How to Stretch and Smear Text in After Effects

hello I'm Noelle Hoenig Keene after-effects observer and frequent wear of ties now I hope you're ready to expand your minds because today I'm gonna show you how to stretch the heck out of some time [Music] so no matter what level you're at with your motion design skills the techniques that I'll be going over today shouldn't be too difficult to grasp just make sure to download the project files that I'm using in this video so that you can work along with me or practice them on your own after watching details are in the description below now grab a coffee because I'm definitely gonna go to some great lengths to demonstrate this in the last bunch of years motion designers have begun to bend and stretch and distort type like crazy it's kind of a trend now and if you don't know what the hell vodka I'm talking about I would look no further than des Studios who in my mind kind of helped pioneer this a really great example of the kind of stretchy type that I'm gonna be talking about today can be found in this piece by worship studio called beyond the arc so check this out yeah there you can see it and there and there and there more specifically here's a really fun shot that I animated for Verizon recently in which I had the word energy turn into the word efficiency so today I'm gonna go over two examples of stretchy type one that's more simple where a word stretches into a stop easing onto screen and another one that's like the example I just showed where one word stretches and transforms into another word before we begin I just want to note that in order to do this kind of stretchy animation we're gonna need to turn our live type layers and after-effects into shape layers and that means that our type will no longer be live so just like in real life you should choose your word carefully before you begin okay so if you've never converted type to shapes and After Effects before let me just roll through this really quick so if you right click on your type layer and go to create you can grab create shapes from text okay that turns off your type layer and creates a shape layer with the same name basically and then if you open this up you see that there's a pretty can vini n't folder structure or tab structure in here each letter has its own tab and within those tabs each one has kind of the things you'd expect from a shape layer like a stroke and a fill this is kind of acts as a group and then you've got your own transform this is really great okay but what we're gonna work on today is this okay each group for each letter has a path okay and we're gonna be animating the heck out of those paths so first things first we need to create path keyframes for the completed state of the type okay because once you start changing those paths if you don't have keyframes that are like the perfect s and the perfect e here whatever you're never getting those back okay so I'm going to roll to like one second or whatever and then I want to make path keyframes for all these letters now there's a lot of digging through subfolders here to get this so what I usually do is I press uu okay and then I just tick off all the path stop watches till I have keyframes there and then I'm just gonna press you again just to show all the properties that have keyframes okay so great just make sure to do that first all right so now that I have keyframes for the completed state I just want to make sure that I'm back here at the beginning okay and I'm gonna copy and paste these keyframes all right and with all of these keyframes selected here that means that all of the points on the paths are selected so I can just take this and I can kind of move this off-screen and kind of create what's sort of like a position animation but which is only happening along the path okay the only thing that's animating are the paths of these letters and not actually the position all right so what I want to do is put some ease on these path keyframes all right I'm gonna press f9 I'm gonna take it into the speed graph unfortunately you have to work on the speed graph with paths because they don't really have values all right and what I want is for this word to very much ease into place okay so I'm not going to crack this percent maybe something like around 90 there and then here I'm gonna push this back so it starts faster not a hundred percent but something like ten percent should be good okay and I think you all know what this would look like all right something like that right and that's pretty obvious but just what I want you to think about in terms of stretching is that the faster the word is going okay so higher up in the speed graph the more it should be stretching all right so it's like as the word whips quickly down from here to here it should move it should stretch the most as it's whipping and moving the quickest okay and kind of at the same time the letters that are closer to you know the resting point like this T here this should stretch a little bit less at the start then the first T which is kind of farther away from the end so I feel like this letter is sort of moving a little bit slower and this letter is moving a little bit faster so I would stretch this one the least then this one and then this one and this one the most you know what I mean so that's just something to think about all right so I'm gonna jump out of here okay and now let's just look at this with the T all right so I'm gonna get in closer here and we kind of have to work off screen here but it's fine because we can see the paths really well I mean we could always choose like yellow here or something so it'd be more clear alright so basically I want to work on this T first and the way that you would select any of these points for example you could just select one and then it would be selected and you could move it etc all right so what I want to do here is kind of grab all of the points for the paths for all the letters except for this side of the T and kind of pull this back this way all right because the words moving left to right so I want to be aware of sort of keeping the leading edge where it is in terms of the animation and only stretching backwards all right so I'm gonna do that and here actually let's preview just that right so you can see that the T is kind of gently stretching into place here which we're basically already getting the effect that we want it's not very difficult talk about a special circumstance with the s okay because the T and the E and the other t here these are all gonna stretch very easily because it's all right angles and straight lines right but when you're stretching curved letters like s's or O's or G's or J's or Q's or whatever it's a little bit trickier okay because if I were to just say take this and stretch this out this way it would look pretty weird and ugly and you'd kind of lose the beautiful curves and it just looks messy all right so there is a fix for this so I'm gonna go over real quick and this would work for any curved letter like an O or a G or C - okay just basically you get in real close to sort of the peak of the curves and I'm gonna choose my pen tool I'd press G that's the shortcut and I get as close as I can to the middle point here and when it makes that little plus sign on the cursor I know I can drop another point along this curve that's really close to that one okay and I would do the same thing on this inner path here okay and now this here is just kind of at a diagonal and I'm just not gonna worry about that it's mostly these curves that I need to kind of concentrate on so I'm just gonna get here click there and then go down here and click there okay so now I can kind of pull out just a little bit and kind of try to select just those and all of these points over there and looks like I missed so let me just go through a little bit closer and grab those and all right that's selected and I'll deselect that and great so I've got those selected and just make sure that I'm just like these two okay cool so now when I pull this I can stretch the s like that and it's just neater it's just an overall neater shape I mean I don't think I love it but it's kind of it's kind of cool it's sort of interesting okay so fine I think that's fine so now like I said we want the S to stretch a little bit longer than the T so I'm gonna do that okay now I'm just gonna grab these and pull this over and get the e to be even longer than the s now I think it's also nice to pull this over so we get sort of a wide thick area here in contrast to these thinner kind of horizontal lines so I'm going to do that and then finally pull back a little grab the tea I'm just gonna make this the longest of the letters right cool so let's check out what that looks like yeah there you go I mean you know that's pretty good so depending on what you want or your client wants this could be done but if you want to do a little bit more work on it we could definitely make this a lot more dynamic and stretchy okay and the key to doing that is to add some overlap into this animation here on these key frames okay so let's just start by like essentially putting some you know two frames let's just save overlap for all these key frames okay so let's move these back like two frames and these back two frames and this back two frames okay I'm just hitting option and right arrow to do that okay right you see like we've basically just created more space now between the letters and it's our job now to just fill that in more this is looking a little bit slow to me at this point so let's just do that cool yeah that's a little bit better maybe we can even make it faster if it's not moving too quickly there's no real reason for it to be stretching so cool you can still see that there's plenty of space between here and we're gonna now fill that in okay and let's start with this sort of final tee here which is what's moving up first okay so what we want to just make sure to do is just have the leading edge of this like I said before keep going the way that it is and kind of stretch this backwards so that's how I'm gonna think about this and I'm gonna move till about here and I'm just gonna basically kind of start hand adjusting this and I'm gonna make a lot of key frames and it's in some sense like I'm you know animating this frame by frame at this point but I think it's kind of cool and it won't take too long right so I'm gonna pull this back and then go here and basically I'm just gonna try to keep this kind of spacing roughly between the s and the T as I go for every frame okay and so it's responding to the s so I know that I can just use my arrow keys now little more convenient and just moving those path points over at a certain point this will probably be good enough let's check that out now yeah so you can see we've added in a little bit more stretch at the beginning for that cool and now it should be okay on the end we could try to see if we can kind of like what would happen if we pull this here like that just don't want to add too much of a I can't take that I just don't add a little sudden jarring animation right there at the end and I'll go ahead and do the same thing to the rest of the layers on fast-forward so I don't bother you with the inevitable nitpicking cool let's check that out right so I think you can see how adding in more overlap here is definitely gonna add a lot more stretch into this now so let's just finish this up let's go to the first frame of the e maybe back one okay where's that yep and drag this back ooh and now I just do the same thing I was doing before well it looks like we'll have to adjust the S a little bit I'm really doing this quickly and just by I just to kind of get through this if it were you I would probably do this a little bit more careful nasai this looks really cool so let's just finish this off you could even potentially delay that final T keyframe coming in if you wanted to give it a little bit more something and then like interpolate that even more hard at the end there if you wanted and then just basically do the same things before figure out the first place the first frame make this longer just kind of randomly and I think what we want actually is looks like the ease now off this does require a little bit of fiddling I told you just because I put so much more space at the end of the tea I didn't really think about it how that was gonna affect my II but I definitely had to stretch that back out so yeah this is what it looks like after I put in a little bit of manual keyframing work and I'm feeling really good about it okay it's time to take this to the next level I want to show you how you can make a super smeary stretchy transition from one word to the next - like I did with the energy - efficiency shot that I showed you in this case because I love you so much I want to have happy transition to healthy which is also nice because like the energy and efficiency they both start with the letter H and end with y so I think we can have some fun with that so I have the words happy and healthy here and I've already converted them to shapes and gone through the tedious process of putting keyframes on all of the paths okay so you didn't have to watch me do that so now basically what I want to do is pretty precisely set guides to help me with this animation just a little bit at least for the edges okay so I'm going to get in close and I have um snap to guides enabled okay so for happy I'm just gonna get over here and make sure for happy I'm gonna select all of my points but before I move on I want to set up down guides because it's very easy when animating path to accidentally bump the letters up or down just a pixel or two so I definitely want to set guides here so now with all of these points selected I'm just gonna slip that back so that's at the edge there okay now I'm gonna select all the keyframes for healthy and I'm gonna drag this back while holding down the shift and move that there and yep that has for some reason shifted up like I thought so pull that down definitely want to work with those top bottom guides here okay so right now I've set this to the two h's line up right and actually I want these to be my first keyframes so let me pull these to the start and now I just want to do the same thing but on the other way I want to make a guide let's see here basically a right okay roughly and now drag these back this way and snap that there and I bet you this shifted up yep move that bag out okay and now do the same thing for my healthy over and its place cool now the Y's are lined up alright great so unsurprisingly this just looks like that now not a big deal and I gotta take this and press f9 and go into the speed graph and basically now in this case right I want something that starts real slow gets very fast and then slows down again pretty drastically at the end so basically I just want this like I don't know like 90% or so on both ends right I want to create a really nice big peak here in the middle all right so I think also obviously you all know this would look like but here here's the real thing is if I find the exact point at which this is moving the fastest like right here okay I'm gonna back up one frame and I got to cut happy there I'm gonna option bracket and do one more frame and I'm gonna trim healthy to start here okay so already this is gonna be a fairly seamless transition between these two right I mean it's very hard to see the transition actually happened because it's occurring when it's moving very very fast all right so that's like kind of the the basis for this animation right from the start now that we've got some of the basic timings of the animation down it's time to take kind of a boring technical step but one that's really important basically I want to break down these shape layers so that each letter is its own layer it's a little bit easier for me to deal with than having a ton of animation happening in subfolders all in one layer and it'll also allow us to kind of adjust the cut point later on and add overlaps in a way that's just a little bit better okay so there's two ways of doing this one is incredibly useful and easy and one is really tedious so I'm gonna suggest we use the easy one but first let me just show you that you could sort of basically like duplicate this like a whole bunch of times and then get in and delete the you know a ppy folder from one and that's your H and then on the next one delete the H and then the P py and just have VA etc etc I've done that a million times but there's actually like a really great tool for that made by my friend Zack loved it and so I'm just gonna plug that okay so it's called explode shape layers if you haven't heard of it you should definitely get it because it allows you to just basically take both of these and with the click of one button now you have outlines I mean paths rather for all of your letters on individual layers okay so I'm gonna delete the original ones and look at how nice that is Thank You Zack okay so we got our basic keyframe timings in place and it's looking pretty good so what we got to do now is play with the spacing to make this better alright so for example let's look at the H here now remember these are passed so if I go to the end of this layer here and if I take this I want to move this back I need to select the path right I'm gonna take this and just push this back not all the way to the start but just so there's a little bit of a gap between there and there and just watch that alone right it's coming up this interesting like really nice delay at the start and then this really hard snap through the middle which is a little bit exaggerated by the fact that you know there's such a big gap between the H when it crosses over but nonetheless I think this is already starting to look really cool so let's go ahead and try that also for the Y okay so at the end here we want the Y to be further down toward this side okay it'll exaggerate this whole animation a little bit and just make sure to stay in these guides this gets really finicky sometimes okay good so let's just move this over to like there just check that out right you can see that like by stretching out that word there at the start what we've done it just really kind of adds to the animation makes it just a little bit nicer so let's now go ahead and do all the spacings for all these letters at the cut point all right and what we have to remember is that like I said before this word is it's accelerating out from here right and the next word is going to be kind of decelerating in from the center okay so what we basically want is a small gap here at the start and then a little bit of a bigger gap between H and a and then an even bigger gap between the a and the P and so on so the biggest gap is between the final P and the final why it's like the the word is spacing out and stretching out okay so what I would do whoops is take my a and I remember there's two paths there you gotta watch out for this okay and I'm gonna drag this back I don't know exactly how far yet but here's the gap that I put for that so this should be at least twice that so that's probably okay we're gonna probably have to adjust this a little bit take my P and I'll shove that back so that's bigger space there and then finally mm put this around the air baby I might have to adjust this P back whoops whoopsies a little bit there something like that okay just so that it's widening out right and you can see that at work here I know this over okay cool that's looking really good so now the next thing is is to remember that basically we have two redundant letters here the H and the y you know because of the way that we set this up in the first place I don't really need these from healthy I just want the h and the Y from happy to take their place okay so first things first is that the the Y will be landing in the correct position from the way we set it up before but the opening H will need to be moved over because that's landed like around here cuz Happy's a bunch couple letters shorter right so what I want to do is just get into this final keyframe here for the H and just kind of shove that over so that it lines up with the other H so I just know that it's going to land in the right place here okay and then I think I can go ahead and just delete the H and the y from there and I can take this Y and just drag this back and now that should still work yeah I mean it's changing the timings a little bit but it's still working pretty well right okay great so that's looking good for the H and the y all right so now I just need to get in here and do the same thing with the healthy letters and kind of space those out between here and here right okay so let me see let me grab hmm so again the space between the Y and the H here will be the shortest and the space between the h and the e will be the longest so I can figure this out one way or the other but I'd probably just gonna eyeball that roughly and then just try to hmm maybe it's better if I work backwards at this point so I'll put this kind of close there and this the worst a little bit more again it's a little bit of a dance I guess that would need to come over and now the A's in the wrong place yeah whoops I don't wanna okay good mm-hmm well fiddling fiddling fiddling this is probably actually one of the trickiest parts is just getting this spacing right but once we get this it's really gonna make the rest a lot easier so bear with me okay cool let's just say that's good and I think maybe this can go over a little bit better great so let's let's look at that animation now just like that yeah and you can see that there's definitely like a little bit of a shift to when it cuts from one to the other now but we'll definitely be able to fill it in with the fun fun stretching part next like I said this part shouldn't be that hard now that we have everything set up we just have to remember that you know for the word happy these letters should be stretching backwards and for the word healthy they should be stretching from left to right okay so there's a little bit of shift there so so just start with the H okay so I'll start here I'm just gonna kind of pull this over like that and for the a I can now all righty so I'm gonna take this point here in this point here and I'll pull that back there okay my PE I will let's see I'm gonna do some of this and some of this alright and the other P remember each one of these is getting longer that's already set up though so I don't worry about it too much just remember to follow the guides that we already have by the other letters okay mm maybe keep that a little bit longer there so it's like they're each getting a little bit longer okay now the Y the Y is a funny case because at first here it's sort of like moving very fast and it's it's it actually strict needs to start decelerating kind of right here because if we move to the next frame we're gonna have the the Y there is gonna already be kind of crammed in they're so now that I think about it probably don't want the Y to be moving as fast as everything else or be as stretched so I take that back take this and I'm gonna let's see take this move this here I'm cheating I'm stretching this out a different way now but let's see oops grab these and just trying to get this know about right cool so that would now look like this alright now let me just work the healthy letters on this side so I'll take the e and I'll put it back it maybe oops yeah a little closer so it's easier to see what I'm doing pull this like that okay let's work the a now um I'm gonna just grab this and this and pull this back right good and the L pretty easy and then we've got the T and I'm just eyeballing this trying to do this super quickly and now the H which yep is a little bit messed up cuz of the Y what I'm gonna do now is just push the Y to frame or two just so I can adjust the H okay and I'll get this right I'm gonna make this go over here okay and let's see now what would that look like just like that even with the Y over there well weird okay so we gotta get this right and it might involve just making the Y a little bit smaller at the transition point and that might require making the PD a little bit longer etc well let's maybe do that that's a little bit closer so this is just very unstretched at this point okay that's fine and so let me go ahead and adjust the piece that maybe we don't want this to be as stretched as much if this is sort of decelerating a little bit so let me go ahead and pull this out right on so actually I think this looks really awesome already and kind of like our test that we just did I think we can still use overlap to make this look a little bit better all right so the one thing that is stopping this from being a little bit more seamless is that all of the letters cut at once and since healthy has seven letters and happy has five the shift is a little bit noticeable in there okay so I think if we stagger this cut point so that some of the letters come on a little earlier and some of them come on a little bit later we can smooth this out okay so the Y is kind of already doing its thing and we did pull this up one so I'm going to leave that alone but let's let's look at this second to last H here okay what if I go to the beginning of there and go like two frames and actually like start this here okay and and what I'm also gonna do is go back one more frame and trim the P there okay so that the the H can kind of like take the place of the P okay so I might have to put this keyframe here and now I'm gonna have to kind of just adjust this to get it in the right place but I can do this and what I actually might be nice is in the next frame I mean in the previous frame the this descender on the p is really wide and here I think it would match better as a cut if I made this like wide as well so it's a little bit more seamless there okay so that's helpful so check that out yeah and now what we have to do is we kind of have to adjust this just like before a little bit frame by frame we could start by just like looking at the interpolation right here and you know seeing if perhaps we can have this slow to a start to smooth some of that out so that might help with that that does help with that actually and we could also potentially like pull this in if we want this to start a little bit faster right and that might not be good just don't want to mess up your other animation at the end here so let's just be careful with that I think what we're gonna have to do is just kind of finesse this in frame by frame at this point so let me do that really quick and we'll take a look at the end result so there you go ooh it looks like oh yeah oh yeah I made a mistake so that's really good actually super instructive I forgot to make a keyframe right here for the a-hole sorry so it's it's going off so what I just need to do is just find the a and just press that there and that'll make a keyframe in the right place cool so yeah so I think this is looking really good I don't want to bore everybody to death by fiddling with this so I'm gonna stop there but I think you can see how this isn't really that labor-intensive you can get it off the ground pretty easily and then with some adjustments make it look really good if you've watched this far I don't think it would be a stretch to assume that you learned a few cool new tricks and that is wide I'm gonna stop now and say so long oh and before I go subscribe for more and click that Bell icon so you'll be notified when we drop more videos and if you really want to step up your game check out After Effects kickstart to learn the most commonly used tools and the best practices thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 42,324

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, Type, Typeface

Id: wMknfqDzp78

Length: 32min 30sec (1950 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020