Animating Letters with Text Anarchy 2.0

Animating Letters with Text Anarchy 2.0
Digital Anarchy’s new After Effects plug-in
By Jim Tierney

Here’s what the final project will look like when it’s done (Click image to play Quicktime).

This tutorial is designed to get you familiar with Digital Anarchy’s new After Effects plug-in package, Text Anarchy 2.0. We’ll also touch on a couple regular plugs that come with AE, but our focus will be on Text Anarchy. The filter set has eight filters for doing a variety of effects with text. We’ll be using one of them here called Cool Text, which allows you to animate characters on a letter-by-letter basis. You can animate Scale, Opacity, Rotation, Blur, and Color in this way.

The gist of this tutorial is to create a simple open for the new hit sitcom "The Squares." To do this, we’ll create a background with a couple standard AE filters, then use Cool Text to create our nifty title animation.

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The first thing you need to do is make sure you have Text Anarchy 2.0's demo filters. It’s tough to do a tutorial for a plug-in you don’t have, so roll on over to:

www.digitalanarchy.com/demos/ta20d.sit (Macintosh)
or
www.digitalanarchy.com/demos/ta20d.zip (Windows)

Install those and you’re good to go.

You will also need the AE 5.0 tutorial files, which you can get here, and the mosaic.psd file used by the project, which you can download here.

Off to tutorial land…

The Background
Let’s quickly create a background for our title. There are many ways to create backgrounds, I’ve chosen a very simple example here using only filters in the standard AE version.

Open up the DMN_Anarchy.aep project file.

You’ll notice that there’s a plain grayscale mosaic in the comp window. This is the seed of our background.

We’re going to apply two filters to this to get this rocking. If you open your Effects window (control+shift+T [PC], or command+shift+T [Mac] ), you’ll notice that we already have Optics Compensation applied. That’s because we’ve already set some keyframes for you to simplify the setup.

Optics Compensation is usually used to compensate for the distortion you see around the edges of an image due to the camera lens. Standing it on its head, it can also be used to create interesting distortions on regular layers, which is exactly what we’re going to here, distorting and warping this lovely mosaic.

Turn on the Optics Compensation filter in the Effects window and notice the instant distortion. The result will look like this:

Cool… but not what we want. To get what we want, turn on the Reverse Lens Distortion checkbox. This inverts the effect and gives us this:

You’ll notice that we’ve set a bunch of keyframes for Field of View and View Center. If you preview the animation, you’ll see the mosaic twist and warp. That’s the basis of our background.

Since simple shades of gray make for pretty boring background, let’s apply the Colorama filter [ Effect>Image Control>Colorama ]. Ah… nothing says ‘washed out 60’s colors’ like Colorama. That said, apply it to our washed out shades of gray.

The initial result is hideous. Why Colorama defaults to this neon rainbow set of colors is beyond me, but we can fix it. Go to the Output Cycle section and from the Preset Palette, select Caribbean. This will give us:

Oh! Much better! Only one last thing to do and we’ve got our background. Colorama works by mapping the circle of colors you see above, to the shades of gray (or Luminance) in an image. It’s extremely powerful and far too deep to go into here, but check the AE manual for lots of great info on it.

We can get the colors to cycle through the grayscale image creating flashing squares of color by animating the Phase Shift parameter in the Input Cycle. At 00:00 set a keyframe for Phase Shift. Move forward to 04:00 and set a keyframe for 1 revolution.

The timeline should look like this:

at 04:00 the dial should be:

And that’s it for the background!

Part II. Text Anarchy’s Cool Text
First, turn on the Cool Text Layer, by clicking on its visibility switch (the eyeball).

Cool Text allows you to animate text on a letter by letter basis. This can create many cool special effects, but the Scale controls can also be used to adjust font size within the same piece of text. Usually, if I want something like this:

it requires the use of two layers. One layer for most of the text, and another layer for the h and e in The, because the h and e are a smaller font size.

Cool Text can let you vary font sizes easily, allowing you to keep everything on one layer for easy animation. So let’s go ahead and set this up.

First thing you’ll notice is that we’ve already animated the Font Size to get a bouncing up and down look to the text. It didn’t seem to make sense having you slog through setting basic keyframes, so I did the slogging for you. Be sure to thank me later.

Move your time marker to the end of the animation at 04:11. Select the Cool Text layer and open the Effects window (control/command + shift + T). Open up the twirly for Effect 1 and set the values to match this:

Position and Width allow you to determine which characters will be affected. Each character has a position number. The first character is 1, the second is 2, and so on. By setting the Position to 2, we point the Effect at the h in The. By setting the Width to 2, we tell the Effect to encompass the character selected, and the character that comes after it. So we end up with both the h and e affected by the Effect. Here’s an example of how Position and Width work together to select characters.

The Amount parameter sets the Scale value, how much the letters are going to be scaled. The Time parameter sets how long the characters will animate to get to that Scale amount. In this case Time is set to 0, so the letters are scaled to 77% immediately.

So that takes care of setting the Scale of our characters, but now they’re a little too far apart. To solve that we’ll need to Kern the letters, adjusting the space between the T and h, and the h and e .

Open up the Kerning twirly, and turn on Show Kerning Pair. This will put a yellow bar in between whatever characters were kerning. Take a look:

The first pair, is the T and h. Set the Kerning Amount to –10 and notice the h scoots closer to the T.

Now set Kerning Pair to 2. Notice that the yellow bar now moves between the h and e , indicating which pair of letters you’re kerning. The Kerning Amount also changes to zero, indicating that you haven’t made any adjustment to this pair of characters. So, (in my best Mafia voice), lets adjust this here pair of characters. Set the Kerning Amount to –10. Bada bing… everything looks capiche. Be sure to turn off Show Kerning Pair when you’re done.

So that takes care of having multiple font sizes. A little bit of work, but, especially once you get the hang of it, it’s much easier than doing it with multiple layers of text.

Effects, Effects, and More Effects
We’ve got five different effects to choose from and we’ll use two of them for this part of the tutorial. First we’re going to use Scale to distort the letters, then apply a Rotate effect to them.

Since we used Effect 1 for the font size adjustment, twirl down the parameters for Effect 2. Set them up like so:

The Time and Time to Return to Original Position parameters are based on frames. Time sets the number of frames that it will take for any affected character to reach the value set by the Amount. In this case, it’ll take 8 frames for characters to scale down to 40%, and 11 frames to return to their original size.

Move to Time 00:10 and set a keyframe for Position2.

Move to Time 00:11 and change Position2 to 1. Set a keyframe for Amount2, as well.

Move to Time 00:25 and change Position2 to 11. Set Amount2 to 300.

Your timeline should like like this:

Now your bouncing text should have a Scale effect going across it from left to right and should look something like this:

So here’s what we’ve got so far:

Click image to view Quicktime.

For the final exercise, we’re going to let you figure out what we did with Effect 3! Open up the Final Comp in the project window.

All the keyframes are in there, and the way it's set up is very similar to what we did with Effect 2. The big difference is that it uses the Rotate Effect to rotate characters around the X axis. If you were paying attention to what we did with Effect 2, figuring Effect 3 out will be simple.

A couple of hints, though. The Width gets animated instead of the Position. The Baseline For Effect has been adjust upwards, so the characters rotate around their center. Play around with the Baseline parameter and see what happens. Try setting it to –270.

Happy Rendering!

Jim Tierney is the president and founder of Digital Anarchy (www.digitalanarchy.com) He can be reached at anarchist@digitalanarchy.com.