Swing-In Text Animation in 5 Minutes | A Short Adobe After Effects Class

1. Introduction: In this episode of Learn and FV, together we'll create a swing in text animation in Adobe After Effects, an animation technique that is quite popular in motion graphics. Can't wait to see your animations. 2. Getting Started: To get started, you're going to need Adobe After effects to follow along. Your class project is to follow along and create your own swing in text animation. I'll provide a completed version of the project file on the project and resources page. It might help if you get stuck. And of course, feel free to post your projects to the project gallery. 3. The Main Lesson: To start things off, we're going to create a new composition. Here's my settings. I'm using social media landscape, 30 frames a second. You can find it under the list of presets. Over on the three D renderer tab, I'm using advanced three D, but it should also work on classic three D, as well. We're going to use our type tool to type out some text. Really doesn't matter what you type out. Gonna align it with the align panel. First thing I'm going to do is grab the anchor point tool and change the anchor point to the top of the layer. I have snapping enabled to make this easier. We'll turn on three D on the layer. Now we'll bring up the rotation with the archy. We're going to be animating the X rotation. First, I'll change it to 90 degrees and press the stopwatch. I'll move over 15 frames on the timeline. Now I'm going to type in negative 55 for our second position. This time, I'm going to move over ten frames on the timeline, change it to 50 degrees. Now I'll move over five frames on the timeline. Type in negative 25 to the rotation or maybe negative 30. Move over another five frames, change it to 15 degrees. And finally, I'll move over three frames and change our X rotation to zero. Let's preview what that looks like. Looking pretty good. To make it better, we'll easy ease our keyframes, F nine to easy ease, we'll head into the graph editor. I'm using the speed graph. Gonna drag this handle to the left, and then I'll just move the rest of the handles towards the middle. Now we'll give that a preview. There we go. I think that looks a lot better. I might smooth out these key frames a little bit. There we go. Nice and smooth. And now we're already done our main tutorial. Now it's just a matter of taking things a little further. Now you can do whatever you want with your layer. You can duplicate it. Control D to duplicate, change the position. The P key will bring up the position. You can change the text. You can move it over on the timeline. If you're using the advanced three D renderer like I am, you're going to notice when you go to change the fill color, you're going to notice this effect as it swings in and out. Think of it as a light shining on the layer, and as the text swings in and out, more and less light will be shining on it. If you don't want this effect, an easy fix is to pre comp your layer to precompose a layer, right click and go to precompose. And then you can add a fill effect. You can find it over on the Effects and Presets panel by searching fill. While I'm doing this, I might as well add a stroke as well. Layer layer styles, stroke. Toggle it down. I'll turn it to a white stroke. And if you want to animate individual letters, you can either create individual text layers and animate them individually, or you can duplicate your pre comps and add some masks and then offset the layers, is what I'll quickly do right now. I might fast forward through this, but essentially, I'm duplicating the precomp layers, using the shape tool to draw mask over each letter. If you weren't aware of this already, using the shape tool on top of a precomp layer will create a mask. Very useful for offsetting letters on precomped text animation. Then I'll move each layer over on the timeline. Holding Alt and page down will move layers over one frame on the timeline. It's a good shortcut to know. And then we can rename the layers. Enter key to rename a layer. And there we go. That's just about it for this tutorial. Thank you for taking my class. See you in the next one. 4. Outro: Congratulations, and thank you for taking my class. Now you can post your projects to the project gallery. I love seeing the animations you create.