After Effects Text Animation

‘Things’ happening with their own will and momentum is probably at the heart of animation. Objects, characters, and images come alive, begin moving and seem to have a life and plan of their own.

This is one of the most popular techniques to highlight your logo, highlight your company or brand name and capture your audience attention with clever use of text and images that come alive.

The ‘stroke’ effect is perfect for having your special message appear, appear gradually with the mood and theme of your composition.

In a very simple illustration these step describe how to use After Effects tools to create a parchment ‘Spirit Writing’ that will add intrigue with subtle text animation to your web site.

This parchment reveals the mysterious spirit writing against a soft brown parchment. The mysterious appearance of the text is accompanied with an equally easy to apply effect, a light illuminating the text.

The light is quite easy, simply choose ‘new light’, give it a name that will help you associate it with it’s effect. For this simple animation, stick with the default ‘Spot’ light setting and other default settings but bring your cone angle down to about 30%. You want the light to be nearly closed at the beginning of your animation.

You are going to animate the cone effect, allowing it to spread more light against the parchment as the animated text appears. Experiment with the brightness, the ‘intensity’ setting but the default of 100% is probably just fine. To animate your cone opening, click the time clock for the cone angle setting, this will create a keyframe, then move toward the end of your timeline and open the cone to say, 80%, almost a fully opened light. When you enter this different value, it will create a second keyframe at that point on the timeline. As you scroll across you time line you will see this effect, the light opening up gradually and illuminating your writing surface, the parchment.

To use stroke, choose and place your text, in this case ‘Spirit Writing’. I chose ‘Montype Corsiva’ for my parchment text because of the Latin, ancient appearance of the font. Apply your stroke effect using the ‘start’ and ‘end’ parameters. Setting start to 0%, then enter clock for end setting to initiate the animation for this setting at the very beginning of the time frame. This will have start and end at 0 at the very beginning. Move down the timeline about ten frames, enter another keyframe with end still set to 0%.

This will be that first almost undetectable moment of anticipation where actually, nothing happens, but this anticipation is an important subtle effect in animation. Now move down the timeline and enter a value of 100% for ‘end’ about three fourths of the way through your composition. This 100% setting is where the stoke will be complete, will ‘end’ and the text will be fully written. Leaving just a few more frames at the end of your composition will allow the completed animation to pause.

As the light opens, your text slowly appears, lingering for the last few seconds after completely opening.

Try it !