Mastering Text Animation with Expression Controllers in After Effects

Follow along with Kansas City-based designer, video editor and SOM Teaching Assistant and alum Kyle Hamrick as we use simple rigs and some — gasp! — Expression Controllers to (mathematically) control various elements of your text-based animation. https://schoolofmotion.com/tutorials/mastering-text-animation-expression-controllers-after-effects --------------------------------------------------------------------- Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇 Kyle Hamrick (00:10): Hey there. This is Kyle Hamrick with school of motion. In a previous tutorial, we looked at creative ways of using the after effects, text animator. Today, we're going to take some of those ideas even further and combine them with a few expressions to create some really cool, useful elements that would otherwise be really difficult or even impossible to build. If you didn't have a chance to watch the previous tutorial at a highly recommend watching that first, that lesson has an in-depth explanation of all the properties within the text animator. And while I'll be giving some explanations during this tutorial, you might get lost. If you don't already have a good grasp on how these work, there's a free project file included with the article on school of motion.com. But all the examples are things we'll be building from scratch directly with an after-effects. So let's get started. Kyle Hamrick (00:53): The techniques we'll be covering are things I use all the time. And hopefully after this, you will too. We're going to begin by creating a simple rig that we'll use for the other examples. In this tutorial, it's also just generally really handy for this kind of stuff, and it helps to take some of the trial and error aspect out of it. I'm going to take a second here and show you my text settings. Everything we're using today is available on Adobe fonts. And just a reminder that you can use any type face you like your settings may just be a little different than mine. In the previous tutorial, we did a lot of creating these long lines of dots and then compressing the tracking to make a solid line. We're going to do that same strategy here, but we're going to make it more controllable. Kyle Hamrick (01:30): So I'm going to begin by double clicking to highlight this whole line of text, and then just type one period. Now I'm going to hit you, you to reveal all properties that have been changed from their default. In this case, the source text is the only one that has. Then I'm going to click on this stopwatch here and we actually need the part that had already gave us. So we'll just hit the end key to go to the end of that. And then I'm going to type dot repeat with the parentheses. See the auto complete helps us out there, and then I'm going to type 10, right between the parentheses. So now it's taking a single character and repeating it 10 times. If you give it more characters, it would repeat that entire character string. This seems pretty helpful, right? So let's go ahead and set this up to 100. Kyle Hamrick (02:15): Nice. And let's maybe come down here. We're going to condense the tracking. I found that about minus 2 75 is a pretty good value for this example. This is great, but I don't want to have to keep changing this value every time that I want to change the length, that's even worse than manually typing characters. But if we add effect, expression controls, slider control, open this up here. You could obviously access it over here as well. Let's go ahead and type 100 right here. If we link this up, now we can use the slider control to control this instead of a hard coded value. So I'm just going to click right here and then highlight this portion with the hard coded value. Let's use the expression, pick whip here, just drive that right to the cider control. For the full transcript visit: https://schoolofmotion.com/tutorials/mastering-text-animation-expression-controllers-after-effects