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Welcome to you.
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In this explainer, I’ll manually animate my movie title text ‘models’ so it zooms into the scene.
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This video is part of a series and can be viewed on its own.
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Apply built in effects is fun, but learning to animate manually using keyframes is a skill you can transfer across to most professional animation software.
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Click on the small right facing arrow on the text layer.
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Next, click to expand the transformation properties.
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The text layer has a group of properties including the text position, location, and rotation.
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Each property is temporal, which just means it can be varied over time.
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I’ll start by placing the playhead at the start of the timeline and drag a left and right over the scale property.
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Notice that at the moment, the text isn’t zooming straight in and out of the screen at the viewer.
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This is because the anchor point for the text is here at the bottom center of the text.
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To resolve this, go to ‘layer, transform, center anchor point in layer content’.
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The anchor point is now perfectly centered and the text zooms in and out straight at the viewer.
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Make sure the playhead is at the start of the timeline.
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To tell After Effects I want to adjust the scale of my text over time, I’ll click the stopwatch here on the left of the scale property.
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A blue marker has been added to the text scale value at the current point on the timeline.
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This is a key frame, a specific point in time to which I want to assign a precise value.
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At the start of the timeline, I want my text to be zoomed all the way out to the point just before it disappears completely.
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So I’ll scale the text all the way up to about here.
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The text is going to be on screen for the entire 10 seconds.
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So I want it to come to rest at around the 6 second mark after which it’s going to remain in place for the final seconds.
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Accordingly, I’m going to need a keyframe at the 6 second mark.
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Again, adjust the scale to be roughly the final size of the text on the screen.
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Notice as soon as I adjust the scale, a brand new keyframe is generated at the current time as the value has changed from the previous keyframe.
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I’ll play the animation back in the usual way.
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If it’s all gone a bit wrong, you can use After Effects undo option or select a key frame and press the delete key.
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A top tip…
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When you’re moving the playhead around selecting key frames, hold down your shift key and the playhead will snap to the nearest keyframe when you’re close enough to it.
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You can also jump from one keyframe to the next by using the go to previous keyframe and go to next keyframe buttons here on the very left of the panel.
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At the moment, the text animation starts then stops abruptly.
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This looks clunky and not like the smooth movements you see in professional productions.
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To add gradual acceleration or deceleration in after effects, we can use an option called easy ease.
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I’ll right click on the keyframe at the 6 second mark, keyframe assistant, easy ease in.
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As you can see, the animation now decelerates or eases to a gradual stop.
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For more control over the easing, click on the graph icon at the top left of the timeline.
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Here you can see the actual curves used by the easy ease animation and tweak them precisely.
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For links to help with this feature, see the website.
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I’ll continue to adjust my zoom animation until I’m happy.
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I’ll then go on to add a second text layer for my movie tagline, sentient shadow, and animate this subtitle in towards the end of the existing zoom.
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Before you continue to the next explainer, practice animating using keyframes.
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In the next explainer, I’m going to add an expression to the video to make it flicker ominously, then animate a light flare to burn out my movie title to a bright white.