my only recommendation of something to change. But other than that, this should all be what we need it to be, because of the preset. Click "OK". You'll see your preset is now listed here. Your output location is listed here, and you can just press this green play button, that will render your file. Then once it's done, you can come in here and actually open it up. This will show you where it landed and here it is. I'm going to go into my detail view so I can just show you guys what size this ended up at. It is 528 kilobytes. Now let's go back over into After Effects and I can show you a way to render this out without having to use Encoder. Again, grab your composition, drag it into your render queue. Now, I have again, some settings that will populate that are defaults that I've set up. But since you won't have those, let's just go into each of these and make sure they're correct. Under your Render Settings, you want to make sure this is set to best. Make sure your Resolution is full. You don't want Field Render on, and you do want this to be set to work area only. Remember when we adjusted our work area, if this was set to length of comp, it would still render the whole 10 seconds. We want to make sure it's work area only. We want to use our composition's frame rate. Under Output Module, you can go to your Format menu. I'm going to select QuickTime. I can't make an MP4 this time, but I can still make an MOV. That's what I'm going to do. I'll go to QuickTime, and then under my Format Options, I'm going to use an animation codec. This is just my preference. You can play around with others that may work for you. You can do some research, decide what you need, but I'm going to use animation and that is my go-to. Click "OK". Everything else should be set up just fine. If you were to ever want to export something with transparency, say it was some text animation that you wanted to overlay over some video. To do that, you would come into your Channels and hit RGB plus Alpha. MP4s don't actually support Alpha. When I need to render something with transparency, this is exactly what I do. For now, we don't have transparency, so I'm going to leave that set to RGB. My audio settings are set to auto so that if there is audio, it will export. We don't have audio in this, so we don't need to worry about it, but If you did, these settings should work just fine. Lastly, you can come in here and set up where it will export to. I'm going to call this Text Animation 01 Large, because the file size will be much bigger as you'll see. Then you can hit "Render". Now, just to show you what I meant, we can come in here and find that new render, which is right here, and look at the file size compared to the MP4. This is why I prefer using Media Encoder and I prefer creating and MP4s, but it's all just a preference thing. Let's watch this one. It looks good. That is a few different ways that you can use to render out your exercises or any of these text animations for whatever purpose you may need. If you have any questions, just pop them in the class discussion. 11. Thanks Y'all!: Thank you guys so much for learning with me. I had a really good time. I hope you did too and I hope you enjoyed adding some new text animations to your toolkit. When you get your exercise done, make sure to share it in the project gallery so that we can all see it and admire your hard work. If you want to share it on Instagram, make sure to tag me @KaitlynKurtDesign. In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns, just post them in the class discussion and I'll do my best to help you out. Thanks again. See you next time.