Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome
to the third edition of my Advanced text series. In this edition, I'll be teaching a weighted
font animation, along with some other techniques to improve your animations. Can't wait to see the
animations you create.
2. Getting Started & Class Project: To get started with this class, you're going to need Adobe After effects to complete
the animation. You're also going to want a font that has different font weights. Fonts I'm using are Monster
at Light and Extra Bol you can use any font you would like as long as you can
change the font weight. Your class project is to create a weighted font
animation of your own. I'll include a
completed version of the project file on the
project and resources page. Please share your animation
to the Project Gallery.
3. Main Animation: Okay, to start things off, I've got a simple text
layer written out. The font I'm using is Maseratlt before we
start animating, the first thing we'll
have to do is go over to our paragraph panel
and center line. Then we'll go over
to our line panel to align it to the center
of the composition. There we go. I'm going
to take my layer now, and I'm going to duplicate it. On the second layer, I'm going
to change the font weight. I'll change it to extra bold. Now we're going to
have to convert our text layers
into shape layers. We'll right click on our
first layer, go to create, create shapes from text, do the same thing for
our second layer. Now we can shy these
two text layers because we don't
need them anymore. We'll go over to this icon
here and click on it, and we'll click on
these two little icons here to get rid of our text. We're not actually
deleting our layers. We're just making
them invisible. Right. I'll select
both of the layers, and we'll go to the search
panel and search for the pack. Now we're going to
go through and click the stopwatch for each letter. Make sure you do it for both layers because we're
going to need this. Make sure you do it
for Beach Path letter. Alright, now I'll close
the layers and then press U to make it easier
to see our keyframes. Okay, so I think I'm going
to animate the first layer, so I'm going to turn off the second layers so we
don't see it anymore. I'll move over about maybe
15 frames on the timeline. What I'm going to do is
I'm going to copy and paste the path keyframes
from our second layer, paste them in our first layer. I'm going to do that
for each letter. Make sure you copy and paste the correct letter into
the corresponding letter. There we go. We have a
very basic weight change. Move over maybe 20 frames on the timeline and press the keyframe button for each letter. Then move over 15 frames. Copy and paste our first
keyframe for each letter. And, of course, we'll
select our keyframes, press F nine to
add some Easy Es, head into our graph editor. I'm going to drag these
handles to the left. We can leave our middle handles same drag these
handles to the right. Keep in mind I'm on the speed
graph, not the value graph. If your graph looks different, it's probably because
you're on the value graph. And now as a final touch, I'm going to offset
the keyframes. We can shy second shape layer because we don't
need it anymore. And if you want, you
can rename your layer. I'm going to offset each of the keyframes for each
letter by two frames. I'm using the Alt and arrow
key to nudge the keyframes over. And there we go. And that's about it for
our basic text animation. If that's all you wanted
to learn how to do, then this class is
basically over for you. If you'd like to learn how
to improve our animation, stick around for
the next lesson.
4. Issues you may encounter: I just wanted to create
a lesson showcasing a few problems that you might encounter while creating
your animation. So the first one is
not quite a problem, but it is something
you're going to be aware of while you're
creating your animations. You're going to notice that
some letters such as this A, for example, have two
separate path properties. Just be careful that you're copy and pasting
the correct path. One is for the
outside of the layer, and one is for the
inside of the layer. Another thing you're
going to want to do is you're going
to want to keep these two path properties together when you're
creating your animation. As you can see, if you
offset the keyframes, you'll get a very
weird looking result, something to keep in mind. Another problem that
you're most likely going to encounter as you're
previewing your animation, you're going to
notice that one of your letters is
animating really weird. Like, take this N, for example, so what is it that is causing our end to
animate like this? Well, more often than not, the solution is
something very simple, and it comes down to what
we call the first vertex, which is the point on our path and which our letter
is animating from. We need to make sure that
on both of our keyframes, our first vertex is
set to the same point. And I'm going to zoom in here to show you exactly what I mean. The first vertex is the point that has
a square around it. That's how you know
it's the first vertex. And as you see as we go to
our different keyframes, that our first vertex is
different on each keyframe. We're going to have to
change the first vertex on our second keyframe. But we'll go to our
second keyframe. We'll right click on this point. We'll go to mask and
path properties, and we'll go to setF
vertex. And there we go. The solution was that simple. Now our N is animating the
way that we want it to. So the third and final problem that you're going to
encounter while creating your animations is
let's say you've set your first vertexes on both of your keyframes to
the same point. Like, take this R, for example, you'll see that on
both keyframes, the first vertex is
set to the same point. But you'll see it's still
animating really weird, and you're wondering what could
possibly be causing this. The problem lies in
the fact that there's a different number
of path points on both of our keyframes. You'll see that on
our first path, there's ten points, and on our second path,
there's 11 points. And as we scroll
through the timeline, you'll see the extra
point being created. The solution to this, and sometimes it can
be very tedious, but it needs to be done to fix this problem is
we're going to have to add an 11th point
on our first keyframe. I'm going to get my pen
tool and I'm going to zoom in on the R on
our first keyframe. And I'm going to
add an extra point right under this point, and we'll see if this
solves our problem. There we go. That
looks so much better.
5. Improve the Animation with the Warp Effect: Here's a completely
optional lesson. I'm going to show you how we
can improve our animation using one of my favorite effects to add to this
type of animation. First thing I'm
going to do is reset my keyframes back to
their original position. I'm using the Alt and arrow key to nudge the keyframes over. It's a good shortcut to know. Now that we're
finished with that, we can head over to our
Effects and Presets panel, and we'll search for
the warp effect. We'll add that to
our text layer. Let's head over to our Effects panel and take a closer look. Under the warp style menu, you can find a whole list of different types of warp styles. You can go through
them all and take a look at how they all
affect the text layer. For my animation, I think I'm just going to go
with an arc upper. Over on the bend, we can
change the bend influence. I'm going to change it to zero, press the stopwatch
to add a keyframe. We'll move over to
our second keyframe. Change the bend influence to 50. I'm going to bring
up the keyframes on the timeline by pressing U. Now we can see our warp effect. Gonna move over to
our next keyframe. I'm just going to press
the keyframe button to keep that same influence. And you can either copy and
paste the first keyframe, or you can type
zero into the bend. Either way, doesn't matter. Now let's select our keyframes. We'll add some easy Es that's similar to our weighted
text animation. Drag these handles over. We'll drag these
handles to the right. Now let's take a preview
to see what it looks like. Alright. I think
that looks good. Now I'm going to
show you a different way to offset the letters. That way we can have our letters offset and still have our
warp effect worked properly. We'll duplicate our layer five times, one for each letter. We'll go down into
our contents menu, and we'll delete every
other letter except W. Now this layer only has the W. We'll rename our layer W. And we'll do that
for each letter. Go into the contents,
delete the letters. Change the name, and we'll
continue doing this. There we go. Now that
we have that finished, now we can offset our letters. Remember, I'm using the Alt key and the arrow key to
nudge the text over. There we go. And to fix our letters not showing up at the beginning
of the timeline, we're just going to
select our layers. We'll drag our layers on the
timeline so that it fills the entire timeline.
And there we go. That concludes this optional
lesson to add a warp effect. If you would like to see how I stylize the text in
the intro animation, check out episode two of
my Advanced text series. In the third lesson
of that episode, I show you how to stylize
your text with highlights.
6. Outro: Thank you, and congratulations
for completing my class. Now you can post
your projects to the project gallery so everyone can see the
animation you created.
Tyler Bennett, Motion Graphics Designer
