Create Stretchy Text using Adobe After Effects - Advanced Text Episode Two

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to the second edition of my Advanced text series. In this edition, I'll be teaching students how to animate stretchy text, as well as some other tips and tricks to improve your animation. Can't wait to see what you've come up with. 2. Getting Started & Class Project: For this class, you'll need Adobe After Effects to complete the animation. You can download a completed version of the project file on the project and resources page. Your class project is to create your own stretch text. Then you can post your projects to the project gallery. 3. Create the Stretchy Text: So here I have my text written out. G to center to the middle of my composition. First thing I'll do is right click, go to Create Shapes from text. I'm going to turn my grid on to use it as a guide. Now I'm nudging my text outlines down somewhere where it'll be nice and easy to use the grid as a guide. With my text outlines layer selected, I'm going to search for the path. Click the stopwatch for each path, the path of each letter. Now I'm going to move over on the timeline. Maybe around 15 frames on the timeline. I'm going to select one of my paths to bring up the points on the text outlines layer. I'm going to select all the top points except for this one on the X, I don't want to select that one. So I'm going to unselect it. Holding the shift key, I'm going to drag the point up. Maybe two around here. I think that's good. Maybe pull it up a little bit more. Remember to hold the shift key to make sure it's straight. I'll move over another ten frames on the timeline. Select the rest of my points. And again, holding the Shift key, I'm going to drag it up. There we go. And it actually looks like my text is a little bit crooked. So I'm going to have to select my bottom points, straighten them out a little bit. There we go. Go to move over to frame 50 on the timeline. Press the keyframe button for each path. Move over another ten frames. This time, I'm going to select the bottom points. Gonna unselect that point for the X. Turn the grid on again. Gonna drag the points down. Back to the original line that the text was sitting on. And for this last one to make it easy on us, we're just going to copy and paste our first keyframes. There we go. We have the very basic stretch animation completed. From here, it's a matter of easy easing our keyframes, and we're going to head into the graph editor, and we're going to adjust these to get the speed that we want. I'm using the speed graph. Drag these handles to the left. Gonna drag these handles to the right. Drag these handles to the left. This handle to the left, as well. And for this one, I'm going to drag it to the right. And drag the last one to the right. And remember, I'm dragging all the handles for each key frame. We want the same animation for each of the letters. Alright, let's preview. There we go. It looks so much better with a little bit of ease on it. And finally, for a final touch, we're going to offset each of the letters by maybe one or two keyframes. I think I'm going to start by offsetting each one by one keyframe. Let's try offsetting by two keyframes. There we go. I think that looks better. I 4. (Bonus Lesson) How I Stylized the Text: This lesson, I'm going to walk you through how I created these highlights and the texture to the animation. I won't dive too deeply into what each and every effect does, but if you are at all interested in what each effect does, you can actually go up to the Help tab and go to the effect reference, where Adobe has listed what each effect in after effects does. We're going to right click, create a new adjustment layer. I'm going to rename the adjustment layer to highlight to our new adjustment layer, we'll add a fill effect. Change the color to black. Now we're going to add another effect called the Bevel Alpha effect. Change the edge thickness to 20. And I'm going to change the light angle to positive 60. Light intensity, we can change it to one. Now we'll add another effect. The simple choker effect. We'll change the choke mat to eight. Now we'll add a solid composite effect. Change the color to black. Now I'm going to add a fractal noise. Change the contrast down to five. Brightness, we can change to negative 20. And we're going to change the blending mode to multiply. Now I'm going to add a fast box blur. Change the blur radius to three. Now I'm going to add a threshold effect. Turn down the threshold level to 50. Add another fast box blur. Change the blur radius to two. Now I'm going to add a set MT effect. We can keep all the settings as they are. Now I'm going to add another threshold effect. On our second threshold effect, we'll change the level down to maybe 110. And the final thing that we have to do, we're going to have to change our highlight layer. We'll change the blending mode to screen. I'm going to change the text outlines color. There we go. Now we've created a highlight. Now for the second part of this lesson, we're going to create a new adjustment layer. We're going to call it roughen edges. Going to add a turbulent displace to our new adjustment layer. Change the amount to three. Change the size to 30. Complexity to four. To add some animation, we're going to hold the Alt key and click on the Evolution stopwatch. And in this field, we'll type in an expression time times 100. We're going to make it a little bit better by adding some more effects. Gonna add a fast box blur. Change the blur radius to three. We're going to add a CC threshold effect. Gonna change the threshold to 110 and change the channel to Alpha. Gonna add a rough and edges effect. Change the fractal influence to zero. Going to move the rough and edges layer to under our highlight layer. There we go. Now it looks the way that we want it to. Something to keep in mind about this is that if you were to add anything to this composition, let's say you want to create a background. I'll go to layer new solid to create a background. You'll notice that as soon as you add it to the composition, the effects disappear. This is because the effects are being added to the entire composition. So in order to properly add the background, you're going to need to create a new composition. We'll create a new background. And then we'll drop the text composition into this composition. There we go. And that just about concludes our stylized lesson. 5. Outro: Congratulations and thank you for taking this course. Now you can post your projects to the project gallery so everyone can see the animations you created.