Chapter11.Raining Slogans

Chapter 11. Raining Slogans

Designing elaborate text animations in After Effects became breathtakingly easy and pretty fun when text Animators were added to the application. Actually, let's qualify that statementanimating text in After Effects became breathtakingly easy and pretty fun if you managed to figure out how to use the text Animators. The text Animator and its group of sidekicks, the Selectors, aren't that difficult to master, but they do take some getting used to when you're accustomed to animating text the old (painfully slow) way.

If you haven't mastered the text Animator and its Selectors yet, then you'll especially welcome the nearly 300 prebuilt text-animation presets provided in version 6.5 of After Effects. Not only can you use the text-animation presets to instantly produce sophisticated text animations, you can also use the results of a preset in the Timeline to explore how the text Animator and Selectors work. That's because the presets all rely upon some combination of text Animators, expressions, and effects.

In this chapter's project, you'll start with several text-animation presets and then work with the results to customize the presets.