Stretched Type In After Effects ｜ Easy Text Animation Tutorial

Hi I'm Ben Marriott, I make weekly motion design and animation tutorials, and in this video I'm going to show you my process for creating stretch type animations. Let's begin. Now I've been seeing this type of stretch text animation all over the place, so here's how you do it. I've got this background with a bunch of these out of focus, sort of bokeh, light leak images that you can get from Unsplash.com, and I've got those just shifting positions slightly, and I've also got some shape layers moving around and rotating for no particular reason. Then it makes the animation look busy, and a lot of the time I see this stretch type effect paired with arbitrary shape movements, and I've got some color correction over the whole thing. This project file is available for download down in the description, so you can explore and dig around a little deeper. Now to the type. I've got this type centered, and I'm using the typeface Acumen Pro. It's part of Typekit, so if you've got an Adobe Creative Cloud account, you'll have access to it. I chose it because it has a nice bold weight, and the lobe of the P has a nice straight horizontal thingy, which looks cool when it's stretched. First we need to outline our text, so with our layer selected, we select our type tool on the top left, and we right click and select Create Shapes from Text, which will create a new shape layer called Type Outline, and inside the contents of this shape layer, we'll find a new shape for each single letter. This works exactly like outlining type in Illustrator, and we can also see that it's labeled each shape with the letter it contains. Now we can also add a stroke by holding Alt and clicking on the properties up here until we get what we want. Let's create a stroke that's white. Perfect. Now let's get rid of this type layer that we don't need anymore. Our text is going to slide in from the right, so this is going to be the final state of the animation. So let's keyframe all the letters in this position. Now instead of opening down and flicking through the menus down here, we can simply type path into our search bar, and then click on the stopwatch to keyframe all of our path properties. You'll notice that P has two paths inside, that's because the second one is the inside of the counter, which is the donut hole of the P. Let's press U on our keyboard to minimize this just to our essential keyframes, and let's drag these over to a little bit later in the animation. Now with our pen tool selected up here, I can simply double click on each shape, which will select all its points in its path, and then just drag it off to the right. And that will create this animation. Now I'm going to use hold keyframes for this animation, so that we have more control over the shape of each letter in each frame. To turn these into hold keyframes, we simply select all of our keyframes down here in our timeline, right click, and select toggle hold keyframes. You can also hold CTRL and ALT on your keyboard, and simply click to toggle between hold keyframes and regular keyframes. Hold keyframes work by instead of tweening between each keyframe, it will hold the shape or value until the very next keyframe. So it goes from our position on the right, to our position on the left, there's nothing in between. So let's animate one letter at a time. Two frames in from our initial position, we want our T to enter the screen. So let's select our pen tool, double click on the T, and drag it over on screen. We want the letters to move fast at the start, and then ease into their final position. And because this is when the letter will be moving the fastest in this animation, I want it to be really stretched out here. So let's select our pen tool, and I'm going to click on this point on the right, pulse shift, and then select the other three points on the right, and just simply drag them over. There we are. In another two frames, let's again double click our T, drag it over a bit further. And now we want it to start slowing down a bit, so let's make the stretching a little less severe. Another method for selecting multiple points on a shape layer is with your pen tool selected, click on one of the points, and then if you change to your selection tool, which is the arrow tool, by pressing B, and then holding shift, if you click and drag, all of the points that you cover up in your selection will now be selected. And now if we hold shift and press our arrow keys, we can nudge that shape into place. And that's just a quicker way of selecting more points, rather than just clicking on all of them. On the next frame, we want our T to touch its final position on the left side. So let's copy this keyframe of its end position from over here, paste it two frames later. Now let's select these points on the right, and nudge them over just a touch. And now let's drag the keyframe for its final position over here. And let's watch that back. There we are, that's looking pretty good. Now let's repeat that process for all the other layers. Now here's what it looks like when we apply that same process for each letter. You certainly don't need to use whole keyframes. I really like to because I wanted it to have a more staggered, sort of glitchy effect, and for these sort of middle positions to be a little more designed so that each frame is striking on its own. It takes a bit more time, but I think the effect is best used sparingly anyway, and once you're in a groove, you can move through it pretty quickly. For this animation, I've keyframed just two positions for each letter and given it a nice strong ease to blend together nicely. No keyframes here at all. And here it works great. It all depends on the circumstances and what effect you're after. I've made a short playlist of related After Effects transition tutorials that dive a little bit deeper. I'll see you in the next video, and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week.