5 Essential Type Animations in After Effects

in this video i'm going to show you five super practical techniques to make your type look great in any motion graphics project [Music] after years and years of client work these are my go-to methods to elevate type animations quickly and effectively if you've got type in your project you probably want it to be red so don't go over the top with any zany or bouncy effects you really want your type to be more subtle and feel deliberate and you can download this project file for free in the description as well so let's start off with something really basic a straight up really clean really sharp position animation and we're going to add a bit of flavor into it later so i do apologize if i cover some topics that you already know so we've got our text layer right in the middle this is where we want it to finish so we're going to keyframe its position property here and then work backwards from where we want it to enter so at the start of the animation let's just drag it down and we don't need it to move too much that's probably too much let's drag that up a bit there it doesn't need to travel far at all now let's easy ease those with f9 and let's go into our graph editor and in the speed graph i'm just going to drag this curve way over to the left and this one over to the left as well so we have as steep of an easing as possible so now it starts fast and really eases into its final resting position now this can work fine on its own but let's add some opacity animation as well so let's keyframe its opacity at 100 at the end of the animation and then zero at the start and let's create the same easing on those keyframes there this type animation will work in 90 of all of your client projects but there's a couple of things we can do to elevate it further one is to add a subtle color animation so let's go over to our effects and presets find the fill effect and the default red is actually pretty good so we're going to keep that and at the very start of our animation keyframe it's color to be red and then a little bit later maybe not the full length of our animation let's change that to white there i'm gonna press u on our keyboard to bring up our keyframes down here and with the fill effect we get a nice little description of our color down here and let's just easily use that back keyframe with f9 now if we play it back we get a really subtle bit of color as it pops in so it starts off red when it's barely visible and then quickly becomes white this is something i noticed in the stranger things title sequence and i thought ah that's a really good way to just add a bit of something extra to a really simple fade in animation now another thing we can add to this animation is to add a blur effect so let's hide our fill effect for now and add the effect gaussian blur that's keyframe it's blurriness at zero and then come forward and keyframe it at 20. let's easy ease those keyframes as well and now when it enters it's slightly out of focus at the start this is just something really subtle and just adds a bit more polish to your animation if that serves the design style you're working in done now let's go on to text coming out of a line now this effect is beloved by clients there is even a meme about it so here's how to do it so we've got our text animating its position like in our previous comp and now we're going to draw a line i'm just going to grab that pen tool change it stroke to white and change its straight width to maybe two i'm actually going to bring up our title action safe area so i can just see the middle of our comp and i'm going to draw a line by clicking down holding shift and clicking down on the right we can use our align tools to align that to the very center as well so we can get rid of our title save now great now let's open up its properties and add a trim paths let's also name that layer line because we always label our layers and if we open up the tree and pause properties we can see we have the start and the end and they determine how much of our line is visible through what percentage of the path if we just grab our end percentage and scrub through that we can see that it starts drawing on our line from 0 to 100 so let's keyframe the end of 100 and at the start of our animation if we drag that down to zero we can see we've animated our line drawing on now if we want our line to draw out of the middle we can keyframe this start and end at 0 and 100 respectively at the end of our animation and then at the beginning let's keyframe them both at 50. so it starts animating from halfway through the path there we go we've got a line animation let's drag that in front of our text as well there let's add some easy ease with f9 and increase those in the graph editor and now let's reveal our text coming out of this line so let's select our rectangle tool and we just want to make sure that it has a fill and i'm just going to draw loosely over the top of our letter where we want it to be visible at the end and just align the bottom with our line there we are and let's rename that matte and let's just drag that over our type layer and then we want to select a type layer and on its track matte which is this panel down here and if you can't see this you can toggle that on and off by clicking down here in the bottom left and we want to change its track mount from none to alpha matte and now we can see that text is only visible where our matte is drawn and we can see there's a very slight gap where it's revealed as well so if we just grab our matte layer and just nudge it downwards that should fix that great now our text is coming out of our line and i'm going to adjust where it comes out by moving our line to the left because i want to pop out just when there is enough of our line drawn there we are we don't want it popping out too early like here so about here is good wonderful now we can quickly add some more text coming out of the bottom by selecting our text layer and our matte layer and duplicating them with control or command d let's open up the keyframes from our text layer and at its end position let's drag this one underneath and let's change its track mat from alpha matte to alpha inverted map let's change the type this one's going way too far let's nudge that up a bit there done this video is brought to you by curiosity stream a subscription service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles including exclusive originals with new titles added weekly they've got everything from quantum mechanics to crocodile mechanics with tons of great nature documentaries which are awesome for animation inspiration and reference and you know i love dinosaurs so my first priority was seeing if the dinos were good and yes the dinos are good amazing diner world in particular is an awesome series that has beautiful animation and rendering with great up-to-date designs with feather covered dinos that look amazing get unlimited access starting at just 299 a month or 19.99 a year that is ridiculously affordable and probably the best deal out there for any streaming service and just for you the first 30 days are completely free if you sign up at curiositystream.com forward slash ben marriott and use the promo code ben marriott during the sign up process now for this syncing type effect let's start with a text layer with no keyframes or effects and we want to keyframe its scale at 100 so let's keyframe that here and then at the start we're going to increase its scale to 104 we don't need to animate it much subtly is going to help a lot with this one now let's select those keyframes go into the graph editor and easy ease those keyframes which you can do in the graph editor just by clicking down here and i want to make sure we're in the value graph where we can get the sharpest easing and drag this handle down and this handle over to the left so now it's at its maximum speed at the start and again eases into that final position this is a great subtle way to have impact to text just appearing and we can also pair that with the gash and blur effect and now we've got an added bit of dimension where it feels like it's going into focus as it animates on now to tracking now tracking is the distance between all of your characters all of your glyphs in your text and we can change that by going to character and seeing the tracking amount here now ours is set really high at the moment to 600 the default is zero but having really wide tracking is kind of you know looks a bit fancy and cinematic but we can't really keyframe this property and we want to increase it so how we do that is by opening up our text options and selecting animate tracking which opens up a text animator down here and we just need to keyframe the tracking amount and let's drag that keyframe right to the start and then at the end of our animation which is about five seconds later let's increase that tracking amount to 30. now this doesn't overwrite our tracking information over here it's still tracked to a value of 600 here 600 points but this is adding on top so at the start it's zero so it's 600 and then it goes to 630 or maybe it's adding 30 on top of that anyway it stacks on top of your value that you've got here so now we have a pretty subtle animation here and it's just a bit more interesting than scaling up your text i find and hopefully looks very cinematic they use this a lot in film trailers so look out for it at the end when they announce the title of the movie now let's animate some tight with the really elegant stroke now we're starting with our time just with a white fill and to get a stroke on it you can change that over here in the character panel and we've got our fill color here and our stroke color and if we click this arrow we can swap backfill and stroke color so now it has no fill and a white stroke now it's good to keep your stroke pretty small i think one two to maybe four is about enough because when you increase the stroke it's adding to the shape of your letters to your glyphs in a way that they weren't designed for and you can see that with the corners here of the k and the r so once it gets pretty large it gets pretty funky and doesn't look that great so keep it pretty thin compared to the size of your text i think two points works great here and now let's add a little something to the fill of our layers as well so i'm going to duplicate this text layer with control plus d and on our layer underneath it i'm going to swap back our stroke and fill so now it is filled white and let's turn its opacity down maybe 35 and we want to make a nice gradient so i'm going to select our rectangle tool and then just draw over the bottom half of our stroke effect actually let's double click and move that down so it's a bit closer to halfway let's zoom out and maybe expand this there we are now to add a smooth gradient we're going to press f on our keyboard to bring up our mask feather and if we increase this a fair bit to maybe 400. let's increase that a lot that's quite a gradual gradient and there we have that across the fill of our text and we can animate this by animating its mask path so keyframe that here then at the start double click our mask and just drag that down so now if we play it back we have this sort of sort of sunrise gradient coming up from the bottom of our text and that would be really good to add just a subtle animation when you need some text on screen and you want it to look you know nice and elegant but what happens when the client comes back and says hey we need to change the text on this so you think no problem you double click open your text box and you type in the new text new but that only affects one layer the layer underneath with the fill it still says stroke and it looks like an awful mess now we could just go in copy and paste or retype that word on our second layer but we don't know when our clients are going to come back with more feedback i want to change the text again or you might have an effect with lots and lots of layers and that might be more inconvenient than with just two layers so there's a really easy way to link the text here and what we do is we open up our text properties open up text and we want to find text source for both of our layers and we want to alter option click the stopwatch to bring up our expressions window but we're not typing any expressions oh no we're grabbing the pick whip not the pick whip over here for our layer properties but for this source text property we're going to grab the pick whip and drag it over to the source text of the layer on top and as we release that and let me click out both texts are now aligned this source text is linked to the top one with an expression so now when we retype anything up here it changes on both layers and we can duplicate this bottom layer to our heart's content and re-change the type again and now all of those layers are all linked to whatever we type here that comes in handy a lot if you've got more adventurous effects with lots and lots of layers now i've got a follow-up video to this with five more essential text effects to take your motion graphics to the next level coming out very soon so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on that one i hope this was helpful if you'd like to learn animation and motion design techniques i've got a playlist of some of the best tutorials on this channel for you to take a look at i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 80,156

Keywords: after effects tutorial, text animation tutorial, text animation after effects, ben marriott animation, text motion graphics, type animation examples, beginner text animation, easy type animation, we should always label our layers, adobe after effects tutorial, adobe after effects, after effects, easy type animation after effects, ben marriott, after effects easy, after effects text animation, after effects free project files, after effects typorgraphy, typography animation

Id: jS1YMWkm4DQ

Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020