After Effects Tutorial: Stretched Text

this video is sponsored by Envato elements involve IDEs over 1 million digital assets such as graphic elements stock footage fonts music and much more so if you're interested I have provided a link down below in the description which will take you to their website and of course if you do decide to register I get to earn a commission now in today's tutorial we're gonna be taking a look at how to create stretched text animations as you can see I've created two examples and the difference between the two is that the first one is fluid and has a smooth animation while the second one has this stop motion sort of look to it now I've gone ahead and created two time stamps which you can skip to depending on the type of animation you're interested in but I would recommend that you go through the entire tutorial because even if you've been using After Effects for a long time you might still pick up something new here and there with all that said let's jump right in and get started alright so here we are now in After Effects and we're gonna start off by creating a new composition by going up to composition new composition but you can also see that you can use the shortcut ctrl + n so let's click on that let's leave it at 1080 P frame rate of 30 seems fine and let's make it 10 seconds and hit OK now let's go ahead and grab the text tool up here ctrl + T if you're using shortcuts and let's click and drag and let's just type something like bad in order to Center this you can use the align panel over here or you can use the shortcut ctrl alt home to Center the anchor point first and then ctrl home to Center the text to the center of the composition but again if you have it over here you can Center it horizontally by just clicking this button and then vertically by clicking this button now before we move on to the next step just make sure you have the final design set so if you want to change your font or you want to change your spacing or scale or whatever make sure you do that and you're all set before you move on to the next step which is converting our text to a shape layer let's right click you can also use create masks from text if that's something you want but shapes allow us more different options whereas masks limit us in what we can do let's go ahead and click create shapes from text and as you can see now if we zoom in a new layer has been created which is a shape layer and if we drop down you can see the contents for each letter so you got B you got stroke fill transform for each of these letters and if we click G the points will appear and then we can click on one point and then click back on V to bring up the Select tool now we can select multiple points at a time also say you have these points selected and you want to add to the selection just hold down shift and click and drag so you can see that adds to the selection now before we move on to the animation part let's go down that list and let's just look at some of these options here so we got the stroke which is turned off we got the fill which is on so if you turn that off the letter disappears and then we can turn the stroke back on so you can see what that does and then you can go down on a stroke and control the width this is what I was saying when I was talking about the difference between the mask and the shape layer the shape layer allows us much more control to like tweak the look of the text but let's go ahead and turn the fill back on and then take a look at the transform you can use these to control each letter individually you got the position you can see the anchor point here so if we rotate is gonna rotate around that point and then ctrl Z to undo if we tweak the anchor point to be at the center of the letter for example we can rotate around that point so with those properties out of the way we can now move on to the animation part now before we drop down every list and click on the path what we can do is select the layer and then go up here to the search bar and type in path and this will bring up every path property within the layer itself so we can quickly just click and drag down and this will allow us to set a keyframe for each of these paths hold alt and then scroll wheel to like zoom in the composition and then click and drag these maybe to like frame 20 and this is gonna be our final position and then we can go back to frame 0 and now we can go ahead and animate these letters to come in from the right side so let's click G on the keyboard and zoom in let's start with a D letter what we can do is just select the entire D letter bring it all the way over here and what we can do now is select only these points so what that allows us to do is by clicking and dragging also you can hold down shift to snap it horizontally we can just drag it like this so it stretches there you go on with the next letter now since I'm using the Gotham font you can see that the letter A only has one point here at the top that is not going to allow to actually stretch it because it's only one point so what we can do press G again to pick up the pen tool and just add a point over here and then just move it into position it doesn't really matter if you can't match it perfectly just use the arrow keys to have more control over it and now by holding down shift as we mentioned before we can click on these points and since we have that point as well selected the point we created we can simply just drag to the right side so maybe kind of like that it doesn't really matter if we overlap the letters because we're gonna shift the timing so that the B letter will come in first the a second and the D letter will come in last so let's move on to the B letter now click and drag so you can select all of these points on the right side and then again by holding down shift just click and drag like this and now you can select the entire letter and just bring it over so now let's go over to this frame and click end to bring up the work area end and then just click 0 to Ram preview as you can see we got a pretty weird-looking animation so let's go ahead and fix that by messing around with the timing and the ease of the keyframes before we do anything else let's select all of these keyframes right click keyframe assistant easy ease right-click again keyframe velocity and let's set the incoming and outgoing velocity to 75% and this is gonna allow us to have this more impactful kind of motion but again the letters are overlapping so let's bring these a and D letter keyframes over you can also make these animations faster so there you go by playing around with the timing of the ease of the keyframes messing around making it more random like the B letter comes in faster the a letter comes in maybe slower the D letter keyframes are like starting from the same point as the B letter but they take almost twice as long there you go you got the stretched text animation moving on we're gonna take a look at how we can create the second example that I showed you at the beginning of this video now I've already gone ahead and created a new composition so let's move on create a new text so click and drag a syphon fear control alt home to Center the Anchor Point and then ctrl home to Center the text to the composition itself now again before you move on and create shapes from text just make sure you have the final design set and then right click create shapes from text now let's go down the drop list and go to contents and you can see we have all the same properties as before now for this one we're gonna use stroke instead of filled so what we can do is just type in stroke width and then we can turn on the stroke for each of these and make the stroke width to maybe about 1.5 then you can copy that control C then ctrl V to paste it on each one but also we need to turn off the fill so type in fill and then turn that fill off for each of these letters let's make the quality full so we can see that better and there you go you have an outline text let's move straight over to the path set a keyframe for each of these letters again let's move it over to frame 20 and this time what we're gonna do is we're gonna use hold keyframes and just to demonstrate what hold keyframes do click G to bring up the points click V to select all of these and just bring them over to the right side normally you would have the fear text just come in from the right side but when we select all of these right click toggle hold keyframe what you can see is the position won't change until you hit that certain key thing in between nothing happens and then as soon as you hit that keyframe it just snaps to this position this gives us control over the design of each frame this way you can have more powerful frames across the entire animation also we're gonna get that unique kind of stop motion look since we're gonna be animating into so every two frames we're gonna set a keyframe so let's go ahead and start with the F letter and in the original animation what I did is I animate it from the end towards the beginning so let's go over by two frames and let's just delete these for now and what we can do is focus on one letter at a time so click G to bring up the end tool again and then click V to select these points it's like this top part and just bring this all the way up out of frame and then go back by two frames again now we can select these bottom points just bring them maybe halfway here and then another two points all the way at the top where we can't see them and then another two points we can maybe have these over here move back maybe over here and then move back and just get them off a frame you can see these do animate but we just have to select them toggle hold keyframe and let's just bring these all the way back at the beginning and now we can hit zero to Ram preview I think we have to add another keyframe here in between solid it doesn't just jump from all the way at the top to the bottom so maybe drag this over and then here in between we can have these top parts just come in like this maybe even two more frames get them even closer and then they snap preview that again now let's go ahead and animate the other letters as I said before I animated these in twos which means I set a keyframe every two frames and also made sure to have the keyframes overlap with each other like this so everything is lined up perfectly now one more thing I did in the original example is I added these trails to the text and the way we can do that is by clicking on the layer control D to duplicate or you can go up to edit duplicate and then where they select it go up to the search bar type in Phil and turn on the fill for each of these letters then type in stroke to turn it off and then we can duplicate this and set this bottom one as an alpha inverted so that means whatever is within these letters is not gonna be shown but now we're just gonna go over and shift it by one frame and this way we can see the previous frame showing up and since we're using an alpha inverted matte of the original letters we're not gonna be able to see the whites in the fill inside of the letters if that makes sense so we press u to bring up the keyframes you can see that each of these frames is shifted by one frame and therefore you can see the previous frame of that animation now if you preview this real quick you can see that we have this sort of like flashy look and to be honest it matches pretty well with a word fear itself so there you go two types of stretched text animations which you can use depending on what kind of project you're working on and remember it's important to have a certain style or design that is consistent throughout an entire project because if you do have multiple styles than it really just becomes a mess alright guys thanks for watching and being patient all the way through consider subscribing and hitting that Bell button to be notified whenever a new video comes out if you want to follow my work or ask me any questions personally then you can find me on Instagram if you have any suggestions then leave a comment down below thank you once again for watching and I'll see you next time you

Channel: Broken

Views: 318,730

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Id: 1m744M8QffU

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 02 2020