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How to Animate "written" Text

For years, all of us who took Steve Herrnstadt's 408 class always stumbled over how to create text that appeared to be in the process of being written either across the screen or on objects in a 3D scene (like a pen writing in a journal). We inevitably ended up hand animating this, which took forever, or just gave up (giving up mostly happened in the IIci days).

Now, we no longer have to spend painful hours working and cursing our plan to add this effect to our animations! One of our new purchases this semester was Adobe's AfterEffects, which, with its latest update, gives us the ability to do this incredibly easily.

All we need is Illustrator and AfterEffects.

This tutorial will take you through the process of creating a brief animation of the words "The End" being written across the screen (highly original, I know, but fairly simple).

You need to create the original path object in Illustrator. Open Illustrator and choose the Pen tool. You should create three objects, the base of "the", cross the capital T, and "End". When you are done, set the stroke and fill of each object to None. You should end up with something like this:

Go to the Edit menu and choose Select All (or command-a). Now copy the objects (EDIT > COPY).

Open AfterEffects.

1. Open a new composition. Click the new comp button on the project window.

2. Go to the LAYER menu and choose New Solid. Set the color to the background color. In our case, we will choose Black.

3. Choose PASTE from the EDIT menu. This will add Mask objects for each of the text paths created in Illustrator. Move this item to the center of your composition (it can be anywhere).

4. Now, we need to apply the Stroke Effect. Select the first mask item. Go to the EFFECTS menu. Pull down to RENDER, and choose STROKE. This will add the effect and open the Effect Controls window. Set the Path to 1.Mask1. Repeat this for the other 2 masks. You will end up with 3 Stroke Effect objects. The second stroke should have the path set to 2.Mask2, and the third. 3.Mask3.

5. Now we will add keyframes to help control the attributes of the stroke objects. In the Time Layout, you can see a list of items, their effects and the effect attributes. Click on the stopwatch icon next to the item marked Start. This will insert a keyframe for that item at 0 seconds. Move the time slider to 3 seconds and click the stopwatch next to the End item to insert at keyframe at the 3 seconds mark.

6. Move the time slider back to 0 seconds. In the Effect Controls window, locate the End attribute setting for the first stroke object. It should read 100%. We are going to change it to 0%. This will insert another keyframe for that item at the 0 second mark. Click the Play button in the Time Controls window to see a preview (it will play slower than realtime).

7. Now we will add keyframes for the second stroke object. Move the Time Slider to 3 seconds. Set the Start keyframe by clicking the stopwatch icon. Move the slider to 4 seconds and set the End keyframe. Move the slider back to 3 seconds and set the End value to 0% just as we did for the previous stroke object.

8. Set the time slider back to 4 seconds. In the third stroke object, set the start keyframe. Move the slider to 7 seconds and set the end keyframe. Move the slider back to 4 and set the end value to 0%.

9. Preview your animation! If all is well, you should see the text being "written" across the screen! You are now ready to export your finished movie.

10. Under the FILE menu, choose EXPORT > QuickTime Movie. You will be presented a few options. Click the Settings button to set the fps and CODEC information, click the Size button to select the rendered size. If you do not have audio, you can deselect the Audio option. If you are not planning to do Internet streaming, you can deselect that option too.