Design Practice: AfterEffects Session 3

This session was based around learning to manipulate type from within AfterEffects.
To start, we learned that there are 2 ways to create type in the program. The first is to use the bar across the top of the screen to select Layer -> New -> Text which will crate a text field on screen ready to be written in to.

The second is to select the Type tool from the toolbar and just click somewhere in the composition window to create the same kind of type.

It will look something like this on screen when some type is input into the field.

The most useful way to edit the type will be through the Character and Paragraph windows.

To show these windows select Window at the top of the screen and press the Character and Paragraph buttons unless already ticked.

They should pop up and appear on the right of the screen.

This shows the character and the paragraph windows on top of each other. They have a lot of the same tools that you would be used to using from other Adobe programs like Illustrator and InDesign and it all works in pretty much the same way.

You will notice below that when the type is selected it will look roughly the same as it would in any other adobe program but will have only a few differences, the biggest of which is the anchor point.

The anchor point is important for animating, especially when rotating because it defines the point of the object which all transformation will be relative to.
So in the image below the text will revolve around that point on the left of the first 't' in a wide circle.

There are two ways to change where the anchor point is in relation to the bounding box of an object.

The first and most obvious method is to use the anchor point transformation in the timeline transformations. When the timeline is selected, press the A key and it should automatically open up the anchor point transformation drop down box.

Change the orange values on the right of 'Anchor point' and the word should position itself relative to where the anchor point is already. The only issue with this is that it will change the positioning of the word on screen so you would need to change the anchor point before doing any animation already.

This is what the word and bounding box would look like after the anchor point is changed to the center of the word. With the anchor point in this position, the word would rotate perfectly around the center of the text between the e and x.

The other (easier) way to change the anchor point is to simply select this tool from the toolbar.

The tool simply allows you to click on the anchor point and drag it around and position it relative to the positioning of the word rather than the other way around.

This is what the rotation would look like around the anchor point when placed in the middle of the word.

The other major difference between type and a normal object is that it has a new drop down option called 'Text' along with Transform. This basically just gives a set of things which are specifically introduced to help manipulate type across a length of time.

One of the most important aspects of this list is the Source Text which you can see has a stopwatch meaning it can be changed over time with keyframes.

This is what the key frames look like in the 'source text' options on the timeline.
Put basically, the source text option lets you change the content of the text field over time, whereas usually the object would just be one thing which could be manipulated.
This means that more or less letters can be added over time very easily and even entire paragraphs can be built up.

This shows an example of a midpoint keyframe in which the word 'text' is only half visible because it is revealing itself over time.

Another really useful part of the 'text' options is the animate drop down box which can be used to animate specific transformations with the type semi-automatically. They can basically create some nice effects and help you out with the animation in a quicker time than it would take to manually produce the same result, although they do need a lot of tweaking with the settings to produce a desired result.

We started by looking at the Position animation. It does exactly what it sounds like; animating the position of the type over time.

These are the options that would be seen for animating position.
By messing around with differing values across the timeline you can produce various different effects but there are too many to go into in too much detail.

For even more option you can click the 'Advanced' button which reveals all of these other value to be changed and tested like ease and smoothness.

You can also change other aspects of the type transformation either separately or combined with other transformations.
You can see the full list above in the animate drop down menu.

Below I have shown how opacity and scale can be manipulated and animated over time.

This option below allows for the animation to change how it affects the word. By default it will animate each letter (character) one at a time after the previous one. You can change the option to word in which case it will animate whole words together one after the other or even entire lines of a paragraph. The all selection will just animate everything together.

Below is an example of using a mask.
Masks are basically paths which are used to show only a certain portion of a layer or object.
To create a mask, you first select the layer that you want to create a mask on and then either create a shape/polygon or draw an shape using the pen tool in the same way you would in illustrator.
The path can then be manipulated in a few different way to create different effects and for different purposes.