Creating text within after effects
- Can create text as you would on illustrator - Character palette
- Double clicking on the text layer selects all of the text
- The first difference of a text layer is the positioning of the anchor point, as it is in the left corner not the middle as it may be expected
- Text layer properties specific to text, as well as usual transform properties
- If you press y you can change the anchor point
- Source text option allows us to change the content and the formatting of the text over time
- A key frame added with this is square - this means this a hold keyframe each time you change the content not a gradual change
1. Text appearing
- Think of a sentence
- Delete text so that only the first letter shows of your sentence, make a key frame
- Move further along time line and type more of the text in, etc, keep making key frames till you have written the whole sentence
e.g.
- Can also change the formatting, e.g. add a new key frame to make the whole text a different colour, font, size etc
2.
- Animate options available
- Anything that we alter with position alters the other properties
- Click animate -> chose position = we now have an additional few options
- We are adding an animator which adds range selector and position properties
- To see how this works we will change one of our position values
- Expand options of range selector, change the start to 50%
- Make the end point a key frame
- Range selector helps you to select how much of your word will be changed by the properties
3.
- Creating a mexican wave style movement
- Alter the start and the end
- Then create a start and end key frame for the offset and alter these to create this movement
- Need to play around with setting to understand this!
- If you change to index values over percentage ones (on advanced settings) it makes it easier to edit characters individually, as you can change it by the number of characters and not a percentage, so more specific
- Changed 'based on' settings such as:
- Experiment with how this effects the sequence
- Changing the smoothness changes the interpolation
4.
- This time we are choosing scale as our property
- We can add new key points to edit the scale, and each character will move around its own individual anchor point
- More options -> anchor point grouping -> can change to word
5.
- Making a single letter bigger every time, still using scale as our property
- Add -> tracking -> adds new tracking property
- Can add effect so that as the letter increases in size it changes colour
- Can lower the smooth in the advanced options so there is no change in shade when changing colour, just straight to the other colour
- Lots of possibilities:
- Play around with the properties:
6.
- Using the pen tool to create an open ended path, while the text is selected
- Change the path options from none to Mask 1
- The text will now take the shape of the path
- Alter path -> first margin -> then drag text along -> add a keyframe (this is how you animate the text)
- Play around!
- If you're preparing audio, choose aiff or wav files, can convert
