Create a Text Message Bubble in After Effects

hey what's going on Internet Josh Noel from premium beat.com and in this After Effects tutorial where to create some text messages cell will be composited with our live-action footage thank you for joining us today and if you want to follow along with this tutorial step by step I encourage you to download these project files the link will be on our website at premium beat comm but let's go ahead and just get started script a new composition by click on the filmstrip icon down here and what's called call this one tutorial and I'm using 1920 by 1080 and 23.976 frames per second and click OK so I have some video and if I want I could go ahead and bring this into our composition right now but you don't have to have any video to do this tutorial I'm going to be really focusing on creating text messages but let's just go ahead and hide this for now and we'll turn it on a little bit later so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to here's the top and we're going to click over the rectangle tool and we're going to select the rounded rectangle tool and basically we're just going to draw out a box pretty simple and what we'll do is maybe set this to like a light gray so let's go ahead and zoom in here and let's create the sort of pointer that's going to be coming from our Center so let's grab a pen tool and basically all we're going to do is kind of click a point here and with another point down here but hold down shift and so you see these anchor points and we're going to kind of draw out this nice curve here and what I'm gonna do now is hold down alt on my keyboard and I'm going to click that vertice and bring it in by a little bit and then I'm going to come over here and click another point maybe just right around here and hold down shift again and drag at these vertices and that will kind of sort of have like this sort of check mark if you will and hold down alt again bring this verse again and then we'll just close this up so now we kind of have this object right here and we just come here and we select shape 1 we can also turn off the mask by clicking this toggle mask button right down here and this will be make it a little easier the drags around but we come here and you know kind of position this where we see fit and now we're going to have that sort of the of where the speech is coming from and that looks pretty good so now we can come here and renames layer two left you know text box so now let's go to our textile tool and we'll just click over our box and type out our tax I'm just going to paste my text right in here and now we can kind of you know shape up the box to our text and then one thing to keep in mind especially if you go for more of I guess an iPhone sort of text message of style is that there's only typically the default settings only allow for several words per line so I want to go more than five words per line here and then go ahead and resize your box depending on kind of where things are supposed to be at the best way to resize our box here so going back in the shape layer go into the rectangle one go into the rectangle path and break the link for size and just scrunch it up by a little bit and then we can continue to move this over and find really the I guess the best spot for this and then maybe we can also scrunch up the y-axis as well and just really get that dialed in there for perfection and then just reapply what we want to put our shape and that's pretty good and for future reference here what we can do so we don't have to readjust our shape down here you know so make sure rectangle one is selected and gravity Pan behind tool and this little anchor point right here go ahead and drag this down all the way to the bottom if you hold down shift it will just be aligned in place and then if we're going to say the transform settings for rectangle one and break the link for scale we'll be able to just scale us up from the top without actually having affect our sort of indicator right here so that's pretty interesting and I'll come in handy a little bit later let's go back to the textile tool you know come here and maybe type out who send me this text message maybe is our good friend Caleb Ward and let's see the two forward slashes here and maybe type out the time of day B whatever and that looks pretty decent of course maybe make this you know just font a little bit lighter than your main phone over here and maybe just bring this down by a touch so it's not as big and we'll reposition this and by the way I'm using the font Helvetica this is Helvetica regular and health Etica light for the text I just created okay so now we're pretty much done with our left text box let's come here and select all of our text box elements and duplicate it brings them to the top and we'll just come over here and we'll also that for our you know our point of view text messages and of course we can just select our text box then we rename it to write text box go to the top here and we can change this color to like a light blue or whatever and click OK and let's go back to our textile tool and maybe change the text color to white so that stands out a little bit better and now we can type out our next line of text and paste that right into here and now we can maybe just bring this text down and you know go to write to text box go into the contents go into rectangle one transform and we can just scale this down and boom that we have it's perfectly in place we bring our text and of course you know we you know change the text you know name to your character or whoever supposed to be sitting up text and of course this is optional you can put a lot more detail into this or none at all it all depends on what you're trying to go for and then let's come here and it's bring this back up into position and only thing we need to do now is just change this indicator here so go back to the shape layer for the right text box go into the content go into the shape one go into the transform shape one break the link for scale and set the X number here to negative so now it's going to be completely flipped on this side make sure to shape one's only thing that's selected and just reposition that to mend me right there so now that's looking pretty good now we kind of have it flipped and we're ready to go and continue to go with this so so now what I suggest doing is pre composing this layer so let's come here select our right box text layers and go to layer pre compose and we'll call this one right box one and then grab and then grab our left text box elements pre compose that and call it left box one perfect and now let's come here turn our footage back on I'm gonna start a compositing this together and we can make sure maybe both layers are selected bring down the scale by a little bit depending on you know where you need to position this and we'll put this right maybe right over here for my footage and let's go ahead and make some elements transparent and as you can see our white text appears a little bit small so let's go ahead and change that as well so let's go into maybe left box one let's go into our you know our actual box here at TR you keyboard for opacity and bring this down to maybe like 75% so it'll be a little bit transparent make sure your top text is selected and go to effect perspective drop shadow now this is kind of optional just depends on what type of footage you're working with but what's something distance down to maybe like two and set the opacity down to 75% so now if we go back into our main comp here and as you see everything's being blended together nicely and we've got to reapply the same settings to our next right box it will go right into there bring down the opacity down to 75% and we'll just go and apply that same drop shadow effect so talk about animating this on if you're going for realism technically text messages happen so fast you don't even see how they animate on so let's go ahead and grab our first text box here at the top let's grab the Pan behind tool keep right here and let's just bring this to the actual I guess indicator right here in the middle or something like that and we'll hit s on our keyboard for scale we'll add a keyframe for scale we'll move that keyframe forward in time just by a few frames moved by three or four frames and then set the scale down to 0% so now that box will and it made on right from that anchor point and we'll do the same exact thing for the right text box here maybe we'll go to like you know a second or so and reposition that anchor point with the Pan behind tool which is right here at the top and we'll go ahead and hit s for keyboard for scale redo these key frames for our right text box and set it's down to zero for some maybe we'll make our last keyframes here easy easy key frames by hitting f9 on our keyboard and we'll come here to select our last keyframe here hit f9 right keyboard for easy as and that will kind of slow down the animation towards the end of our keyframe there and make these a little bit more smooth so now say if you want to continue to build on this sort of scene what is the best way to go about this so we don't actually have to recreate the wheel every single time here so what I suggest doing go into your project here so it goes left box one here commissioners selected and goes to edit duplicate and let's double click this box and we can come here and type in our next set of text paste in my text and you know bring this down by a little bit and readjust the actual box like I did before go into the contents the rectangle one go into the transform and we'll scale down the y-value here perfect and then readjust maybe this entire box come up a touch you know so not so bad then we go back into our main tutorial here and let's select the left box one here and let's duplicate it bring it to the top so this part is very important we need to make sure our box that we want to replace is selected and hold down alt on your keyboard go to the project window here and make sure to select left box to hold down alt the entire time while doing this and just drag this right on top of left box one and you can see it just basically swapped it out and all we need you now is gonna be a hit piano keyboard for position and just position is down so now we have our new box in here and what's great about it is that it retains the same you know effect these parameters that we did in this main tutorial compeer just hit you on your keyboards bring up the keyframes and we'll bring our scale keyframes over to like three seconds or so so now we have our three boxes in here and that's looking pretty cool so I added another text box in here and let's say we want continue to build us up and scroll it up let's go up to layer new null object and let's parent all of our text boxes to this new object and let's say once this new text message comes on and I'll just take a look at the scale keyframes here let's say we want this to scroll up right here at this point in time let's go to the new object hit P on keyboard for position add a keyframe for position go forward by a few frames and we can just scale this entire thing up or start position entire thing up maybe make the last keyframe and easiest keyframe by hitting f9 on keyboard and now once that new text chat comes in there this entire thing will continue to scroll up so you can continue this entire animation process Forks to go on for as long as you want and if you were follow along with this tutorial this is what you should have got and something very similar to this and I just challenged you guys to go ahead and create your own variation this and make it work for what you're trying to do so hope you guys enjoyed this video for more tutorials please be sure to check out our blog a premium be calm and if you're the need for royalty-free music we have a huge library full of great music for your projects so if you have the time I invite you to check us out on premium beat calm and once again thank you for watching this video and this has been Joshua Noel from premium beat Calm [Music] you

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 105,634

Keywords: Text, Message, Bubble, After Effects, Project File, Video Tutorial

Id: sH9rSiijGNI

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2017