Text Animators For Beginners | How to Create Text Animators in After Effects

Hello friends and welcome to our tutorial!

Here are the animations you'll create by the end of this guide:

Example 1

What we'll create:

In this first example, we've already prepared some text, you can write your own. We'll make some pretty simple text animation where we'll animate the Opacity of this text by a character using the Range Selector.

Let's select our text and open its properties. Open the Text menu and in the Animate Tab push the play icon. After that, select the Opacity property.

As we can see, Animator 1 has appeared with the Range Selector.

Range Selector animates the text - it represents the range of values from 0% to 100%, where 0% will be in the beginning of the text, and 100% will be in the end of the text.

We’ll put 0% in the Opacity:

Place a keyframe in the beginning of the timeline with the start property.

Next, we’ll go to the first second and make the start 100%.

As you can see, the text is now animated by characters from the beginning to the end. We can also animate it from the end, by doing the next actions.

We’ll set the start to 0% and now we’ll animate the end the text - it will appear from the end of the composition.

So this is how it works and you can make all sorts of animations with this, you can animate it by character, by word, or by line.

To do this, go to the Advanced tab. As we can see, the animation is now based on characters and if we need to select words, or lines, we can change it here.

Now the whole line of the text is animated.

To make the animation smoother, we’ll select characters again and Easy Ease our keyframes. We’ll select our keyframes, right-click on one of them and choose Keyframe Assistant>Easy Ease.

Now we’ll go to the Graph Editor, select our keyframes and pull one of these handles to the left.

And we're done!

Example 2

What we'll create:

In the second example, we'll mix different animation properties to create something more complex.

We’ll select our text, open it's animation properties and in the Text Menu in the Animate Tab we’ll hit the play icon and add the Opacity property.

Now in Animator 1, we need to hit the play icon again and add the Position properties, set the Position of our text by 45 pixels.

So we're setting the initial value from which the animation will begin and set our Opacity to 0%.

What we’ll do next - open Range Selector and in the beginning of our composition make a keyframe for the start - 0%. On the first second, we’ll set 100%. Here’s the result:

If we need to set our animation by words or lines, we can do it in the Advanced Tab like in the previous example.

The whole line will be animated, but we’re going to stick to the characters. Now we’ll select our keyframes, right-click on one of them and select Keyframe Assistant>Easy Ease.

Go to the Graph Editor and Ease Out our animations.

So this is a very handy method that can help you to make quick changes with only two keyframes. If you’d like the text to be animated from the top, not from the bottom, we just need to hit -45 and the animation will be changed accordingly.

Example 3

What we'll create:

In this third example, we'll create text animation by lines. Let's go into the composition, where we've prepared the text.

Our text string is separated into lines so I'm gonna open up my text menu, hit the play icon in the Animate Tab, and select Position.

In Animator 1, I'm gonna add the Opacity property to this, set my initial value, hit the Opacity to make it 0% and make some keyframes in the Range Selector.

To create the animation by lines, go to the Advanced Tab and select the lines.

And like in previous examples, the last thing we have to do is Easy Ease our keyframes.

Example 4

What we'll create:

In the next example, we'll animate the whole word and we're going to animate its Tracking. The Tracking is basically the distance between the letters/the characters.

It will help us to achieve a cinematic, slowly appearing text, which perfectly goes for titles, openers and similar texts. With our text prepared, open the Transformation menu, go to the Animate Tab and select Tracking. For this example, let’s set our Tracking to 10.

Now we’ll add one more property to the Opacity and set it to 0%. Go to the beginning of the composition and in the Range Selector hit the keyframe for the start and on the first second set the start to 100%.

You can see the sentence is animated by a character and we haven't achieved the effect we were going for. To change this, we need to go to the Advanced tab and choose animation based on lines.

As always, the final thing we need to do now is Easy Ease our keyframes and we're done.

Example 5

What we'll create:

In our final example we'll mix more properties - we'll animate the Opacity, Position and Rotation. Also, we’ll use two Range Selectors, since you can basically make any number of Range Selectors to achieve all kinds of results.

With our text prepared, open the Transform menu, go to the Animate Tab, select the Position in Animator 1. 

We’ll add two more properties: Opacity and Rotation. Set the Position to about 45 pixels, the Rotation to about 30 degrees and the Opacity to 0%.

Now, in the beginning of the composition we’ll set the start value to 0% and on the first second we’ll set the value to 100%.

So we already have this cool-looking animation but in the example we can see that the text is moving from right to left, not just appearing from the bottom.

To change this, we need to add another Animator or Range Selector. In the Text menu in the Animate Tab let's hit the play icon and add Position:

Now as you can see, we've created our Animator 2 and here we’ll set the Position value to 115 pixels, open the Range Selector and animate our text.

Hit the play icon to make a keyframe in the beginning of the composition and on the first second I'm gonna set the start value 100%.

Now we have this kind of animation - Animator 1 is animating this text by a character it's animating the Position, the Rotation and the Opacity. Animator 2 animates the Position of the whole lines we've selected and thus we're achieving this kind of movement.

To make this effect even more vivid and dramatic, we're gonna need to select our keyframes, right-click on them, Easy Ease them. Go to the Graph Editor and pull the Bezier handle to the left. Select these keyframes and put the handle to the right.

Conclusion

Hope this guide was useful and you’ve learned something you can apply in your future animations!
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