After Effects...Session 4

Today we are looking mainly at type and the type tool.

This is our text layer, we can't work with individual letters like with an Illustrator or Photoshop file of text.

Animating it is the same as any other files.

The anchor point isn't in the middle, it rotates from the bottom left hand corner.

The pan behind tools allows you to change the anchor point without changing the position of the layer.

There are properties that just apply to text.
The source text property allows you to change the contents of the text layer over time and its format.

You can make different words appear over time.

You can change the colour and size over time.

The animate tool opens up a new list of options for animations.

When you choose an animation a new property opens up called animator 1, stating the animation you have selected.

We can animate the start and end of the text.

You can also change the movement of the text by changing the Offset value.

If you open the advanced options you get a lot more choices to make

If you change the units to Index it works with number of characters not percentages.

You can choose how you animate your text, by characters, words or lines.

We are now looking at the scale animator

For more options open up the more options tab

If you change the anchor point grouping you can change that each word scales around its own anchor point.

You can add more properties 

You can change the tracking between each letter

You can also change the colour of each letter as its animated

 

Path Options

You can use the pen tool to create a mask and paths.
Here we are creating a path.

If you select the mask it attaches the type to the path