What's up. Joey here at School of Motion and welcome
to Day 26 of 30 Days of After Effects. Today, we have a pretty cool video. We're gonna talk about text animators in After
Effects. Text animators are this feature of After Effects
that was added and it came with all these presets. It's amazingly powerful and really useful
but the problem is, it's kinda confusing and things really aren't labeled in a way that
makes it easy to use. So I'm gonna help you figure out how it all
works and I'm gonna show you some easy techniques to start building your own library of text
animations and give you some insight as to why it's important for you to learn this feature
of After Effects. So let's hop in to After Effects and get started. - [Joey Voiceover] So let's talk about text
animators. Now, most people that I've actually seen use
the text animators in After Effects just sort of use the built-in presets that come with
After Effects because there's really not a ton of great resources out there, I found,
to learn how to use these things and it's also, sometimes it's just easier to just manually
animate type and make it do exactly what you want but when you're doing a project that
has a ton of type in it and it's one of those jobs that I mention from time to time, not
everything is going to go on your reel, not everything is gonna be the most amazing thing
you've ever created and sometimes you just gotta get stuff done and text animators can
let you do fairly sophisticated type animation but in a way where it's super easy to change
it and so that's what we're gonna talk about today. So let's just dive right in. And I'll show you how I made all these little
animations here. So let's make a new comp and we'll call this
one Bounce. Just gonna add a type layer in there. Just type in the word 'bounce' and we'll get
started. So the way text animators work, it's actually,
in a weird way, it's similar to the way MoGraph works inside of Cinema 4D so if you're familiar
with that, then this may make a little bit more sense to you. But if not, don't worry. I'm gonna try and break this down and make
it a little bit easier to understand. So the way you add a text animator is you
have a text layer, right. And you open up the text options right there
and you can see over here there's a little button that says 'animate' with a little arrow
and if you click that arrow, you get all these neat things you can animate. So to make this bouncy animation, let me open
up the original one I made here. Here's the bouncy animation. Alright? So here's how I made this. Let me close all these, too, so I don't confuse
myself. There we go. Alright, so one way you can use these text
animators is to basically create positions and sort of states for your type and then
animate between them to create bouncy animation or have things scale up and scale down or
rotate into position or stuff like that. So what I do sometimes when I use these is
I'll first, I'll create, I click on this button and I want these letters to fly up from the
bottom and sort of overshoot and come back and bounce and land. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna be animating
the position. So when you say 'animate position' here's
what happens. This Animator One gets added. So the first thing I'm gonna do is rename
that so it's something that means a little bit more. So this is actually gonna be the initial position
and the way this works is you've got two parts to this text animator. You've got the actual property that's being
changed, which is the position, and you'll see if I move this it's gonna move every single
letter. And then you've also got the range selector
and this is the key to text animators, okay. When I change this position like this, if
I move it to the bottom, now I've got this range selector and right now the range is
set from zero to 100 meaning the entire string of letters is being effected. But you can animate this, right. If I animate the end, then it's gonna sort
of one at a time have each of these letters be influenced, right. And so that's sort of the simplest version
of using a text animator, you can just set a key frame here, come over here, set another
key frame, and grand preview it. And there's your type animation, right. And the thing is that the default settings
for these are pretty ugly. Every letter goes one at a time, there's no
overlap to them, there's no easing, and it just doesn't really feel good and it's kind
of, it's a lot of steps. To try and make this feel good, this is, I
think, the trouble with text animators and the reason they aren't more widely used is
that they're just not that user-friendly right now. And maybe in a future version of After Effects,
that'll be changed but it's just not that intuitive. So anyway, what I'm going to do, I'm actually
going to, I'm gonna stack a few of these text animators. I'm not just gonna use one and try to get
it to do everything, I'm gonna use multiple text animators. So what I did was I used one text animator,
which is actually not animated at all. All it's doing is it's setting the initial
position of my type down here, okay. So then what I'm gonna do is, I'm just gonna
duplicate this. So you just click on it, Command+D duplicates
it, and now I'm gonna save Position 01. Alright, so now Position 01 is actually going
to be negative 663. And actually, it's gonna be even a little
bit less than that because what I want to happen is I want the type to overshoot and
then come back down. So this is gonna be the first position, this
type, sort of ends up in. And now, if I use this range selector and
I animate from zero to 100, you can see that now, because the type is starting down here
and the purpose of this text animator is to move it back up when I animate the end. From left to right, the letters kind of fly
back in to the screen so it's great. Another thing you can do is you can leave
this at 100% and you can animate the offset. So this is what I'm gonna do, you just gotta
be careful 'cause if you go too far, it'll start to come back around. So let's put some key frames on here. I'm gonna start at negative 100. We'll go forward to one second. And we'll set this to zero. Alright, now let's play this. Alright, so we've got the letters doing what
we want them to do. That's the first move, but what I really don't
like, is that it's one letter at a time. And there's no overlap, which sucks, frankly. And then, there's no easing, either. They just kind of stick, they're flying in
and they just stick and it's just really kinda, it just doesn't feel good. So this is where some of these advanced range
selector settings can come in. So there's two settings you gotta mess with. One is, and there's actually a lot of settings
you can mess with but text animators are actually a pretty deep topic and we're not gonna be
able to get to everything in this video but I just want you to get kind of the basics
out of the way. So if you look at the shape, the shape right
now is defined as a square and what that shape is referring to is it's sort of the shape
of the influence of the range selector as you change this offset amount. And it's square right now, meaning that it
goes from one letter and then to the next letter and then to the next letter. But you can change this shape and there's
a whole bunch of different ones, right. There's ramp up and ramp down and so let's
just kind of go through them a little bit. So ramp up, right. You can see that it's sort of making things
go backwards. So that's not what we want. So let's go down to ramp down. And now as we move through, you can see now
the letters are overlapping a little bit. It's not the B and then the O and then the
U, they're all sort of happening together. There's some overlap, which is great. And because we've changed it to ramp down,
now the animation isn't finishing so we need the offset to actually go all the way to 100. So let's set that to 100. Cool. So that's better. But there's still no easing. It's still really stiff. But at least there's some overlap. So now the next thing we can do is we can
actually add easing. So there's two settings here, there's ease
high and ease low. And it's really weird that they're called
ease high and ease low. Why aren't they called ease in and ease out? But watch what happens if I crank up the ease
high to 100. Boom. Now they ease in. Beautiful. And actually, this is what I want. Basically, ease high is ease in and ease low
is ease out. Meaning the initial position here, there's
no easing happening there. If I crank this up, then there will be. And they'll ease out of this position and
then ease in to this position. But I don't want that. I just want them to, let me set this back
to zero. I want them to shoot out of the initial position
and then I want them to ease in to the final position. So ease high is making them ease in to that. Alright? So no, there ya go. We've got the first part of our move. Fantastic. Next thing I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna just
duplicate this and call this Position Two and you can see, our type is being messed
up now. So what I'm gonna do is first reset this position. Set that to zero. Because this position is a relative position. It's not an absolute position so I want it
to move down relative to it's current position. So I'm just gonna decrease the Y position
a little bit. And then I'm gonna go into the range selector
and I'm gonna take these key frames and I'm just gonna knock them over like two frames
because I want this move to happen slightly after this move, right. And so what that's gonna do is it's gonna
let the letters come down. You can see it's happening very slightly right
now. So let's actually amp this up a little bit
more. So you can see the effect better. And let me scoot these key frames over even
a little bit further. There we go. And now you can wee that the letters come
up and then they kind of come down a little bit so they're overshooting. Pretty cool. And now I want to go into the advanced properties
here and I do, I want them to ease out of their, you know, when they overshoot, I want
them to ease out. And then when they land, I want them to ease
in. So I want both of these eases to be set to
100%. And you can see that now that's created some
problems and what's happening is if you have both the ease high and the ease low set to
100%, then sometimes the easing can sort of get funky. So I'm gonna set both of them to 50. And now we get a nice little settling. Cool. And so the more delay I have between this
set of key frames and this set of key frames, the longer it sort of hangs up there. And if I have them closer together, it's a
much quicker little transition. So you can sort of play with the timing between
it. And that's the basics of how you can stack
type effectors or text effectors to get this. And so then let's say you wanted it to just
overshoot down the other way. Well, you could just duplicate this and then
come to the position and just make this a negative 45 or something. So now it's going back the other way and then
you offset these key frames. And you can see we gotta kinda play with the
timing a little bit. We may have to kick these out a little bit
more. Alright, so now it goes too far and it comes
back down and it shoots up a little bit. What I found is that if you start going too
crazy with these, if you start stacking a whole bunch of them, you can see that the
timing, it can start to create, it can sort of minimize the animation that you're trying
to create. You may have to push these key frames a little
bit further apart to really see everything. There we go. Bounce. And then I can just grab all these key frames
and move them closer together and there's your bounce. And so just by playing with the timing, you
can really get the exact result you want. Cool. Alright, and then the beauty of this, you've
done all this work and it's a little weird but once you get it working the way you want,
then, you can just type in, if you have some weird long last name, it doesn't matter. You can type in absolutely anything and you
can get this cool result and you can type in entire sentences, you know. And this is a longer word, so I want it to
take a little bit longer. Okay, just move the key frames a little bit. So this is the beauty of taking the time to
set up something like this, is now if you have, if you're doing a corporate piece and
you have 100 titles, you don't have to, and this is what you want it to look like you
don't have to split this into layers and do some kind of crazy pre-comp and animate each
one, it's like you just copy and paste this type layer and type something else in. Alright, so let's look at some other stuff
you can do with type layers. So that's the bounce. Let's look at this one. This one's kind of an interesting one. This glitch, right. Glitches are very hot right now. Glitches are so hot. Actually, Red Giant just came out with a new
Glitch plug-in as part of their universe package, which is really awesome and it does the stuff
very easily for ya so check that out if you're in to glitches. So let's talk about how I did this. So let's first make our type layer. Let's call it 'Glitch'. And this I started by just doing, I started
this kind of in the same way. So when you make a type layer, the anchor
point of each letter is at the bottom by default. So if I wanted to scale up some of these letters
but have them scale from the middle, I need to change the anchor point of the letters. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna
animate the anchor point and I'm just gonna rename Animator One to Anchor Point Fix and
I'm just gonna move the anchor point so that it's in the middle and then I can just move
my type layer up like this so it's in the middle and there we go. And so now every text animator I put after
this is gonna use that new anchor point. So again, you can stack these things to get
the result you want. So now the next thing I wanna do is animate
the scale of some of these letters. One thing that's pretty cool about the text
animators is that it works on a per character basis. So if I hit 'Scale' it's gonna scale up each
letter which gives you this interesting result that it's, wouldn't be that easy to do any
other way. But what if I only want some letters big and
I want it to be kind of random. The default range selector is not gonna give
you that control. It's only gonna let you do things kind of
sequentially. So what you can do, though, is you can, you
can add a different type of range selector called, and so if you click 'add', once you've
added something that you can animate, you can click on these individual text animator
groups and there's a little arrow to the right of them you can add more stuff to them. So if I want to add another property, I can
do that. I can also add a different selector. And remember, the selector is the key to the
text animator. You set the property that you want to be changed
but then what you're animating is the selection of letters or you can even have it be a selection
of words. You can change that, too. There's a setting down here that you can base
this on characters or words or lines. There's a lot of settings here. But you're animating the selector and so if
I grab a wiggly selector, this is sort of a random selector and you can see right away
it's sort of randomizing. What's going on here and it's animated by
default. So it kind of creates this funny, silly, rubbery
looking thing which is kind of interesting. And what's interesting is you've got two selectors
on here now, a range selector and a wiggly selector. And they can work together in different ways. So right now the range selector, this is how
you should think about it. The range selector, the start is zero, the
end is 100. That means the entire freaking thing is selected. And there's zero offset. If I move the offset this way, you can actually
see the beginning and the end. It shows you these two lines. It shows you what's selected. So that's what's being selected. Now in the wiggly selector, the mode right
now is set to inner section. What that means is it's only going to affect
things that are already selected. So if I set this range selector to have an
offset of 60 or make this even easier, let's say zero to 50%. So only the first half of the word is selected. The next selector the mode is set to intersect,
this selector will only effect the first 50% of the word. Now, if you set this to add, right. Then it actually, what it's gonna do is it's
gonna add a wiggly selection to this that's already selected and the stuff that's not
selected is just gonna get a normal selection. So that's why you can see these letters look
bigger than these letters. So you can actually use transfer modes, I
guess, with these selectors. So this is cool because what you can do, first
thing I wanna do is I wanna turn the wiggles per second to zero. I don't wan these animated. What I do want is I want to lock the dimensions. So if I say on, now when it scales these things
up it's only gonna scale them up the same on X and Y so you won't get these weird stretched
out letters. Unless you want that. There ya go. So then what you can do is you can animate. You can say how big do you want these things
to get. So I want, I want them to get pretty big. So the way this is working, right, I've set
the scale to 200 and let's just set it to 250. The scale is set for 250. The wiggly selector is sort of creating a
random selection values and the way that text animators work is if a letter is 100% selected,
it will be assigned a scale of 250. If it's 50% selected, it will be assigned
a value less than 250, right, it would be assigned 125. And because the wiggly selector has a max
amount of 100% and a minimum amount of negative 100%, what that means is that you could actually
end up with a letter that has a negative selected value. It's negative 50% selected which means that
it can actually have a negative scale. So if you don't want that, you set the minimum
amount to zero so that way either the letters are their normal size or their bigger than
that. So now I'm gonna set that to negative 100
'cause I think it would be cool if some of these letters became smaller. Alright, so I'm gonna set the range selector
to 100% so every one of these is selected and what I wanna do is I want to have the
letters randomly sort of twitch. So the way I did that is I just changed the
random seed. If you just change this number, it's gonna
give you different results. Now what's interesting is it actually kind
of does it in a way that's kind of correlated, I guess. So as I animate this random seed, the values
change smoothly. So what I wanna do is I'm gonna just pick,
I'm just gonna pick, okay, I think that looks pretty, that's cool right there. So I'm gonna put a key frame there and I'm
gonna set that to be a whole key frame so Command option, click the key frame. Go to the next frame and then just change
this. And change it to something that looks different. Then go to the next key frame. Change it to something that looks totally
different. And then I'm gonna go forward two key frames,
change it to something else, and there ya go. And so then, the next thing I want to key
frame, I want it to basically twitch a few times like this and then I want them to sort
of settle. So now what I can do is I can actually animate
this. I can animate the initial range selector and
I can change the start to go all the way up to 100 and the effect of that is if the start
is 100 and the end is 100, that means nothing is selected and because the wiggly selector
is set to intersect, it's not gonna effect anything. So on this, maybe on this frame here, I'll
put a key frame then I'll go forward like three frames and set that to 100. I'll easy ease those and let's just do a quick
grand preview, right. Wssht, cool. So now you've got this little twitchy glitchy
thing. And let's, let me just nudge this forward
a few frames so it starts on black. Cool. So that's kinda neat but I kinda want a little
bit more movement to this. I want a little bit more of an effect. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna, let me
rename this. So this is the, the wiggly scale. And I wanna do the same thing with the position
of these letters, too. So let me just duplicate wiggly scale for
a minute. Let's say wiggly position. Okay, and let's open up this and what I wanna
do is instead of having the scale be animated, you can actually click on scale and just hit
delete and now that property doesn't get effected anymore and then I can go over to this add
button and say property, position, and I can adjust the Y. So now in addition to the scale moving, we
get the Y. And I've got these things separated out and
that's kind of handy. I mean, what I could do is I could just go
in to wiggly scale like this and add the position property to this so now you would have scale
and position being effected. But I kinda like having them separated out
because now I can really easily, if I want it to have a little bit less of an in sync
animation, I can just move these key frames over a little bit and so now the position
isn't so in sync with the scale. You can play with that. You can have, or you can have the position
twitch even a little bit after the scale is done animating. So it's kinda nice to have everything separate
out. So there ya go. So now you have this cool little glitchy animation. And I'm not really loving where that T is
ending up so what I could do, let's see. So that is happening because of this position
key frame here so I'm just gonna change the random seed on that key frame. There we go. So now we'll get a different result. Cool. I kinda dig that. Right. So that's cool. That shows you how you can use the wiggly,
the wiggly, you know, little selector to get kind of random stuff and now, of course, you
get the same benefits here. You can literally type in whatever you want
and you've got this cool glitchy kind of animation. And you don't have to do anything else and
you can make a hundred of these in a few minutes now. So again, I want to keep reinforcing, these
are very powerful and you don't have to just think of them as oh, their these canned type
animations that ship with After Effects and yes they are cheesy and yes they, a lot of
them look like a bad video toaster preset or something but you can make your own. So I'll show you, let me just kinda show you
another one I did. This one here. This slide one. This is similar to the bounce one I did except,
you know what, we're doing these, you know, you guys understand that my videos can be
long so why don't I just do this. Let me stop talking about it and actually
do it. This slide one, the way I did this one, was
so first thing I did was I set the initial anchor point so I did the same thing. I set the anchor point. Now, before I do that, actually what I want
to do is I wanna enable per character 3D. So right now, this is a 2D type layer. You can actually animate each of the letters
using the text animators as if they were 3D objects. So if you say enable per character 3D, you
get this neat little icon in your 3D checkbox and now any of your position scale rotation
transforms you do, are gonna have X, Y, and Z. So what I wanna do is I'm gonna set my anchor
point. First, I want the anchor point in the middle
again. But then, I want the anchor point actually
back like 100 pixels in Z space. Now, it's not really gonna, and here, I'll
make it really obvious, I'll make it 200 pixels. And this is just gonna be our initial set
up. And so again, this isn't animated, it's just
setting up what we're about to do next. And the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna
animate the rotation. And actually, I need to make sure I don't
have this selected when I do that. So it'll give me a new text animator. So this is gonna be rotation and what's cool
is because I've moved the anchor point, if I rotate these now, you can see they actually
rotate around the anchor point so you can move them, you can get these kind of complex
movements, right. So what I did was I had them start back here
somewhere. So this is gonna be my initial, whoops. Oopsy-daisy. Let me open this back up. So I have my initial setup. And this is gonna be my initial rotation. And this doesn't need to be animated and I'm
just gonna duplicate this and I'm gonna call this 'Rotation 01'. So this'll be my first sort of move. And what I'm gonna do is go back to my wire
rotation and just make this plus 142.5. Whoops, sorry. There we go. 142.5, there we go. And because, remember, these're relative values
and so since we set the initial rotation to negative 142.5, to get it back here, I need
it to go to 142.5 and then I can just use my range selector. And we'll animate the offset again. And first, let's go to the Advance tab and
remember that the default square shape isn't very nice so we're gonna use ramp down and
let's set the ease high, let's just set that to 50 and set the ease low to 50 as a start. And now we animate the offset. So the offset's gonna start at negative 100. Put a key frame there. Go forward to one second and 100 and play
that and there ya go. And now you've got kind of a nice little easing
slide. Now, at the beginning of this, you don't want
to see these letters. And so you can decide how you want them to
appear. An easy thing to do is to just animate their
opacity. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate
this right here and I'm gonna call this 'Opacity'. Let me open this up. And I need to delete this rotation stuff 'cause
this text animator, I'm only gonna be dealing with opacity. And the first thing I'm gonna do is in the
initial setup, I'm gonna add a property of opacity so now in addition to changing the
anchor point, I'm gonna set the opacity to zero. And now in this opacity factor here, what
I'm gonna do, I just called it an effector. That's how much this sort of works like Cinema
4D. I'm gonna add the property of opacity to this
and set the opacity to 100% and now for the range selector. The range selector already has the animation
on there so what's happening is, it's moving through the letters one by one and fading
them on as they rotate up. Pretty nifty, right. So I didn't really have to do much more than
that. If you want, let's say that you don't actually
want the letters to start appearing until they're here. You can just offset these key frames a little
bit. And so now, they look like they're kinda sliding
in but there's kind of this interesting rotation to them. Alright, now I kinda liked it better the way
it was initially. If we look at the one that I created, the
only other thing I did was I also added some Z rotation. So I had them kind of lean in as they were,
as they're kind of animating on. But again, it's the same concept. We're just starting with an initial setup
and just stacking these type animators. And then once you get some animation going,
you can just offset the animated ones by a little bit. Alright, so the last thing I wanna show you
is how I made this one. Just because I wanna just demonstrate, and
this is not really gonna be, this isn't gonna be that useful for you unless you already
know some expressions but I wanna show you just how powerful these things can be. It's pretty crazy, the power built in to these
text animators and I think the more people that play around with them and sort of try
to really crack them open, figure them out, the better all of us are gonna be at understanding
the power of them. You really can do a lot of stuff with them. What I thought was, wouldn't it be cool if
I could sort of have them alternate. You know, some come from the top, some come
from the bottom and have them sort of work like a slot machine or something. So the way, let's just sort of dive in and
start talking about how to do that. So I'm gonna animate the position. Now here's the tricky thing. I need every other letter to go in a different
direction. So I can't just say, there's not really an
obvious way to do it. Using just a range selector, I could do this,
right. And then just make sure that only that first
letter is selected and then add another one and make sure only the second letter's selected. I could do that, that would be a huge pain. But, I was sort of thinking about how to approach
this and I looked at the selectors and I noticed there was an expressions selector. So you click on this and it adds another selector,
expressions selector and if you click on this arrow by amount, there's an expression in
here. Looking at these variables here, I'm thinking
okay, well the selector value, that's probably the amount of selection that's gonna end up
on each letter and the text index, well I'm guessing that's, you know, like this is the
first letter so that has an index of one and this is the second letter so that has an index
of two and text total must be the total amount of numbers. So I figured out that there's these variables
that you can work with. What you wanna do and what you can do, which
is awesome, is you can make a little if-then expression using these variables. So you've got selector value and text index
and text total so here's what we're gonna do. We are going to first write a little if-then,
okay. So we're gonna say if and what we wanna check
here's what we wanna check. We wanna see if, 'cause these text animators,
they're evaluating each letter on its own. So letter by letter, it's gonna evaluate. So we wanna say okay, well if this is an odd,
sorry. If this is an odd-numbered text index, so
if this is the first letter or the third letter or the fifth letter, I want you to move that
letter by whatever this position is. But if it's an even letter, if it's number
two or four or six or eight or whatever, I want you to do basically the opposite of what
this position is set to. So I need to be able to check if each letter
is an odd or an even index. And there's an easy way to do that with a
little programming trick and I'll teach it to you guys and I don't wanna get too deep
into the programming side of this but here's the way it works. So if the text index, and remember, this text
index variable is gonna be whatever letter is being looked at, right. And I'm gonna use a percent sign here and
say two. Now what this is, okay, and let me put this
whole thing in parentheses. So we've got if, open parentheses, and then
another open parentheses, text index, percent sign, two. Now, what the heck is that percent sign. Well, that is actually, it's an operator. It's called an operative but what it does
is it basically takes this number, divides it by two and then gives you the remainder. So if you remember learning long division
in school, the remainder is whatever's left over after you divide something and so if
you have an even-numbered letter, so two, four, six, you divide it by two, you're gonna
have no remainder. So that's gonna equal zero. So if the text index, percent sign, two and
then equals zero. And when you're checking something in an After
Effects expression, you need two equal signs. This is basically saying, is this an even-numbered
letter. So if it is, then I want you to use the selector
value. And the selector value is, remember, the amount
of selection that gets assigned to each letter. So if it's a hundred percent selected, it
will be effected by this. If it's negative 100 percent selected, it's
going to be negatively effected by whatever my position's set to. Okay? So I'm going to copy and paste this and put
this on the site so you can just copy and paste this, you don't have to type this in
but if you want to learn expressions, you need to type it in because that's how your
brain's gonna remember this. And look at the, make sure you get the syntax
right. If this equals zero, open bracket. The next line is what will happen if this
is true. Then on the next line, I close the bracket
and now I'm gonna add another little piece of this. I'm gonna say else and open another bracket. What this lets you do is it lets you check
if this is true. If it is, this happens. If not, something else happens. Negative selector value. There ya go. So now we've got this expression on there. And watch what happens when I animate the
position now. Boom. The odd-numbered ones, they move in the opposite
direction because they have a negative selector value but the even ones have a positive selector
value. So there ya go. Now you've got that set up. And so let's rename this. Let's just call this 'Initial Value' again. And duplicate it and call this 'Position 01'. And now set this to negative 100. Remember, this is a relative value so the
initial value is 100. To move it back to zero, we need to make it
negative 100. Let's go to the range selector, advanced,
let's do a nice ramp down, ease high, let's set that to 100% and then we'll animate the
offset. So it starts here, right. Go forward one second. There ya go. Right, and here's this animation. And you can see that there's no easing out
of the position, it just shoots in. And let's actually make this a little bit
more amplified here. Let's have it start at 300. And then set this to negative 300. Cool. Alright, and so now you could do the exact
same thing we did with the slide where you add an opacity animation too. So that the letters are not visible when they're
up here and down here but as they start moving, they get visible. So Initial Value, just add the opacity property
to it, set it to zero. Now this is gonna be interesting. So because this initial value has this expression
selector on it, the odd-numbered letters are not going to be set to zero because it's basically
saying negative 100% of zero, it's basically not gonna work. So what we're gonna have to do is set an initial
opacity. We're gonna have to make this a separate text
animator. So we'll just say animate opacity. And we'll move this up here and we'll call
this 'Initial Opacity'. We'll set the opacity to zero. And then we can just duplicate this and call
this 'Opacity Change'. And now on the opacity on the position, we
need that expression selector. But on the opacity we don't. We can just delete that expression selector. And let's make sure that we get rid of this
position and on Opacity Change we'll add the opacity property. We'll set it to 100% and then in the range
selector, it's already got key frames on it so there ya go. So now we're stacking and we're getting a
more elaborate kind of animation. And again, I wanna just point out that why
this is useful and really powerful is because now you can type in anything you want and
get that crazy motion. And you can just stretch out your key frames
to make it take longer if it's a longer piece of type. There ya go. And all of these, by the way, work with motion
blur so if you have some neat kind of overlapping animation, you can use motion blur and get
a nice little result there. And there ya go. So what I hope, the takeaway, okay. There's always a takeaway in my videos what
I hope that you take away from this is that text animators, if you break each little bit
of animation down, this is the first position, the initial position, then you got the second
position then the third position then the fourth position and all of those positions
just have offset key frames. You can build some really complex moves. I mean, you could have these things have twenty
different things happen and really make it intricate and then all you have to do is copy
the layer and type in something else and it's done. So these are extremely powerful, they do take
some getting used to and I'm still sort of figuring them out. I mean, you sort of saw me stumble through
it a little bit. But super useful when you're doing long-form
pieces that have a ton of type and you just wanna get, you wanna make something that looks
nice, that looks custom, but you don't wanna have to do ten minutes of work every single
time there's a new piece of type. So I hope you guys dug this. I hope you find it useful. Thank you guys so much. I will see you next time. - Thank you so much for watching. I hope you learned something new today about
text animators which are one of those things that a lot of pros don't use that often because
the stereotype is that they look very canned and they look cheesy but they don't have to. If you build your own from scratch and you
use animation principles and you really take the time to make them look good, they can
be very, very useful time savers for you. If you have any questions or thoughts about
this lesson, definitely let us know and if you learned something valuable from this video,
please share it around. It really helps us spread the word about School
of Motion and we will owe you a beer. Also, don't forget to sign up for our free
student account to access project files from the lesson you just watched. Thanks again for watching and I'll see on
the next one.
