From the course: How Do I Do That in After Effects

How can I create a handwritten title in After Effects? - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: How Do I Do That in After Effects

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How can I create a handwritten title in After Effects?

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- Sometimes when we're working with text, we want to reveal that text in a much more organic way. Maybe it looks like an actual signature being written. There are several different techniques for this, including actually capturing pen strokes. But what I want to show you is an effect called the write-on effect that can be used to create an animated mask. This works really well and you can actually draw to input it or use your mouse. I've opened up a project here and you've got two states but let me show you the end state. Here, we're compositing an animated title over the background and I've just got two other layers that are revealed, the feather or the quill that floats in, and the bottom line of text that's a simple blur transition. Well, all this started out as was a Photoshop file. So if we take a look at the Photoshop file itself, you'll see that the different layers were brought in. So, we had our paper texture and then each of the individual items, which we can animate. What I want to focus on here is animating just the text itself. I'm going to turn the other layers off and you can play with those with other animation techniques you've already learned, but let's teach you the write-on effect. To start, I'll turn off anything that's not needed. We'll leave the paper texture in place and turn off the other items. With title selected, I'm just going to lock the other layers so I don't accidentally modify them for now. Now, let's use the write-on effect. You'll find it under effect, generate, write-on. And what we need to do is basically keyframe this to trace over the text that we have. So we'll start with the brush position. You see the dot that we're moving around. This allows us to put this where we want, and you're just going to basically draw. So let's turn on the brush position here and get a much larger brush size. Don't worry about it being bigger than the strokes. Now, move forward a few frames, plus three, and I'm just going to grab this and pull it. Plus one. Plus one, and notice how we can move it through. Go, plus two. And it's really quite simple because you could just grab the actual point that you're moving to create the wipe. If you find it necessary, you can also increase the size of the brush. So in this case, I'm going to bump that up slightly so it covers everything. There we go, and we can take the brush size back down. Good. So there's the first tracing. Very cool. Now it's just kind of repetitive. If you get bored watching me do this, you can jump forward in the movie, but let me show you what's happening. Again, we're just moving this through to reveal. And by moving a couple of frames at a time with the stopwatches on, it's going to track what we're doing. Now don't worry about it being bigger than the letters. You just want to completely obscure the letters so that it will function as an animated mask. And by moving one to two frames at a time, it's really easy to add enough control points here so it carries. Be sure to evaluate your handwriting here. In this case, this is a handwritten font and because it's getting a little thinner, I'm going to actually adjust the brush size here slightly, and you see it keyframes. Again, just add the different points that you need and by moving one frame or so at a time, it becomes easy to accurately reveal. Now, feel free to keep working on your own but I'm going to jump forward and show you the next step, which is the animation. Once you've done the basic tracing, drag back through to see your animated stroke. If needed, you can edit the keyframes. Now, we just have to change a few properties. What we're going to do is change this and say that we want to reveal the original image. Now when we press play, you see how the signature writes on. It's very cool. In this case, I'm just going to move the first starting point so it actually appears outside of that S. Now we've got a good clean animation and you see that the letters are revealed. Feel free to take a look at some of the other properties here if you'd like to see how we animated and layered in the other elements. For this case, I'll just turn the footage back on so you can see it composited over the backdrop and the animated signature when combined with the footage and paper texture, creates a very professional result.

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