How To Create A Dynamic Text Bubble Effect In After Effects

hi guys jordan with motion array and today we're going to be showing you how to create an iphone text message effect inside inside adobe after effects like it or not phones are a really important part of our lives you see this effect all the time in tv movies and commercials and whatever reason you have for putting it in your production i'm going to be showing you the way that i go about doing this effect personally i'm going to be showing you not only how to create the text bubble itself but also how to turn it into an auto scaling text box so that whenever you type in anything it automatically scales to fit exactly the way it should then i'm going to show you how to animate it so that it actually looks like the real deal and then at the very end if you wanted to do stuff like 3d track it to an object in your scene i'm going to be showing you how to quickly do that at the very end but if you just wanted to skip all of that and use a template to get the quickest possible results here at motion array we have some awesome templates to create this effect and i'll link them in the description below but now the very first thing that we're gonna do to actually create this effect is actually to screen record a conversation that we're having over text with somebody else this does two different things one it gives you a frame of reference that you can look back to and actually make sure that your effect is looking like the real deal but the other thing is that if you're just really in a pinch for time you can use that to just create a nice looking effect in and of itself slide your frame over and then have the conversation going on beside you this actually looks surprisingly good and if you just cut out and splice out some of the dead sections in between you get a really nice flow but now that you have a frame of reference let's dive into after effects and take a look at how to get this effect okay so here we are inside of after effects and i'm just going to create a new composition we're going to make it 3840 by 2160 pixels this is bigger than 1080p it just helps us to make sure that if we have to scale up our items they're not going to be too pixelated and the first thing that we're going to do here is we're actually just going to import a reference image to help us just frame out what our text bubble is actually supposed to look like okay so here we have our reference image so we're going to create a new solid just make sure that you're not highlighting any sort of layers here just click off to deselect and go up here to your rectangle tool and click and hold and then go over here to your rounded rectangle tool this is the one we're going to be using release and then you have your rounded rectangle and now you can click and drag and try to create somewhat of a similar shape it's not going to be perfect that's good enough next thing we're going to do is we're going to click on our new shape layer here and let's just hit enter and we're going to rename it text bubble just keep everything nice and organized we're going to click t to bring up opacity and then drop it down here so we can see both are solid and also the background image at the same time we're gonna zoom in here and we're gonna try to see if we can line these two up nice and perfect i've actually got it to be the correct blue color i'm just gonna make it white so that we can see a good contrast here and you can see that there's a couple things wrong the size is close but it's not quite there and then also the roundness of it isn't quite right a good way to go about this here is to drop down your little uh drop down here and then go to contents go to rectangle and then go to rectangle path from here is a great place to change up the size instead of using just the global scaling feature if you scale up just the whole image as a global thing then you might end up getting harsh pixelation so let's disselect this little constrain proportions icon here and now we can move our width and our height independently of each other scale up the height a little bit scale up the width a little bit and that's looking right about perfect but now we need to adjust the corners there and they're not quite round enough but thankfully because we ended up using the rounded rectangle we have a parameter here called roundness and we can scale it up here until we get exactly the look that we're going for that's pretty good okay cool but we want to get the color perfect and this is another reason why having a reference image is so great because now you can just click on your layer go up to fill grab the eyedropper tool here and now you can hover over the actual image here and you can just copy the exact color if you need reference uh you can see that for me here it's 1989ff if you want to just type that into your shape fill color you can just do that you can end up with the same result so click ok now let's go back here to our text bubble and let's raise up the opacity back to a hundred percent and wouldn't you know it we have our text bubble it's looking pretty good okay so now before we actually make our text bubble auto scale so that it reacts to our text we need to have a piece of sample text there to begin with so let's hit either control or command if you're on a mac and then t and that brings up our type tool and let's click over top here and let's type out something let's uh type in the same stuff that we've got here in this text bubble for example just give me a heads up cool and so what's really important here is that you use the appropriate font if you want it to look exact so what ios uses as of the time of recording this video is called san francisco that's the name of the font here and actually if we click and bring this over here i'll zoom in here and i'll just prove to you that this is pretty much a carbon copy so you can see that this is the font that ios uses before after perfect if you wanted to use a different font and just uh give it your own style go for it uh but i'll leave a link to the san francisco font in case that's really what you want to use okay so now comes the time where we actually make our text bubble auto scale now this normally would be a little bit challenging you got to write in a bunch of scripts and everything but i've just left a copy and paste solution for you in the description so if you go down to section one and copy the script there i've left for you then follow me here to your text bubble go down to contents rectangle one rectangle path one and then under the size here you wanna hit alt or option and hold that and then click on size and this allows you to start actually adding script underneath that parameter and now just paste in the script that you copied from section one in the description below click off and you'll notice there is a little bit of a problem here it indicates there's an error in the expression and you can see here that it's not pointing to the right item that's okay you just need to change one little thing here my text layer that's just a sample placeholder layer name you actually need to make that exactly the same text as the name of this text layer here but the easiest way to to get that perfect is just to click on your text layer hit the enter key and then copy that exact phraseology that you've got there now click into your script here and highlight my text layer make sure to not highlight either the quotation marks on the other side and just paste in the name of your text layer and now you can see that it automatically scales around the parameters of the text it's perfect and if we click on our text and we re-type it out that's not quite what we're wanting but we're getting close there's another parameter that we have to add so if you go to section two underneath the description you'll see the second script that you have to paste in and if you follow me down here to position make sure that it's positioned underneath the contents rectangle rectangle path one not underneath transform it's a very important difference has to be the position underneath contents click and hold alt or option again and click position and paste in this second section two script under this section click off and do the same thing where you copy the exact text name of your text layer then go back in here and change my text layer to be the actual text layer name in your project all we have to do is just click and drag over top and that's it and now when we type it in it auto scales exactly to what our text is doing the only problem is that there's not enough padding around it it's just lined up to exactly the edges of our text which is not exactly what we want but adding some extra padding around that is super easy click on the add feature here underneath your text bubble layer and then add an offset paths feature drop this down a little bit here and now all you have to do is just scale up until you get the exact size that makes you happy we got the width like the height of it correct but then the actual width is just a little bit too squished we want it to be so that the text is ending right about the time where this curvature starts here so all we have to do to do that is just go up to our transform features here go to scale uncheck uniform scale and then just make it a little bit wider then we can take our anchor point here and just move it so that it's a little bit more centered and there you go we have our perfectly working auto scaling iphone text bubble this works great now here's what's also awesome is that if you click enter you've got a new line and you can just keep going highlight your text here give yourself a little bit more spacing between your lines and when you make adjustments in characters or if you have any paragraph changes that you need it all reacts accordingly it's really really nice so now you might be thinking cool we got this nice effect but do i have to do that whole process for every single piece of text no you do not you can actually really save a lot of time here by doing the following highlight both the piece of text as well as the text bubble right-click and pre-compose make sure you move all attributes into the new composition we can say this is line one hit okay cool now let's dive in to this composition highlight both of these and copy go back to composition one either up here or we can also hit the tab button and then you can go back to composition one this way now click here in your composition and paste in the text it'll be kind of like pasted right over top here but it'll be independent so you can change this one without changing the one that you originally created so now you can highlight both of these as well pre-compose again line two and so that's how you can start to build out an entire text conversation really quickly but now before we do any actual animating what we need to do is build out the entire text conversation as we want it to look in just a still image format so that it looks something like we have here in our example text conversation now one problem that you might notice here as you're starting to build out your text conversation is that unless you have your anchor points perfectly aligned if you need to make any small adjustments like say for example you didn't like the look of this particular bubble you wanted it to be a little bit wider it doesn't actually scale properly because our anchor point is way off here for some reason so if that's your problem how do you get your anchor point right back to center it's really simple just highlight your bubble shape layer in question and then go up to this button right here it's called pan behind and you hold ctrl if you're on a pc command if you're on a mac and then click it twice and now your anchor point is directly in the center of your bubble and you can make adjustments and they'll all be perfectly centered so let's keep on building out our text conversation and as you're creating the text for the other person in the conversation the text color that you can use is a little bit of a subjective gray but if you want it the exact value it's 27272b so after a few lines back and forth you should end up with something that looks more or less like this it's important to remember that with ios text messages these lines don't all have to extend to the same length it's actually very common for them to be very mismatched in terms of their in terms of how far they extend and depending on your personal preference you can squeeze these to be even closer if you'd like so now it's time to actually animate our text bubbles to appear as if they were appearing on a screen so if you're to actually look at how these text messages pop up on your phone it's really actually pretty simple what they do is it just rises up a little bit about the size of the text itself so if we took line one for example it goes from about here to about here and then the opacity just goes from zero to 100 that's really all that there is to it but the easiest way to go about this is instead of actually changing the position of each individual layer instead anywhere inside of your composition here right click then click new null object it doesn't matter where the null object is here in your frame all that matters is that you parent each of these lines to the null object got this little squiggly line here this is the parent pick whip just click and drag it to null one or you can click this line here and choose null one if you don't see this option it might be that your toggle switches and modes here at the bottom is preventing it from being visible for some reason or you could see if dragging this in or out displays it but once you can see it here just make sure that each individual line is parented to null one and now if we change the position of null one we change the position of everything let's bring this to a starting point where the first piece of text is in about the middle of the frame here and then let's keyframe the position here to start exactly where it is and let's go forward about eight or nine frames you can use the page up or page down button if you have a full size keyboard one two three four five six seven eight or you can just kind of zoom in and you can measure out one two three four five six seven eight frames and then just raise the vertical position here about the height of the actual text layer itself so this is what it looks like nothing crazy right click here on the second keyframe and then go to keyframe assistant easy ease in take all of your layers all five of them hit t for opacity and bring it down to zero now for this first line here bring up the opacity keyframe get to start at zero here with this first keyframe here for position on the null object and then go forward until one frame before the position ends here and then bring the opacity all the way back up to 100 and this is what you get it's a really really simple effect i'm just going to put it on loop here for a second it's really simple and then as your scene progresses just move forward to new position keyframe the position again go forward the same number of frames and then raise it up about the size of your text layer then go to the next line that you want to reveal go to the first frame of that new animation keyframe the opacity to start at 0 and then bring it up to 100 and this is what we have and then when you go through for the rest of the lines of text you get something that looks like this [Music] now all that there's left to do is to actually prompt there to be a reason for you to be getting text messages in your scenes at all and then to add little cues like sound effects to help really sell the idea that you're actually receiving that message now the cherry on top here is that if you wanted to track your text so that it lines up with your phone as you're moving it around i'll show you how to do that really quickly so take your text message sequence that you just created here and highlight everything with control or command a then right right-click and pre-compose make sure that it says move attributes into the new composition and then call it something like tracking sequence now this is acting as a single unit and this is really important now bring in the piece of footage that you actually want to track it onto for me it's this shot of this woman in the subway here so let's bring it into our composition underneath our text message sequence here let's just position our text so that it looks as if it kind of belongs in the world of the footage here that's good for right now hide this tracking sequence for the moment we're going to add a new null object and then click and highlight the footage layer here go to your tracking section and if you can't find that just go up to window tracker and that'll pop it up and you're going to want to track motion it's going to pop up this little tracking dot here you want to click and drag this over to the thing that you actually want to track the motion of and you want to choose an area of high contrast so if we just kind of scrub through the footage here it's really hard i would love to choose something like say for example this notch here or like the camera lens here but none of those are really high contrast but the nice thing here is that i noticed that her finger isn't really moving any different than the phone it's sort of locked onto it here so we can actually use her finger as a point of reference so click and place it over top of the area that you want to track and then make sure you're on the first frame of the section you want to track and then choose how much tracking you want do you want position rotation scale or combination of all three for me there's no real rotation that i need to worry about so i just need to worry about position now this is a really important piece here you want to go to edit target and choose your null layer then once you're ready click analyze forward and let the work begin cool once it's done all you have to do is hit apply apply x and y and there you go now your null object is following the thing that you told it to track all you have to do at this point is reactivate your tracking sequence here go to the first frame and then parent your text message sequence to the null object and it's kind of tough to see the actual motion happening here but if we turn off our footage layer we can see that there is motion taking place that's locking it directly to the phone [Music] so that's how you get the iphone text bubble effect custom inside of after effects like i mentioned before if you guys did want to save a lot of time we do have a template that can get you this look right out of the box but that about wraps up this video if you guys liked it please consider liking so that youtube knows to spread it to as many people as humanly possible and subscribe and click the bell icon to never miss another video i've got some awesome stuff coming up in the near future two weeks from now you're not going to want to miss out but that's it for me thank you so much for watching and i can't wait to see you in the next video

Channel: Motion Array Tutorials

Views: 30,642

Keywords: How To Create A Text Bubble Effect In After Effects, after effects, adobe after effects, text bubble effect in after effects, iphone text effect, iphone text message effect, text effect after effects, after effects tutorial, after effects text bubble, how to create iphone text bubble, how to create iphone text message, iphone text bubble effect, iphone text msg effect, iphone text msg effect after effects, iphone text msg effect tutorial

Id: Swyers966G0

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021