Create AMAZING Lyric Videos in After Effects with typography!

i'm going to show you how to create a lyric video using typography animation in after effects the technique i'm going to show you will enable you to create a few different animations and then reuse them using the essential graphics feature this will allow you to create a bespoke look while saving you a bunch of time the song i'll be using is a royalty-free track and i'll post a link to it down below you can either follow along using that track or just adapt the lesson to your own lyrics so let's get started [Music] we are going to be recreating four of the animations you saw in the intro the project files are available in the description for free if you're feeling lazy and just want to download the full pack of 20 animations ready made you can get them as well for a small price otherwise you can follow along on this tutorial and we can work through it together [Music] so the first thing we want to do is create a solid for the background so let's press layer new solid and make sure that the hex code is dark gray like 181818 and let's call this bg for background let's lock this layer now let's create a text element by using the type tool and i'm going to type motion but you can type in whatever you want and i'm going to use the align tab to center this element i'm going to use the paragraph tab to choose center text and i'm going to hold ctrl and double click the pan behind tool to center the anchor point at the center of the text layer now i'm going to scale this layer up a little bit you can use any font you want but i am currently using barlow condensed extra bold and i'm going to make sure there's a white fill and zero border you should make sure that the composition duration is set to one second this is going to be quite a quick animation now i want you to select this middle text layer and press ctrl d twice to create two duplicates i want you to move one slightly below and one slightly above let's rename this bottom one text inner bottom and let's rename this one to text upper bottom and let's give these layers a different color by selecting both of them and choosing a layer color just to keep everything neat and tidy now i want these two text layers to have no fill but a thin stroke so let's go to the character tab let's select no fill color and let's type in a stroke value of 0.3 now i want to create two more text layers so click this center text again and duplicate it twice again and let's move one off screen to the bottom and move another one off screen at the top now let's rename this top one to text outer top and let's rename this one here to text alter bottom and let's click both of these and give them a unique color as well now let's start animating so let's select all four text layers that we've just made excluding the middle text here press p to bring up their position keyframes move your playhead to the start of the composition and add a position keyframe now at the start i want these inner text layers to be slightly more out so let's move them down a bit and up a bit here now let's move to say 10 frames in and let's move them down closer to the center text about here so the movement should go something like this for the bottom layer let's grab this position keyframe by highlighting it and pressing ctrl c and then pasting it into the position of this text outer bottom so now we have this movement and now let's do the same with the top layers so i'm going to grab at 10 frames the position of this text upper bottom ctrl c and paste it onto text outer top and now you have this movement now we only want this middle text to appear at 10 frames in so let's move our playhead to 10 frames let's drag the start of this to our playhead so we actually want to keyframe the fill and stroke of this middle text layer so that it can start off with no fill and stroke and then change so let's twirl down this layer click on this animate button and add a stroke width property let's click this animate button again and add a fill color opacity property let's add two keyframes for these values now let's move the playhead back one frame change the fill opacity to zero and the stroke width to not point three move the playhead forward one and you should be able to see that it changes from no fill to fill now i want to speed up the start of this animation slightly so let's grab these keyframes at 10 frames in and drag them to 5 frames and let's drag this middle text layer forward a bit now when the fill and stroke change for the center layer we want these outer elements to disappear so let's highlight all of them and drag their end points to our playhead so then we have something like this and let's move our playhead to 10 frames and press n so we set the end of our composition here and then replay so now that we've finished the animation we can focus on trying to make the animation customizable and reusable so in order to do that we're going to use the essential graphics panel so if you come up to window essential graphics make sure your composition name is selected in this drop down now we're going to twirl down the motion layer and find the source text property and we're going to drag it into the essential graphics panel let's rename this property to lyric now if we create a parent composition by selecting new composition and just type in parent and press enter and then we drag our composition into this parent comp now we twirl it down you should see essential properties if you twirl that down here is the lyric property that we created so if we change this to something else like bananas and press ok nothing changes at the start but then this element changes so we need to make it so this essential property changes every single text element not just this final one so let's go back into our composition and we want to link the source text of all the other text layers to this source text so to do that let's twirl down any one of the other text layers let's choose this one here hold down text where this source text property is we want to grab this pick whip here and drag it to the source text property of the main motion text this expression that it's added means that this layer's source text will always be equal to this layers and now we want to do the same for all the other layers the quick way to do that is to select the source text property press edit copy expression only highlight the other text layers edit and paste now if we go back out to the parent layer all of the text layers have changed to bananas for the next example add in another gray solid change your composition duration to one second let's add in another text element we want this to be between three and five words would work i'm going to choose by your side if i can spell there we go we're going to center it double click pan behind while holding control to set the anchor point to the center we're going to scale it up and we want to start off with no fill but some border so if we go to the character panel you can see here i've got 0.3 pixel border and no fill now we want the fill to come in word by word so let's twirl down this text layer and click this animate button and add in a fill color opacity property so now we've got a block fill here you can see here it's added an animator 1 property and a range selector and then the fill opacity so we're going to twirl down this range selector here and we can use this to control the fill on the text so for example if we drag this end property back you can see it's removing the fill we want this to happen word by word rather than character by character so if we twirl down the advanced property and we change this based on characters to based on words now if we dwell this end property as is doing each word one by one i don't want this fade to be happening so i'm going to change the smoothness to zero and now it just goes instantly word word by word let's bring the end property down to zero we're going to animate the start property from 0 to 100 so if we add a keyframe on the start property from 0 and we go to 1 second and we change this to 100 and we play the animation you can see it fills in each word one by one and you can imagine in the song each word would fill in at the time in which the person's saying it now to make this customizable and reusable we're going to open the essential graphics panel by going to window essential graphics and we're going to select from the drop down our composition we're going to grab the source text property from the layer we created and drag it into the essential graphics panel and let's change the name of the property to lyric and now you can see here if we change this to anything else like uh motion is fun it's going to update and the animation still works we could have a problem if we create a sentence that's too long like motion is fun for everyone you can see part of it's now going off screen so to fix this we can also add the scale property of this element to the essential graphics panel so if we go down to our layer here and we press s to bring up the scale and we drag the scale property into the central graphics panel and let's leave it named as scale and now you can also change the scale of the layer but now if we play you can see it still works fine if we wanted to have more words we scale it down if we wanted to have less words like motion fun we can then scale it up [Music] for the next animation we've added a dark gray solid in again we're now going to add in another text layer let's just type palms motion or whatever you want to type let's center it and center the anchor point let's go to the character panel and make sure that we have a white fill with no stroke let's scale it up slightly now we're going to twirl down the text layer we're going to click this animate property and we're going to add a tracking property and the tracking is just the spacing between the letters like this so let's add a keyframe for zero tracking and drag it to frame eight now let's set a keyframe for 100 tracking at frame zero so then the tracking decreases like this now we're going to animate the scale so let's add a scale keyframe at frame 0 and scale it up quite a lot now let's move to frame 8 and copy and paste that scale keyframe at frame 8 and then at frame 12 shrink it down to about there so let's add some easing to these keyframes i'm going to highlight the tracking amount keyframes and press f9 to add some easing and we're going to go into the graph editor here and change the easing to an extreme kind of easing like this and we're going to add some easing to these scale keyframes as well so let's highlight all of those and press f9 and go into the graph editor and let's tweak these handles as well maybe slightly less extreme [Music] there we go now as a final touch we're going to twirl down the text layer again we're going to press the animate button again and we're going to choose opacity then it's added in animated2 property here with a range selector and an opacity property so let's twirl down the range selector and let's open advanced and let's select randomize order now let's keyframe this end property let's set a keyframe at the start of the composition for 100 and at one second in let's set a keyframe for zero percent and then we have something like this so this is fading in characters in a random order i actually don't like this specific random order so down here i'm going to alter the random seed to a different number now we should get a different sequence i also want to turn off the smoothness and i'm going to speed this up by moving the final keyframe back to 16 key frames i still don't like this order so i'm going to change the seed again actually some smoothness wouldn't hurt you can you can decide for yourself whether you want the smoothness on or off now to make this animation reusable we're going to do the same process we did for the previous animation we're going to open the essential graphics we're going to select our composition from the drop down we're going to drag our source text into essential graphics and then we're going to rename the name of the property to lyric and now we can type whatever we wanted to hear and the animation still works now before we added this scale property to the essential graphics but because we've added keyframes here that's not really doable so instead we're going to add a null layer new null we're going to parent this text layer to the null we'll call this null scalar and we're going to press s to bring up its scale property and we're going to add that to the essential graphics and now we can change the scale and all of the keyframes scale proportionally if we just wanted pancakes we can scale that up and the animation scales appropriately okay so let's add a dark gray solid here with a hex code of one eight one eight one eight let's add in a text field and let's type motion let's align it to the center hold ctrl and double click the pan behind tool to set the anchor point to the center of the text let's grab the scale of this layer and scale it up a little bit let's twirl down this text layer click the animate button and add a scale property and it's added an animator 1 layer here with a range selector and here's our scale property in here so let's add another property to this animator one click this add button here select property and position so now we have two properties here position and scale being controlled by this range selector so this range selector allows you to select certain characters within your text and then apply this position and scale to just those characters for example if we want to grab the first character let's grab this end property and bring it back so that it's maybe 10 so now you can see here these red lines are indicating that just this m is being selected now let's uncheck this constrained proportions for the scale so we can just change the horizontal scaling and let's just ramp it up massively to like 800 and let's move the position of it back left so you can see it's just moving the m and now let's do the same for the final character so let's duplicate this animator one by clicking it and pressing ctrl d and now you can see we've got an animated two let's twirl it down twirl down the range selector and now let's select the final character instead of the first one so let's start at 90 and end at 100 and let's uh tweak the position that looks about right let's open the advanced for this animator 2 and we're going to keyframe this amount property you can see if you drag the amount property back and forward it controls the position and scale both that we've just animated so let's add a keyframe for the amount property at 100 and now let's go to one second in our timeline and let's add a keyframe for zero percent and let's do the same for animator one now we have this animation so to view these keyframes in a more tidy way i'm just going to click on this layer press u which brings up only the keyframed properties so we have our two amount properties here so let's add some easing to our keyframes highlight them press f9 so you could leave it there but i'm going to also animate this scale so i'm going to add a keyframe at the start and then add one second in i'm going to scale it up and we're going to also add some easing to these keyframes by pressing f9 and now let's add some custom easing by highlighting all of these keyframes and going to the graph editor let's box select these end keyframes and drag the handle to the left so it's going to start off quickly and then ramp down slowly and we have this kind of animation and there's so many variations you can do with this kind of animation you come back down to the advanced properties you could change the units property to index which allows you to select specific characters like the fifth character the first character the eighth character rather than in percentage you can add some smoothness you can add some more easing here you could animate any property for the characters not just position and scale so now we're going to make this reusable we're going to open up the essential graphics panel we're going to choose our composition from the drop down and we're going to add our source text in there and let's try changing it to something else like pancakes and let's add the scale again because we keyframed the scale we'll have to add a null in and we'll have to parent our text layer to the null grab the null open its scale property and drag the scale property into the essential graphics panel now let's scale it down for pancakes and that still works okay so i'm going to drag our audio track into the composition again you can download this audio track from the link in the description or you can use your own track and now i'm going to start crafting the lyric video using these four animations that we've made and customizing them so the first line is so i'm going to drag in the second animation we made and i'm going to twirl down the layer twirl down essential properties right click this lyric property that we made edit value and let's type in life is harder and then it looks like this speed it up slightly i'm going to right click time time stretch maybe 60 that's the stretch factor i wanted to just hold at the end so i'm going to right click the composition time freeze on last frame [Music] drag the end of the composition to about here now the next line is than i like to think so we're going to use maybe this first animation that we made we're going to twirl down the essential properties again and change the lyric to than i like we want it to hold a bit longer so i'm going to freeze the last frame again and set the end point to here and the next line is to think so use the fourth animation that we worked on and i'll change the essential properties to to think and again i want to hold on the last frame for a little bit so i'm going to freeze on last frame and then the next one is but it's easy so now use the third animation we made and the line is but it's easy so i'll just do the rest of the animation like we're doing here and i'll speed it up for you for the first seven seconds of the lyric than i video to think but it's easy when you're by my side we can also add some extra animation to these compositions to bring it to life a bit more so for example instead of this first layer disappearing when the next layer comes in we could instead scale it down so let's add some keyframes for the scale property i'm going to disable constrain proportions i'm going to add a scale keyframe and as this second lyric is coming in i'm going to make this zero on the y scale and then maybe add some smoothing something like that maybe speed it up a little bit [Music] and then with this guy maybe i can animate the rotation press y or select the pan behind tool i'm going to set the anchor point to the bottom left we're going to make it rotate out like this and add some smoothing f9 [Music] here i've actually used two copies of one of the animations we made one on top of the other easy when you're by my side so even when you only have a few animations if you use them creatively you can still get that very bespoke feel the viewer might not even notice that a lot of the animations are repeating obviously we've only done four animations the more animations you do the much more bespoke it's going to look but let's just watch it through once more [Music] and then you can always spice it up and make it look even nicer by adding some texture to the background and i've added some subtle dust on top as well just to give it that professional look i hope you've learned something from this video about typography animation and the essential graphics feature let me know down below i'd love to see what you guys can create using these techniques again if you want the full pack of 20 animations check out the link in the description please like the video guys it helps me out so much and as always see you on the flippity flop

Channel: Holmes Motion

Views: 201,439

Keywords: essential, graphics, motion, after effects, adobe, animation, premiere, reuse, template, typography, text, type, character, words, lyric, video, how to, typeography, typography animation, typography after effects

Id: P502HuM4WF0

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/daantesao]

Just subscribed, nice video