From the course: After Effects Weekly

Create jumpy characters - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Weekly

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Create jumpy characters

“

- [Eran] Hey everyone, Eran Stern here with another After Effects Weekly Tip and in this video I'll show you a cool way to create jumpy characters out of the text tool in After Effects using the wiggly selector. Then we'll save our animation as a preset and we'll apply it to the other titles in this master comp. Now, this project is a result of an exercise I gave to my students a few years ago. The brief was to create an animated title sequence for a movie based on their favorite book and the comp that you see here was made by Rotan Heckman who chose to create a trailer for the book The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov, a great book by the way. So, let's switch to this morning scene comp, this is without any treatment and I'll show you how to create it from scratch. So, the first and the most important thing is to choose some hand-drawn font. I'm using this font which is named The Skinny and I believe you can find a free version of it on the internet. So, just so it will be easy to concentrate, I'm going to solo this text layer on screen and I'm going to press space bar just so you can see that currently there's no animation whatsoever. I'm going to go back to the beginning and then I'm going to tree down the properties for this text layer and I'm going to add an animator. I'm going to add both position and then from this Add menu, I'm going to add also Rotation. Now, those will get very, very tiny values, so for the X position, I'm going to allow only one pixel and same for the Y, then I'm going to tab my way to the rotation and I'm also going to give it a very low number, so one degree. This is almost unnoticeable but it will be enough when those letters begin to dance and in order to make them do this wiggly move, I'm going to return to this Add option and from the Selector, this time I'm going to choose the Wiggly selector. If I'm not going to do anything, just press play, we can already see that things are going to move and they are going to move based upon the values that you'll find over here. So, you can make them move faster. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to change it to six and you can also try different modes, so the best way to do it is to just press space bar and while After Effects is previewing, you can just select different styles and see what makes sense to you, what do you like. So, for example, the subtract style is going to do this number for the gaps between the letters and so, the result will be a much more jumpy text. However, in this case I'm going to choose the Intersect mode which I think works quite nice here. You can also play with the correlation and this will tell the effect how much closer the animation should be from one letter to the other, so at 100%, everything is basically going together and if I'm going to take it to the lower value which is zero, now every character is going to do its own number. So, once again this is a creative selection. I'm going to stick with maybe 30% in this case. Now there is somewhat of a problem in terms of where the animation is happening and in order to see it, I'm going to open up the More Options over here and this will allow me to select the group alignment and show you that every one of those letters has its own anchor point. So, at the current state, each one of the letters is rotating and moving from this anchor point, so if I'm going to press play again, you can see that this is indeed the fact. Now I do want to change it, so I'm going to select the Y offset over here and bring it more or less to the the middle of the line, something like that, so negative 35 in my case and now the axis is in the middle of each one of the characters which to my eye look much better. Now it's time to save everything that we did so far as an animation preset so we can easily apply it to other text in the main comp that we have over here. And in order to do so, my recommendation is to tree lap everything, then select the layer itself and then go to the Animation menu and over here select the last command, Reveal All Modified Properties. If you like, you can also use a keyboard shortcut, double tap on the letter U, so, UU in sequence will give you the same thing. Now I'm going to take the timeline full screen by pressing on the tilde key and this will show us everything that we've modified to this title. Now we can decide what we want to save. So, I'm not going to save the transformation, because each and every title has a different place and I don't want to take the place of this title and inherit it to the rest of my titles, I also don't need to save the source text but I will save the more option by clicking on it as well as anything I did under animator number one. In other words, hold down the Command key on the Mac, Control on PC and click on the name Animator 1. This will save everything underneath and in order to save it, go to the Animation menu once again and choose Save Animation Preset. Now I'm going to navigate to the default folder which is my User Presets and I'm going to save it on top of what I already had done in the past, so I already have this Jumpy Text.ffs. Also note that After Effects is sensitive to the version that you are saving this animation presets meaning that if you will try to use it with an earlier version of After Effects and currently I'm using CC 2018, it's not going to work, so it's going to work from CC 2018 and onward. Anyhow, I'm going to click Save and I'm going to replace what I already have over here. I'm going to press once again on the tilde or grave key in order to bring back all the rest of the panels and then I'm going to dismiss the solo switch for this title and I'm also going to enable this tracking data, this is a null object which holds all the tracking information that I already did in advance to this shot. This way I can use parenting and link the title that I have here to the movement of the shot, so this is what I'm going to do and then I'm going to press space bar just to check how it's looking in this comp and I think it works great. So, I can go back to my main comp and note that over here, if I'm going to scroll down, I have couple of red layers and by red I mean the label is red and of course those text layers are just sitting there without any animation, so no jumpy characters yet. But we can easily apply the text preset that we've just saved to all of them, so I'm going to select one of the text, click on the label and select all the label group. This way After Effects is going to select all my text layers in this composition and I can go to the Animation menu once again and apply the Recent Animation Preset that I just saved and in this case this is it. Note that you also have a keyboard shortcut for it, so Command + Shift + Option + F or Control + Shift + Alt + F on the PC. And now once I did this, I want to check and verify that this is working, so I'm just going to press space bar for this title, let's move to this guy and as you can see, everything got the same treatment in one go. Super easy and super fast. I'm going to go to the beginning and I'm also going to enable the soundtrack that we have over here to show you the final thing with everything included. Before I'm going to do it, I'm just going to say goodbye and remind you that if you ever need to create jumpy characters inside After Effects from live type, you can definitely use this easy recipe, so thank you very much for watching and I'll see you again next time. (playful music)

Contents