Animating Type With Alpha Mattes in After Effects

It is always interesting to see someone’s workflow if not for new techniques, but to find new combinations of ones that you already know. Looking around the web, you may find there are many ways for animating type in Ae. There is no definitive method for animating type, the best way gives you the best result in the shortest amount of time with the least headache.

Mt. Mograph shows that you can get a slick type animation going in the most simplest of ways. Building and animating type that mimics the popular look that you see around these days, the type that is being “written or animated on”, Matt demonstrates that workflow can dominate over widgets, plugins and complicated systems.

Today, we’ll go over the popular ‘animate-on’ text effect and also go through some truly amazing scripts to make your motion graphic workflow as painless as possibleMatt – Mt.Mograph

Although the final animation may look like it is more involved than it actually is, creating it is actually quite simple. Animating type can be built with only a few keyframes. Matt also shows how effective using the Ease and Wizz script can be in After Effects for creating more interesting animation. It can make working with graph velocities much quicker by applying presets to your keyframes.

Ease and Wizz

Matt shows off the Ease and Wizz script from Ian Haigh. If you are not familiar with Ease and Wizz will give you a dock able panel offering buttons that will apply a set of expressions for After Effects that give you more ways to interpolate between values. Technically Ease and Wizz can affect any type of value that is an animated property, so although Matt is using it for the position attribute for animating type in the tutorial, it is versatile enough to be used anywhere. To learn more about the Ease and Wizz Script for After Effects, check the page at aescripts + aeplugins here.