Transcripts
1. Trailer: My name is Jake Bartlett
and I live in Los Angeles, California working as a
motion graphics artists. In this course, I'll teach
you what I've learned from animated kinetic text on a daily basis for the
last several years. You'll learn everything
that you need to know to get started animating
kinetic type. I'll cover how to layout and
animate text synchronized to an audio track and animate a 3D camera inside
your composition. The knowledge you'll
gain will expand your skill set as a
motion graphics artist and get you creating fun and professional looking
animations in no time. For the class project,
you'll be animating a quote from your favorite
movie or TV show. Once you're finished, you'll
have an awesome animation to show off and you'll
be able to apply what you've learned
to any kind of kinetic type project
like lyric videos, animated infographics,
titles, whatever you want. I'll see you in class and I can't wait to see
what you create.
2. Mini Typography Crash Course: Before we get into the lesson, I want to make sure you understand that I'm going be using keyboard shortcuts for almost everything inside of After Effects. Keyboard shortcuts are a super efficient way of navigating through the program and they'll make you a much faster animator. As often as I can I will try to remember to save the keyboard shortcut as I'm doing it but if I ever forget you can always see the keyboard shortcut appear in the bottom corner of the screen. If you look in the additional resources of this unit you'll see a link to Adobe's website where they list all of the keyboard shortcuts for After Effects. I highly recommend you go there and just see all the little things that you can do to speed up your efficiency inside of After Effects. To start, I want to go over some typography basics because typography is 50 percent of kinetic type. Before we get in animating anything, we're going to have to pick out some fonts and the font is going to be just as much a part of your design as your animation is. Your fonts are really what gives you look and feel of the entire project. You can see here that we have a few different types of fonts. On the left is what the fonts would look like normally and on the right is the same fonts, all caps. You can see that the script font does not work at all in all caps and that's pretty much because script fonts are designed to look like handwriting and most of the time they'll be cursive and you would just never write in all caps with cursive. This is a small caps font and instead of having lowercase letters it just reduces the height of the uppercase letters. Sometimes you come across an all caps font where the lowercase letters are the exact same as the uppercase letters. Sometimes the spacing between two letters is noticeably more or less than the rest of your text. That spacing is called kerning. There are two types of automatic kerning, metrics which is what this is set to right now and optical. Now without getting too scientific metrics is going to try to space out your text based on the width of each character. Optical kerning is going to try to space out the letters based on how close they are to each other so that's going to allow for some overlapping between the characters. More often than not, I've found that optical kerning is a quick and easy way to set the overall kerning for your text. Still you're going to run into certain characters that just don't kern well and that's when you'll have to adjust it manually. You can see right here that on the word 'have' the gap between the A and the V is bigger than the gap between the V and the E so we're going to fix that. To kern something manually pull out the text tool by hitting Command T or Control T on a PC, Click between the two letters that you want to adjust then hold down Option or Alt on a PC and tap the left or right arrow keys to adjust. Once you get it where you want, hit Enter and you're good. You can also adjust the kerning over here in their character palette by clicking one of the preset numbers or by clicking and dragging on this yellow number here. The goal in kerning type is to have even spacing where none of the characters are scrunched up into each other and there are no awkward gaps. Here I've typed out a quote on five different lines and they're all jumbled together and it's pretty hard to read. What I want to do is adjust the font size and the width of each line so that they're all the same size and make a nice block of text. The first thing I want to do is make all of my text uppercase and a quick way to do that is to just Select all of your text, go on to the character palette and click this double capital T button which means all caps and there you go. Next I want to make all the lines the same width so I'm going to Click on my second line Click and drag on the font size until it's about where I want it. I'm going to go the next line do the same thing. Again and again. Pretty good. That's one way of making each line the same width but let's say I wanted to make all the text the same size as this line. I'm going to note that it's a 119 pixels tall then I'm going to Select all of the other texts layers Click on the font size in the text palette and type in 119, hit Enter and now they're all the same size. Now the overall spacing between characters on an entire line is called tracking and to adjust that Click on your text, go to the character palette again and right next to kerning is our tracking. Same way, Click and drag on that yellow number until it's out to about the same width as the next line. I'm going to do the same thing with the third line and if you want to move faster than the clicking and dragging is allowing you to, a quick tip is to just hold down Shift when you're dragging and that'll speed it up. Holding down Command or Control on a PC will slow it down. Normal speed, Command or Control to slow it down, Shift to increase the speed and I do the same thing on each line and there you go. It's pretty rough but you get the idea. You can also adjust the tracking the same way that you did with kerning by selecting a certain number of letters, holding down Option or Alt on a PC and then tapping the left and right arrow keys. Now that'll work with as many letters as you have selected. Now this isn't necessarily the best looking text in the world but now you know how to space out your text in a couple of different ways. As an example project that I'll be walking you through on this course, I chose a quote from parts in our creation. I started by laying out all the texts that I thought would be on the screen at one time so you can see, I just have the entire quote here laid out in different ways before any animation is done. Sometimes I just make up the compositions as I go but planning stuff out ahead of time is always going to make things simpler. You can see that I just picked out two different fonts, a condensed font and a script font. I think they worked together on their own pretty well but they're also going to reflect the mood of the quote that I'm animating. That's something you're going to have to think through when you're picking out your own fonts. Do they work well together and do they reflect the mood of my quote? What you need to do before moving on to the next unit is pick out some fonts that work well together but that also work well for the mood of your quote. As an exercise, lay out a few of the lines from your quote with fonts that you think work best. It's okay if what you lay out right now isn't what your final project looks like. This is just a warm up. This is how my text looks before I animated, it may change after I get to that stage but breaking up the text into sections I think I'll be animating in helps organize the entire project. That's it for this unit so be sure that you share your progress in the student gallery. I'd love to see what kind of fonts you are going to be using in what quotes you're going to be animating too, see you in the next lesson.
3. Position: Almost all kinetic text is animated by three basic properties: position, scale, and rotation. Deciding how you're going to use those three properties in combination or on their own is how you'll be able to design custom and unique animations. Let's start with position. Type out a new text layer. Open up the position value by pressing the P. Set of key frame. Move forward a few frames. Switch to the selection tool by pressing V on the keyboard. Click and drag your text across the screen. Let's preview that animation, and there you go. This is the most basic way that you can animate the position value of a text layer. But we can also animate text through another way, through, get this, a text animator. Let's go ahead and make a new text layer. Open it up and right here you can see under Animate there's an arrow that will bring up this drop-down menu. Click on "Position" and now we have a position animator applied to our text layer. Now, the animator position works exactly the same as the transform position, except instead of basing the value on the composition, it bases it on the layer itself. Let's go ahead and set a keyframe, move forward a few frames, and click and drag the text. You can see our value is changing. Preview that animation and there you go. We basically have the same animation on both layers. Now because we've animated the second text layer with a text animator, that means we can grab the layer and change the position of it and the animation will be preserved. Now if we do the same thing with the other layer where we have keyframes on the position value, it's going to add another position keyframe and it's going to mess up our animation. That's one big benefit to using a text animator. As often as you can I would suggest that you use a text animator over the transform properties. They're generally more flexible and they allow you to make changes more easily after you've already animated something. One really helpful feature of a text animator is the a range selector. Now, a range selector is going to allow you to apply the transformations to a certain number of characters that you select. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of our first layer and then reset our text animator's position by getting rid of the keyframes and setting this back to zero. I'm just going to click and drag the text to be about the center of the screen. Now, a range selector is found right here, and it's automatically included with a text animator. Go ahead and open that up, and you'll see that we have a start, end, and offset values. The start value is set to zero and the end value is set to 100. That means that all of our text is being selected right now. But if I slowly scrub this end value to the left, you can see that that line and arrow is moving across the screen. If I set it to zero, none of our text is selected. If I move it to 50 percent, around there, half of our text is selected. That's what those two lines represent. The offset value does just that. It offsets what part of the text is being selected while preserving the amount of text that is selected. I'm going to go ahead and set that back to zero and set this back to 100. Now, I'm going to go down and change the position transformation on the text animator, the y-value and shift the text down. Now, if I change the end value, you can see that the text is returning back to the original position and that's because our range selector is now no longer selecting any of the text, so none of the position transformation is being applied. This is one way you can make cascading text animations. If we set a keyframe at zero percent, move forward a few frames and change the value to 100, then we can preview that animation and our text is being animated one character at a time, applying the transformation position over time. Now, there are tons of ways that you can customize the way that this animation is taking place. If we just set this in the middle here, twirl down the Advanced tab, we now have lots of different options. I'm going to go ahead and make this bigger so we can see all of them. The units allow you to change how the range selector is selecting text. Right now, it's based on percentage, but you can change it to index. Now, index is simply the value of the character. A would be value one n would be two, and so on. I'm going to go ahead and set that back to percentage. The next value is based on, right now it's set to characters, which is why only one letter at a time is being animated. But if we change that to a words, then the entire word animates over that same amount of time. If we add multiple words, then that same animation is applied to the entire line one word at a time. If we change that back to characters, you can see it applies it to all the characters. If we say characters excluding spaces, it's not that noticeable in this animation because it's so quick. But basically, that just says, ''Ignore the spaces.'' There's one less value in here, that's lines. If you have multiple lines of text, this will apply the animation to each line individually. If I just go ahead and copy this text, duplicate it, add another line, duplicate, now I have three different lines and they're all being animated separately. As you can see, there are a lot more values. I'm not going to go through every single one of them, but I do want to encourage you to play around with them so you can see how they affect your animations.
4. Scale: Now let's animate by using scale. Go ahead and type another text layer. Open up the scale property by hitting S on the keyboard. Set a key frame, move forward a few frames and then change the scale. We preview that animation, there you go. Now if you notice the scale is based on the bottom-left corner of the layer and that's because that's where anchor point is. That's what this little cross here is. That's your anchor point. So the scale is going to be based on that anchor point. Now if we adjust the anchor point position by using the pan behind tool, which is right here or you can get to it by pressing Y on the keyboard. Then we can click and drag on the anchor point and set it wherever we want freely. So we set it right in the middle of the layer. Now the animation is based on the center of the layer. So changing the anchor point of the layer is going to drastically change the animation that you create based on the same two key frames. So make sure you play around with changing the anchor point and seeing how that affects your animation. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and back up to where we have the anchor point at the original position. Now you can do the exact same thing using a scale animator, the same way that we did with the position animator. So let's go ahead and make a new layer. Open it up at the scale animator, backup to align with our first layer, set a key frame, move forward, change the scale and now you notice that the animator is scaling each character individually the same way that the position animator was affecting each character individually. Now we can change this animator to match the transformation skill exactly the same way. To do that, open up more options and change the anchor point grouping from character to word, and now the scale is affecting the entire word, but it's affecting it from the bottom center of the layer. If we wanted to match our first layer, we have to change the grouping alignment. Now this is represented by that little X you can see at the bottom of our word. So if I move that all the way over to the left, the scale is now affected by the bottom-left corner. Again, the text animator is basing the values off of the text layer itself instead of the composition. So negative 100 percent on the x-axis puts the anchor point on the far left of the text layer. Since the y value is set to zero percent, the anchor point is also at the bottom of the layer. If we change the Y value to negative 100, now it's in the top left corner. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and do a few steps. So we're back to animating per character. I'm going to take off the key frames and I'll leave this at 50 percent and go into my Range Selector, set a key frame on the n value, back up a few frames, and then change that to zero. Now you can see the animation is applied to each individual character as the n value animates from zero to 100 percent. So it behaves exactly the same way as the position animator. Again, if we go into advance and we change characters to words, then the entire word is being animated at the same time. But the characters still have their own individual anchor points and that's because on more options we have the anchor point groupings still set to character. Again, if we change the anchor point, you can see all those little red axis. If I change this to negative 100, then it scales upwards based on the center of each character, starting at the top. Again, just like the position animator, if I want to change the scale of this layer, I can do it even after animating, because the key frames are applied to the scale animator instead of the scale transform property. So again, I recommend that you try to use a text animator over the transform properties.
5. Rotation: Last, let's animate by rotation. Go ahead and type out another text layer. Open up the Rotation property by pressing on the keyboard instead of keyframe, go forward a few frames and then change the rotation. If we preview that animation, you can see how the rotation is also based on the anchor point. If we change that anchor point to the center of the text, the text is now going to rotate around the center of the layer. Right now, our text layer is only rotating on one axis, the Z-axis because our layer is 2D. If we want to rotate on other axes, then we're going to have to make our layer 3D by clicking right here. Now, we have the X, Y, and Z rotations separated, as well as the orientation. Now, before we do any more animating, you've got to understand the difference between orientation and rotation. I'm going to go ahead and go back to the beginning and get rid of our keyframes. The rotation values will let you set a specific angle on each axis individually. You can even tell it to have a certain number of revolutions. If we set a key frame on the X Rotation, move forward a few frames and change this value on the first number here to two, that's saying that it's going to make two full revolutions around the X-axis by the time it gets to the second key frame. If I scrub through, you can see that our text fully rotates twice around the X-axis in a positive direction. If I change that value to negative two, the text flips in the opposite direction. You can do this on any axis. If you grab the second number and just drag and you get to 360, it automatically adds one revolution and resets back to zero degrees. This is what that animation looks like. If we try to do the same thing with Orientation, we're going to get frustrated pretty quickly. That's because the Orientation values are, one, linked together and two, can only be set between zero and 359 degrees. If you wanted to make that same two revolution rotation on the X-axis and you've set a keyframe, move forward, and then just click and drag this number until you see it's 360 twice. It's going to reset back to zero and then you have no animation because the orientation is not there to animate the rotation. It's simply there to offset the 3D layer to a specific angle. Now, if I wanted to animate the orientation, I can do that by setting a keyframe, adjusting the value, and previewing, and it's going to animate the way that you expect it to. But if you wanted to change the animation of one of these three axes in the middle of these two keyframes, it's going to add a third keyframe, and then your animation is going to look completely different. This is why it's important to animate text using the X, Y, and Z rotation values. Since you can keyframe them individually, you can control when each axis is being animated. I'm just going to offset each one of these values a little bit and you see right now, they all animate at the same time. But if I take the Y rotation here and offset it a few keyframes, then it doesn't kick in until a little bit after the other animation has already started. If I offset the Z, then you can see how each axis rotates at a different time. This can be very useful when you're trying to do more complex animations. Now, once you've key-framed your rotation values, you can go back to your orientation, change the angle of that text and then your X, Y, and Z rotation values are preserved. Just like before, we can animate the rotation of a text layer using a text animator instead of the rotation properties. I'm going to go ahead and type out another text layer, open it up, click on "Animate" and go to Rotation. Again, you can see that we only have access to the Z rotation. To get access to all three axes, instead of making that layer 3D, we have to go to the Animate menu again and at the very top you see "Enable Per-character 3D". This is the little icon that represents that. Now, you can see that we have the X, Y, and Z rotation values and the rotation is based on each character. Again, if you wanted to preserve this entire word, you can go into your More Options and change the Anchor Point Grouping to Word, and that'll fix that. But I'm going to go ahead and go back to Character so you can see what options this is going to give us. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of our first layer. It's just out of the way. Then I'm going to position this in about the center of the screen. Then I'm going to change the Y rotation to 90 degrees, so all the letters are facing away from me. Now, if we go into our Range Selector, go to the beginning of a layer, set a keyframe on the End value, go forward and change the value to zero. Now, our text animates back into position. But what if you don't want the animation to go from back to front? Well, then we can take off the keyframes that we just created. Set a keyframe on the Start value, move forward and then change that value to 100 percent. Now, you can see our text animates from front to back instead of back to front. If you want to see how to do some more advanced animations with text animators, there are a whole bunch of Presets that come with After Effects. If you go to your Effects palette and open up the first folder, it's called Animation Presets. Scroll down and you'll find a Text folder. The Animate In and the Animate Out folders are a good place to start. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this layer and then I'm going to type out a new text layer. I'm going to apply the Center Spiral Preset. Now, wherever you have the play head in your timeline is where the animation is going to start from. If you press "U" on the keyboard, it'll bring up all the keyframes for the selected layer. We can see that it's applied a Rotation and an Opacity animator onto my text layer. I'm going to go ahead and drag these to the beginning of the clip and then let's preview it to see what it looks like. It's a pretty crazy. I don't know that I would ever actually use this animator but I can open up the layer and see how it was built. This Preset has an animator called Spiral, which is really just a Rotation value, and it animates from eight revolutions to zero. Then we have a Fade In Animator, which is just an opacity animator and that goes from 0-100. If we go into a range selector and then down to Advanced, we can see that they've customized the values to get the specific animation. The units and the based on values are the same as what we've already seen. Mode set the Add, Amount, 100. The first thing that I'd noticed is different is the Shape is set to Triangle. If we were to set that to Square, the animation is going to change completely. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. I don't exactly know what all of these values mean, but that's why you need to go in and play with them to see how they affect your animations. Switching this from square to triangle completely changes the way that the text is animated. If I switch it to Ramp Up, the animation changes again in a completely different way. This is why it's really important to just play around and see what the values change, and that will give you a completely customized animation. Now, I can't recommend that you actually use a lot of the presets that come with After Effects because that's a dead giveaway that you're not actually designing the text animations yourself. Just use them as a guide and figure out how they work by looking through the text animators, mess around with the values and apply what you learned to your own animations. Now, all of that might seem like a lot to take in all at once, but trust me, it's only scratching the surface of what's possible with kinetic type. Now, I want you to be comfortable with the three different properties that we went over in this lesson. Know how to animate all three of them using the transform properties as well as a text animator. Sometimes a text animator is going to behave weird or just do things that you're not expecting. If you run into any issues, feel free to ask a question in the Q&A section of the community tab, and I'm more than happy to help you through it. But if you really just can't get that text animator to do what you want, my general rule of thumb is to just revert back to animating the transform properties. Just be aware of how that's going to affect your animation moving forward. Now, for your homework, I want you to do three test animations. One on position, one on scale, and one on rotation. They can be as simple or as complicated as you want them to be. Just be sure that you're comfortable with all three properties and you know how to use them and be sure that you share your progress in the student gallery.
6. The Graph Editor, Pt. 1: Now that we have the three fundamental animating properties in our toolbox, we can start having some fun. One of my favorite things about kinetic typography is the ability to make custom animations from scratch. Using the graph editor to easier keyframes will allow you to polish and refine your motion. Refining every aspect of your motion is what changes this simple movement into a professional looking animation. Here I have five different texts layers, all animating across the screen, and each one of them has a different motion. But if I bring up all the keyframes by pressing You on the keyboard, we can see that all five text layers have the same two keyframes at the same point in time. But they're actually not the same two keyframes at all. Let's bring up the graph editor, which you can find right here. This is the graph editor. By default, the graph editor only displays the property that you have selected in a given layer. If I go ahead and select the position value of the first text layer, the graph editor is now displaying its data. These two points represent the position keyframes that I've set for this text layer and if I switch back to the normal view, you can see that they're in the same position as in the graph editor. The graph editor can display a few different types of values. Right now it's displaying the speed value of the position in pixels per second over time. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the other text layer so we just focus on the first one here. Since this text layer's motion is constant and there's no easing on either end, the graph is represented by a straight line. But if I turn on our second layer so we can compare them and I pull that up on the graph editor, when we preview this animation, we can see that the second text layer's motion eases in and out instead of abruptly starting and stopping like the first text layer. The graph editor is telling us the same thing. The second text layer's motion starts at a value of 0 pixels per second and as time moves on, it speeds up until it's around 1200 pixels per second and then it slows back down until it's at another resting point of 0 pixels per second. Now, if we take a look at this third layer and bring up the position in the graph editor, we get an even different curve. What this graph is telling us is that this text layer is starting at a very fast value of around 5400 pixels per second, but then it's very quickly slowing down until it gets to a stopping point. If we preview this animation, that's exactly what we're going to see. The text takes off extremely fast and then very gradually slows to a stopping point. How do we edit the speed curve? Well, let's go ahead and turn off these second two layers. Close them up. I'm going to duplicate my first text layer by pressing Command D or Control D on a PC. Then I'm going to open up the position by pressing P on the keyboard so I can distinguish between the two layers. I'm going to switch back to the regular timeline, select these two key frames, then click and drag the text downwards. Now, we see that both of these texts layers have the exact same motion. If I go back into the graph editor, we see our straight line again telling us the motion is constant and has no easing. But if I grab this keyframe and drag it all the way down to the base our line is now a curve. This is telling us that we have a slight ease now into the motion before it stops abruptly. If we preview that, we can see the difference between the two layers. If I do the same thing to the second keyframe and bring that all the way down to the base, we now have easing on both ends, but it's extremely slight. There's very little difference between these two animations. If we take a look at the graph editor, we can see there are handles coming up keyframe. If I click and drag this handle, we can start to edit the curve. Pulling a handle away from the keyframe is going to influence the amount of time it takes for the animation to get up to speed. Pulling it closer to the keyframe will do the opposite. The same is true for the second keyframe. I'm going to go ahead and drag this handle pretty far away from the second keyframe. As I'm dragging, you can see that the graph editor is displaying an influence percentage. This is very helpful if you're trying to be consistent between multiple key frames influence values. If you take a look at the composition window, you can see this text layers motion path. As I click and drag this influence handle, you can see that the motion path is also changing. That's because the motion path and the graph editor curve are both the same path, just representing two different properties. The graph editor is showing us the speed of the text layers motion, and the motion path is showing us the actual position points of the text layer over that animation. If I drag both of these handles as far over to the left as I can, almost all of the motion is distributed at the end of the animation. If I preview that, we can see that's exactly what's happening. I'm going to undo a few steps by pressing Command Z or Control Z in a PC until I get back to our boring curve. Another value that the graph editor displays when we're editing the curve is the speed value. You can see as I drag this key frame up, our speed value is increasing. I can set this to around 500 pixels per second, and I'm going to drag this out to about 75 percent influence. Now our text layer starts suddenly, eases into a faster motion before gradually stopping. But if you need to be very precise with your values, clicking and dragging is not the best way to do this. But if I double-click on this keyframe, we can control the speed and influence values with precise numbers. What I'm interested in right now is the outgoing velocity of this keyframe, because the motion is moving out of that keyframe. I'm going to set the speed to precisely 500 pixels per second with an influence of precisely 75 percent. I'm going to hit Okay, and our curve is now set. Then I'm going to double-click on the second key frame and this time I'm interested on the incoming velocity because we're moving into this keyframe's motion. I'm going to leave the speed at 0 pixels per second because I want the motion to end gently, but I want the influence to be much higher than 16 percent. I'm going to go ahead and type in 60 percent, press Okay and now our curve is adjusted. I can preview this animation. Now we have an animation that starts abruptly, speeds up and then gradually slows down to a stopping point. As you can see, the graph editor is a very powerful tool for editing the motion of a text animation. The graph editor can display another type of graph. If I pull up the rotation property of this text layer by selecting it and pressing R on the keyboard, I'm going to set the starting value of the rotation negative 180 degrees, set a keyframe, move forward a few frames, and then set it back to 0. I also want to move the anchor point to the center of the text so if I switch to the pan behind tool by pressing Y on the keyboard, I can click and drag on that anchor point and move it to rate about the center and now my text is rotating. If I select the rotation value and go into the graph editor, our graph is now displaying a different property. Instead of speed over time, it's now showing me degrees over time. The rotation that I've animated as being represented by this straight line. If I highlight this first keyframe, you can see that the value is negative a 180 degrees, just like I said, and it moves up to a value of 0 degrees. But if I hold down Option or Alt on PC, my selection tools, which is the convert vertex tool, then I can click on my keyframe and a handle appears. I'm going to do the same thing for the other keyframe. Now I can adjust this handle freely, just like the pen tool, to adjust the amount of time it takes to progress to the animation. If I hold down Shift, it locks this handle to a straight horizontal position, which will keep the starting rotation value at rest. Now to show you what I mean by that, I'm going to go ahead and enable the motion blur for this text layer. If we go to the first keyframe, we can see that there's no motion blur being produced. If I grab this handle and drag it upwards, you can see in the composition window that motion blur is being introduced to the layer. This is because the rotation of the layer is changing very quickly, starting with the first keyframe. This can be very helpful if you want the first frame of your animation to appear as if it's already in motion. One feature that's unique to this value graph over the speed graph is the ability to adjust this handle below the baseline and that's because rotation can have a negative value. Speed has a minimum value of 0, but rotation can have a negative number. Since I drag this handle below the value of the first keyframe. As I move forward in time, the text layer is going to rotate in the opposite direction that it ends up in, because the curve is dipping below the value of the first keyframe before curving up and reaching a value of 0. If I take the second handle and raise that above the value of the second keyframe now, our animation is going to move past both our keyframe values before reaching them. This can create sort of a bouncy animation. It's a really nice feature that will let you make some completely custom animations. I'm going to go ahead and lock these handles back to the base of each keyframe by clicking and holding Shift so that the handles snap back to the keyframe space. Now if I wanted to edit the speed curve for the rotation, all I have to do is switch to the speed graph. I'm going to click on this little icon in the bottom of the graph editor and choose Edit Speed Graph and now we can see the same type of curve that we did with the position animation. The rotation speed can have a negative value. If I click and drag this handle, it can be lowered below 0. To have a more precise value, I'm going to go ahead and undo and double-click on this keyframe for the outgoing velocity, I want 0 degrees per second, but I want to influence the animation with this keyframe by 75 percent. I'm going to hit Okay, then I'm going to double-click on the second keyframe, come to the incoming velocity and again, leave it at 0 degrees per second and influence 75 percent. Hit Okay, preview our animation and now we have a really nice animation that eases in and out of each keyframe. By default, the graph editor is set to auto select graph type. We're just going to automatically select between the value and speed graph based on what after-effects thinks is the most likely type of graph you want to edit. I'm going to switch that back to auto select graph type and you can see that we're now back to the value graph. Now if I want to see the position value of this text layer as well as the rotation, I'm going to hold down Shift on the keyboard and press P. Then I'm going to click on the position value and you can see that our graph editor has switched to showing us the speed graph. If I bring up the scale property by holding down Shift and pressing S, right-click on that or back to seeing our value graph.
7. The Graph Editor, Pt. 2: That's all great. But how do we apply it to Kinetic text? Well, here I have the first line of text from my project quote, and I want to animate each word on screen, have it bounce a little bit before it ends up where it is right now. I'm going to go ahead and select all my text layers, and set a keyframe on the position value by holding option or Alt on a PC and pressing p. Then I'm going to back up at the start of the layers, and click and drag the text all the way down off screen. Now I want to Zoom in on the composition window and I'm going to do that by pressing the right angle bracket on the keyboard, which is also the period key. If I preview our animation and it's just boring, point a to point b position animation. To animate the balance, I'm actually going to work backwards. I'm going to go to the last key frame, and then tap the page up key a few times to backup a few frames. Then I'm going to click and drag on the text, so that it's a little bit lower than the resting point. Then I backup a few more frames then I'm going to click and drag the text, so that it's higher than the last key frame. I'm going to keep doing this until I get the number of bounces I want out of this animation. Each time that I adjust the position, I want to go greater than the value of the last time that I was above or below the last key frame. This should be enough bounces, but now we need to work on the timing and the position. First of all, I want to pull the second key frame out a little bit. I'm going to go into the Graph Editor, and since I have multiple text layers position values selected, they're all being represented at the same time in the Graph Editor. The first thing I want to do is ease into the motion of the second key frame. Now if you look here, this keyframe is split into two, and that's because right now the incoming velocity and the outgoing velocity are not linked. To link these values hold down Option or Alt on a PC so that you bring up the Convert Vertex tool and then click on the keyframe. Now you can see that the incoming and outgoing velocities have snapped together, and if I click and drag on one of the handles, they stay together. This is going to allow us to have a smooth curve between the incoming and outgoing velocities of the given keyframe. As the animation reaches the peak of its position value, I want it to ease to a stop. So I'm going to grab this handle and drag it down to the base of the Graph Editor as well as give it an influence of a 100 percent. If I preview the animation, we see that the text eases very quickly into the maximum position value before bouncing up and down a few times. Now I like the timing between the first two keyframe, I think I'm going to leave that be for right now. Let's move on to the next keyframe. Before I do any more editing, I'm going to go ahead and select all of these keyframes, hold down Option or Alt on a PC and snap all of the incoming and outgoing velocities together for each keyframe. If I zoom in on the keyframes by pressing the plus sign on the keyboard, we see that we now have curves instead of straight lines. Another thing to note about the Graph Editor is that it automatically scales based on the size of your curve. If I scroll back in time, you can see that the Graph Editor automatically zooms out, based on how much of the curve is visible. I'm going to go ahead and scroll back so we can see more detail in the keyframes we're interested in right now. As this motion comes out of the peak and it starts its bounce, I want to ease the motion just a little bit so that it looks like it's gaining speed as its falling. I'm going to preview that animation, and I can tell by this preview that the last few keyframes are moving way more than I want them to do. To adjust the values of multiple keyframes, all you have to do is select all the key frames you want to adjust, and keep in mind that I have all of the text layer selected. I'm selecting each keyframe for each of these layers. Once you have the keyframe selected, just make sure that your play head has aligned to one of the keyframes that you're going to be editing. Then you can come up to the composition window and click and drag the text freely, and you can see that all the keyframes are being edited proportionally to what they were already set to. I'm going to hold down Shift and position this text to where I think I want it. I'm going to preview that animation and it's still a little bit too bouncy for what I'm going for. I'm going to go to the keyframe where we have this second bounce before it comes to a resting point, and I'm going to select all of those keyframes, and then click and drag that text down. When I preview that animation and it's closer to what I want now, but really at every bounce, I want all of the points to come to a resting position. To do this quickly, I'm going to select the last four keyframes, and then come down to the easy ease buttons. We have easy ease, easy ease in and easy ease out. The easy ease button is going to set the incoming and outgoing velocities of the position keyframes to a base value of zero. If I click on that, you see that all the key frames are now snap to a base value of zero pixels per second. If we look at the preview, we now have a smoother bounce. It's very slight details, but it's those little nuances that will give your animations are very custom and unique look. Since I have multiple keyframe selected, another thing I can do is edit multiple influence handles at the same time. If I click and drag on any of the selected handles, you can see that all of the selected keyframes are being affected. I want to ease out each keyframe. Now we can see that in between these two keyframes, we're reaching up higher pixels per second value than the previous two keyframes. That's because there's more time between the first two keyframes then the second two key frames. I'm going to go ahead and select the last three keyframes, hold down Option or Alt on a PC, and tap the right arrow key to move it out one frame. The curve is telling us that with each bounce, the amount of distance covered by the text decreases and that's exactly what I want. Let's preview this animation, and we're much closer to what I'm going for. I still think that one of the last bounces is a little too extreme. I'm going to scrub through to see if I can find that, and I'm actually going to hide the motion pass by pressing command Shift H or Ctrl Shift H on a PC to hide all of my overlays. I'm going to scrub through this animation to see which motion is sticking out to me. I think it's this keyframe right here. I'm going to go ahead and enable my overlays again, and I'm going to select just this keyframe, and then I'll just tap the down arrow key a few frames to bring this text down on that position, and I'll preview that animation. I think this motion is pretty good. I just want to change the timing a little bit. I'm going to grab the last three keyframes, hold down Option or Alt on a PC and tap the right arrow key to bringing out a frame, and I'm going to select just the last two keyframes, do the same thing, and the last keyframe space that out a couple frames, and we'll preview that animation. I'm pretty happy with that. Now I want to turn on the motion blur for all of these layers and then turn it on for the composition. See what that looks like, and that's just a nice touch that I think adds to this animation. Now, I don't want all of this text come in all at once, I'm going to switch back to the regular timeline view. I'm going to bring this up a little bit, and hide all of the keyframes by pressing U on the keyboard. Then I'm going to select all but the first text layer. Now I want to offset each layer by four frames, and I'll do that by holding Option or Alt on a PC and pressing the page down key for times, and that'll offset all of the text layers four frames, from the first text layer. Then I'm going to Hold command or Ctrl on a PC and click on the next text layer to de-select it, and then I'm going to offset four more frames. Do the same thing until I get through all of my texts layers, and now we have a cascading text animation. Now the second line I want to animate by scale, and I want each scale to scale in on its own anchor point. We're going to use a text animator to do this. I'm going to open up the first text layer and add a scale animator. I'm going to move forward a few frames by pressing the Page Down key on the keyboard and then set a scale keyframe. Then I'm going to back up a few frames and scale the text up to about a 110 percent. Go to the beginning of the text layer and then set the scale to zero. This animation is also going to have a bounce to it. I think I'm actually going to scale this up a little bit larger than a 110 percent, so that we get more of a balance and that's better. Now let's ease the motion. I'm going to go into the Graph Editor, and since I have the scale property selected, it's showing up in the Graph Editor, and I'm going to Zoom in by pressing the plus key on the keyboard. Then I'm going to select my three keyframes, hold down Option or Alt in the PC to bring up the Convert to Vertex tool, and click on a keyframe. Now all the keyframes have a handle. I'm going to select just this keyframe and pull out the handle while holding Shift, so that I can use this motion of bit. Then I'm going to do the same thing for this handle. Now if I preview the animation, I think the motion is pretty good. I just want to adjust the timing. I'm going to click and drag on this keyframe while holding Shift to lock the scale value, just so I can move it over a few frames and that's pretty good. I'm also going to enable the motion blur for this layer, and see what that looks like. I actually think that the animation is happening a little bit too fast. I'm going to grab the second two keyframes and push them forward in time a few frames. That's much nicer. Now I'm actually going to reuse this animator on the second text layer. I'm going to select it and copy it by pressing command C or Ctrl C in a PC, and then selecting the second text layer by pressing command V or Ctrl V in a PC. Then switch back to my timeline view and press U to bring up the keyframes for that layer. We can see that the keyframes are pasted in the same place that my play head is located. I'm going to select these keyframes and move into the beginning of the text layer. Then I'm going to offset this text layer, so that it takes place after the first text layers animation has already completed. If I preview this animation, we see that one word animates after the other. Now one thing I want to change about the second word is where it's scaling from. We're going to open up this text layer, go into the More Options, go to the grouping alignment and change the y value to negative 100. Now we see that the anchor points are at the top of the letters instead of the base of the letters. Preview that animation, and that's exactly what I want. For the next line of text, I want to animate by rotation. I'm going to use this example to show you how to make one of my favorite text animators, and it looks like this. I've never really come up with a good name for it. It's supposed to mimic the motion of a swing set. Let's start from scratch, and then get rid of that. I'm going to type a new text layer. It doesn't matter what I type, because I'm going to be using the text animator, which I can apply to all of the words, once I get the animation where I want it. When I open up this layer and add a rotation animator, then I'm going to enable Per-Character 3D. Then I'm going to change the anchor point to be negative 100 on the y-axis, so that when I animate the x rotation, it rotates on an anchor point above the letters. To start, I'm going to go to the beginning of the text layer, and set the x rotation value to 90 degrees. I'm going to set a keyframe. Then I'm going to move forward a few frames, and then swing the texts forward until it's about where I want it to be before it starts moving backwards. Then we move forward a few more frames, swing it back the other direction, move forward a few more frames and every time that I adjust this angle, I want the value to be less than the last keyframe. Then eventually I'm going to get down to zero. Let's just preview that animation to see what it looks like. We're not where we need to be yet, but I think we have the right number of swings. Now let's start fine tuning. The first thing I'm going do is select all of my keyframes and easy ease them by pressing F9 on the keyboard. Now, each keyframe has a smoother motion. Next, I'm going to open the Graph Editor so I can see the curve of our animation. Now, we think about the way that something would swing in the real world. If you were holding a swing out at a 90 degree angle and let go of it, it would take a little bit to ease into its motion. I'm going to do that same thing to our first keyframe. I'm going to select it and I'm going to drag the handle out a bit just to ease this starting motion. Then I'm going to come to the second keyframe, and again if we think about this motion in the real world, every time the swing would reach its peak, it would ease into that position until falling back into the opposite direction. I want to make sure that the motion of all my keyframes reflects that. I'm going to tweak all of these handles just a little bit. Now I think this animation is moving just a little bit too fast. What I want to do is stretch out that key frames proportionally. To do that, I'm going to switch back to the regular timeline view, and select all of my keyframes. Then I'm going to hold down Option or Alt on a PC and click and drag on the last keyframe. As you can see while I do this, all the keyframes are being spaced out proportionately between the first and the last keyframe. If I drag this keyframe out a bit, the animation will proportionately be the same, but will take place over a longer period of time. This is much closer to what I was looking for. Now, most of the time when you proportionately stretch out the keyframes like that, if you try to line up your play head with one of the keyframes, you'll see that the keyframe is actually taking place between two frames. To fix that, all you need to do is grab a keyframe and drag it slightly, and it will snap to the nearest frame. I'm going to do that for each one of these, and preview the animation, and I'm pretty satisfied with that motion. Now if you were to make this animation, and you follow all the steps that I just showed you, I can almost guarantee that you're not going to end up with the exact same animation as me, because there are just too many little details that I find tuned. Even if you make the same type of swinging text is me, it's going to look different, based on the timing and the easing determined by you. Congratulations, you just made it to the most complicated and most valuable lesson in Kinetic Type. I really want to encourage you to play around with the Graph Editor until you're completely comfortable using it. There are lots of features that I didn't cover. If you come across something you need an explanation for, feel free to ask a question in the Q and A. At this point, you can start making your own text animators. If you want to animate the texts from your quote, go ahead, but don't spend too much time on it before watching the next unit, where we'll cover synchronizing the text of the audio. For your homework, create animators for position, scale, and rotation, using the Graph Editor to smooth out your motion. If you're having trouble coming up with animations, look for inspiration online in the project resources of this unit.
8. Syncing Audio: The next step in kinetic type is synchronizing your animation to an audio track. Here's the first line of text from my quote that I animated earlier. Right now each text layer is offset by four frames, but it's not synchronized to anything. So if I scroll down and enable the audio from the clip that I'm animating to, and preview that animation. My animation isn't lining up with the words at all. So what I'm going to do is grab everything but the first text layer and just scoot it out of the way so I can align these texts layers one at a time. Now in After Effects, if you hold down command or control on a PC while scrubbing through your timeline, you'll hear an audio preview. This is the key to synchronizing your animation to the audio. So I'm going to scrub through the timeline so I can find when he says the first word. So the first word is actually lined up pretty well. I'm going to preview that. That timing actually worked out pretty nicely. So let's go to the second word. Right about there is where I think the next word is going to start. So I'm going to grab my second text layer and line it up to about where you can first read the word. I'm going to preview that. That's pretty good. I'm going to keep doing this until I get to the entire sentence. As I'm doing this, I'm going to constantly scrub through and preview my animation to see how well it's lining up. That's pretty much there. I'm going to offset this last layer, a few frames. That's all there is to it. Now you can really start to animate your project code. Just make sure that you're constantly previewing your animation to see how well the text is lining up with the audio. It's always a good idea to show the animation to someone who hasn't seen it yet, to see how well they can read the text that you've animated while hearing the clip that you're animating too.
9. Making Presets: One thing you can do to increase your efficiency inside of After Effects is creating text animator presets. So here I have the swinging text animation that I made earlier, and I'll save this as an animation preset. This is actually very simple. Now the way that a preset works is by saving all of the properties that you have selected, when you press Save. For this animation, all I have to do is open up the layer, go to the text, select my animator, as well as the more options because that's where we set our anchor point grouping alignment, then come over to the effects and presets palette and click on this little Drop-down menu and choose Save Animation Preset. Now this should automatically open up the after effects presets folder. Everything inside the presets folder appears in the after effects effects and presets palette under the animation presets folder. I'm going to go ahead and make a new folder inside of presets, and name it Skill Share. Then I'll name this preset swinging text and then press Save, and now we have a preset. To use that preset, I'll make another text layer, open up the animation presets, scroll down to find my new folder called Skill Share, and double-click on the Swinging Text Preset, and you can see that that's been applied to my text layer. If I press "U" to bring up all the key frames, the same key frames that we set for the first text layer are now applied to the second. Preview that animation, and it works perfectly. If I open up this text layer, we see that our animator was added and under More Options our grouping alignment was applied. This is all you have to do to make your own presets. Just keep in mind that whatever you have selected inside the text layer will be preserved when you save the Animation Preset. Now we'll type out the whole line of text from the quote, and I place it where I want it on the screen, and then we'll break up each word into its own layer. The way I like to do this is by pressing Command D or Ctrl+D on a PC to duplicate the layer. Then I'm going to select all of the text but the first word and get rid of it. Duplicate that layer, move it over, double-click on it and type in the next word. Line it up, duplicate it, offset, type in the new word, and I'll just keep doing this process until I have the entire line. Now we can get rid of my reference layer. I'll select all of my text layers and go to the beginning, and then double-click on the Swinging Text Filter to apply it to all of the layers. Now if I preview that animation, they all have the same swinging texts preset that we've made. If I offset each layer by a few frames, now we have a cascading animation for every word. I like to make a new set of presets for every show that I worked on. That way even if I'm using the same type of animator, each animation will be unique.
10. Animating a 3D Camera: The last thing you'll need for a Kinetic Text Animation is a 3D camera. A 3D camera will allow you to move from one phase to another inside your composition. Here I've already animated a section of my quote. Wait, wait. I worry what you just heard was, "Give me a lot of bacon and eggs." I'm going to walk you through how I use 3D cameras to animate Kinetic Text. In this composition, I have the same text laid out an animated, but without a 3D camera. Let's go ahead and add a camera by going to Layer New camera, making sure that the type is set to one node camera and hit Okay. Then I'm going to add a null object by going to Layer, New, Null Object, and I'll make that later 3D, and then parent the camera layer to the null layer. Just for my own organization, I like to label both of these layers green so I can pick them out easily in the timeline and I also put the null object below the camera. I'm going to go ahead and rename this layer to be Camera Controller. Now, if I move the null object, the camera also moves. The same is true if I rotate the null object. I'm going to position the camera to frame the word the way that I want it to appear when it animates on. Then I'll back up to before the text is animated on instead of position keyframe on the null object by pressing Option P or Alt P on a PC. Then I'll move forward to just before the second word is animated on and I'll move the camera forward just slightly. Now the camera is pushing in on this word as it animates. As the second word is animating on, I want the camera to push in very quickly to frame this second word much like the first word is right now. So to start, I'll just push the camera in, then reposition it. That's about where I want it. But I want my camera to get there before the entire word is animated on. So I'm going to back this keyframe up a bit and that's about what I want. I want the camera to just sit there for a few frames before moving on in the next section. I'll move forward a few frames, set another position keyframe, and preview that animation. Wait wait. Now, I want to ease this motion by using the graph editor. If I have the position value selected and I bring up the graph editor, I could start editing my curve. First, I want to smooth out this motion right here. I'm going to lock these keyframes together by holding Option or Alt on a PC and clicking on these keyframes. Then I'll grab these influence handles and adjust the curve to get about where I want it. Now, I'm going to preview that animation. Wait, wait. I like the motion of the easing in, but I don't like how it just abruptly stops and sits there. I'll actually go to the last keyframe and continue this motion inwards just a little bit, and ease out this curve a little bit. If I zoom in on this curve, my goal is to make this a smooth curve, and you can see that it has a little jagged edge right here. I'm going to grab this keyframe and bring it down, so we have a nice smooth curve and that represents smooth motion. So now we have a continuous smooth motion from one keyframe to the next. But we can see that there's some problems at the end of the animation where the camera is going places we don't want it to. To fix this problem, we need to edit the motion path of the Camera Controller. To do that, I need to see the motion path from a different angle. To explain this, I'm going to switch our composition view from one view to two views. Now we have two windows showing the same scene, and on this second view, I'm going to change it from active camera to top. Now, we're looking at the same scene and both windows, but the top view is looking through the camera and the second view is looking at the scene from above. If I select my Camera Controller, we see the null object highlighted in both views and if I zoom in on this motion path, we can get a better view of what's going on. So in between these two keyframes, I see that there's an Auto Bezier handle that's been added, which is making the Camera Controllers motion path go past the last keyframe before arriving at it. What I want to do is grab that Bezier handle and pull it in so that it doesn't pass the last keyframe. Now, if we look up in the camera's view, we see that the motion is no longer going past that last keyframe. But we are getting a little bit of a dip in our motion that I want to correct. I'm going to switch from the top view to the left view. Now we see the scene from the left. If I select this keyframe again and zoom in on the motion path, we see that our motion path is curving downwards before getting to this keyframe. I want to straighten this out. If I select my keyframe, again, I see my Bezier handle. I'm just going to pull this down so that it lines up with the motion path. Now, we have a nice smooth camera motion that moves between the keyframes. I'll switch this back to one view so we can see our composition better. I'll preview that animation. Wait, wait. Now, I just want to take this last keyframe and move it slightly over to the left. Wait, wait. I like that. Let's move on. The next line of text comes in at a 90-degree angle. As I move the camera towards that text, I'm also going to rotate it. I'll bring up the rotation property by pressing R on the keyboard, and I'll set a keyframe on the Z rotation. Then I'll press the U to bring up all the keyframes and I'll move forward in time so I can see the next line of text appear. Then I'll adjust the Z rotation to be 90-degrees and we get another keyframe automatically. Our camera rotates as the next line of text animates on, but I also need to push it on this text as a camera rotates. I'll align with this second rotation keyframe and then push the camera in on the second line of text. Now, the camera pushes in and rotates at the same time as that second line of text animates on. Again, I want the motion to continue past this keyframe and continue to push in on the text as it animates. I'm going to go to the end of this text animation and push the camera and even further and preview that animation. I worry what you just heard was. The keyframes values are good, but now we need to eat the motion. If we back up to here, we can see that our motion is bouncing again. That's because I've added another keyframe which added a second Bezier handle. I'm going to switch back to my left view, pan around so I can see this motion path and select this new keyframe, grab this Bezier handle and pull it in. That should be good. I'm going to check it from the top angle as well to make sure that motion path is looking the way I want it to and I'm pretty happy with that. Then I'll switch back to my camera. Now I need to ease the motion. I'll bring up the graph editor again and snap these keyframes together. Then I'll zoom in on this section of the curve. Again, I just want to make this a nice easing curve. Now it looks pretty good. I also want to use the rotation. So I'll select that property, hold down Option or open a PC and click on these keyframes to add handles, and then I'll shift click and drag the handles out and preview that motion. I worry what you just. I'm pretty happy with that, but I want the rotation value to reach the second keyframe a little bit quicker. So I'm going to pull this handle out a little bit more, and I'm going to bring this handle back in. I worry what you just. I'm pretty happy with that motion. Now, we'll switch back to my timeline view and zoom out again. Now, the next line of text appears closer to the camera. I'm going to want to pull the camera back out before it animates in. To see how far I need to pull the camera out, I'm going to go to after the text is animated in, then pull my camera out, and position the text where I want it to end up. Then I'll pull that keyframe back to before any of the text is animated on. Let's preview that motion. I worry what you just heard was. I see another problem in here with the Bezier handle out the motion path. Again, I'm going to switch to my left view, click on the keyframe that's having problems, and zoom out. Then I just want to move to where I can see the motion path and find the keyframe that's giving us trouble. For this particular keyframe, I actually want the motion to ease to a stop before pulling back out. So I don't want any Bezier handle at all. Switch back to my left view, pull up the pen tool by pressing G on the keyboard and click on this keyframe to get rid of the Bezier handles. I'll switch back to my camera, and now that problem is solved. But I still need to ease this keyframe. For this motion, easing the motion will probably be enough. So I'll just hit F9 on the keyboard. Now, if I look at my curve, we see that the motion just gradually comes to a stop. Preview that motion. I worry what you just heard was. That's pretty nice. Now, I want to come back to my timeline view and move all the way to the end of this animation and pull the camera out just slightly. Preview that animation. I worry what you just heard was, "Give me a lot of bacon and eggs. " Again, our motion path needs some work. First, I'll open up the graph editor and lock this keyframes, velocities together, ease out that curve, and we see that the camera just moves up a little bit at the end. That is again from the motion path Bezier handles. So I'll select that keyframe, switch to my left view. Reposition this view so I can see that keyframe and I'll backup in the timeline so that my null is out of the way. This is the Bezier handle that's giving us trouble. So I'll pull that in so that it doesn't go past our last keyframe, and I'll switch to the top view. We see that that same Bezier handle is making our motion curve in a direction I don't want it to. So I'll align this Bezier handled with the last keyframe. Then I'll switch back to my active camera, preview this motion. "Give me a lot of bacon and eggs.". Let's take a look at the whole composition. Wait, wait. I worry what you just heard was, "Give me a lot of bacon and eggs.". We're finished. The biggest things I look for when animating a 3D camera are easing the keyframes, easing the motion path, and getting rid of any Bezier handles that aren't necessary. This will allow you to have nice smooth motion through your entire animation. Depending on what kind of Kinetic Text Project you're working on, animating the 3D camera can be just as important, if not more important than animating the text itself. Understanding how to control the camera and ease the motion is extremely important.
11. Thanks for Taking My Class!: Now you have all the tools you need to make your own kinetic type project. Be sure that you understand everything we went over in each unit, and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the Q&A section. Thanks so much for taking my first skill share course, and let me know what you think.
Jake Bartlett, Motion Designer
