Design Production for Digital//Adobe After Effects Workshop//Workshop IV.

Adobe After Effects Workshop//Workshop IV

Notes from a workshop afternoon with Mike Flowers*

* Reblogging and re-working on this post after the previous post had unfortunately (as somewhat mysteriously!) went missing from my blog. Rather frustrating as (admittedly foolishly- and by accident!) I ended up sitting through the workshop twice, but at least it will give me the opportunity to refresh my mind in terms of the processes used, hopefully to actively apply these into my ident/title sequence series of final outcomes.


CREATING TEXT WITHIN AFTER EFFECTS

- Can create a text layer easily as you would on Illustrator- character palette.
- Double clicking on the text layer selects all of the text.
- The first difference to a text layers is the change of position of the anchor point- now in the left hand corner, not in the centre, as would would be usually expected.

- The text layer properties are also specific to text, as well as having the usual transform properties.

- If you press 'y' (and/or the 'Pan Behind Tool' in the toolbar), you can change the position of the anchor point.
- Source text option allows us to change the content and the formatting of the text over time.
- A key frame added with this is square- this means that this is now a hold keyframe each time you change the content- not a gradual change:

1//TEXT APPEARING
- Think of a sentence.
- Delete text so that only the first letter shows of your sentence, make a key frame.
- Move further along the timeline and type more of the text in, etc, keep making key frames until you have written the entire sentence (see example above).
- can also change the formatting, e.g. add a new key frame to make the whole text a different colour, font, size, etc.


2//ANIMATE OPTIONS AVAILABLE

 

- Anything that we alter with position alters the other properties.

- Click animate > Chose position, we now have an additional few options.

- We are adding an animator which adds range selector and position properties.

- To see how this works we will change one of our position values.

- Expand options of range selector, change the start to 50%.

- Make the end point a key frame.

- Range selector helps you to select how much of your word will be changed by the properties.

3//ANIMATION

- Creating a Mexican wave style movement.
- Alter the start and the end.
- Then create a start and end key frame for the offset and alter these to create this movement.
- Experiment for a full understanding of the possibilities in this text manipulation.
- If you change to index values over percentage ones (on advanced settings) it makes it easier to edit characters individually, as you can change it by the number of characters and not a percentage, so more specific.
- Change 'based on' setting such as Characters, Words, Lines, etc.

4//SCALE AS A PROPERTY

- Add new key points to edit the scale, and each character will move around it's own individual anchor point.
- More options> Anchor point grouping? Can change to word.

5// CHARACTER SCALE


- Making a single letter bigger every time, still using scale as our property.
- Add> tracking> Adds new tracking property.
- Can add effect so that as the letter increase in size it changes colour.
- Property > Fill Colour> ...
- Can lower the smooth in the advanced options so there is no change in shade when changing colour, just straight to the other colour.

6//PEN TOOL PATH

- Using the pen tool to create an open ended path, whilst the text is selected.

- Change the path options from none to Mask 1.

- The text will now take the shape of the path.

- Alter path> First margin> Then drag text along> Add a keyframe (this is how you animate the text).

- Experiment.