Essential Text Animations in After Effects

Nice to see you again, editor! This is our After Effects tutorial and we're about to animate the text. Among the best ways to create a good text animation, are adjusting Position and Opacity properties, working with Sale and Blur values, using Tracking to animate your text, Stroke and Mask, or some basic but handy effects. Also, we'll check how the Viewer extension can make it work the same way. Let's start!

Position

The first way to animate the text is to change Position and Opacity. These two - are the basic After Effects properties that give you the ability to work with your layer (same with Scale and Rotation). Go to the Transform menu and set the Key to Position for about 1.5 seconds. 

After that go back to the beginning and with Shift pressed, move the text a bit lower. Make EasyEase keys for smoother animation. 

The next step is to set the Opacity value under the Position key. Leave the Opacity value at 100%, go to the beginning and set it to 0%. Repeat creating EasyEase keys. 

Set the Opacity

Then, choose the layer, go to Effects & Presets and find the Fill Effect. 

Set the key and choose the color you like. After the 1-st second, you can bring the white color back. 

EasyEase keys can help you again with making your animation smooth. 

Sink

The second method is created by using the Scale and Blur values. Let's go to the Transform menu and set the key to the Scale value for about 2.5 seconds. Go back to the beginning and set the Scale value to 115%. 

Set the Scale value

Here EasyEase keys also will greatly do their job for smoother animation. Then choose the layer, go to Effects & Presets and find the Gaussian Blur effect. This one is really popular among editors and for a very good reason - it helps to create soft images with eliminated noise. Set the value to 15 at the start of text composition. After a few frames, set it to 0. 

Tracking

In a third way, we will use Tracking. Go to the Character menu and set the value to 600 interleaved distance. Next - open a layer with the text, go to Animate>Tracking. 

Set Tracking

Put the key at the start and at the 2-nd second. At the start set the value to 65 and leave 0 at the end. Make EasyEase keys for smoother animation. 

Stroke

In a fourth way, we will use Stroke and Mask. Go to the Character menu and turn fill off, stroke automatically turns on. 

Here we can adjust the thickness of the stroke. We leave the value 3. Next - select the layer and duplicate it. For the lower layer, turn off the Stroke and turn the fill on. 

In the Transform menu, set the Opacity value to 20%. Select the Mask tool and create a rectangle around the text. 

Set the key to 1.5 seconds. Return to the start and move the mask down. Use EasyEase keys for smoother animation again. Next, add more Feather. At the first second, let's set the key to Opacity and at the end set it to 100%.

Basic Effects

The next method - use the basic effects that can be applied to text. Go to the Effects & Presets>Animation Presets>Text menu. Here you can choose the effects that are appropriate for your case. For example, if we select Animate In and show you 3 effects that we like. The first is Slow Fade On, which is a smooth appearance of your text. 

The second is the Typewriter.

Words are typed to the letter. And the third is Fade Up Words - an appearance by words. When using standard effects, we advise you to try different ones and experiment.

Fade Up Words Effect

EasyEdit Viewer for Text Animation

Another alternative way is to use the EasyEdit Viewer extension. For example, the Hyper pack has a Titles category, that contains a lot of animated text comps. The compositions are suitable for any situation. Simply select text comp you like and import it to the Timeline. On the right, you'll see Essential Graphics panel where you can type in your text and edit it to suit your needs. For example, you can edit the scale, move it as you like or change and color. 

Hope these were useful! We're glad to have you here on our blog, if you're a newbie, we advise you to check our other articles, for example, Top 5 Useful Expressions for AE or Best ways to Speed Up After Effects. See you next week!