Creating the Dancing Figure

In the next few steps, you'll create the text layer that forms the dancing figure in the logo. Before you begin these steps, make sure you've installed the DANCEMAN font from the Chapter 5 folder on the DVD onto your computer system. Each letter in the DANCEMAN font displays a stick figure in a different dance pose; the lowercase letters put the figure in a mirror image of the corresponding uppercase figure's position.

Once the font is installed, you should see DANCEMAN listed in the Font Family menu in the After Effects Character palette. Now you're ready to go:

1.	Click the Horizontal Type tool, and then set the Font Family to DANCEMAN and the Text Size to 150 in the Character palette. Setting the text properties
2.	Click in the box at the left end of the logo, and type the uppercase letter A. Instead of the letter A, a stick figure appears. Adding the dancing stick figure
3.	Expand the A text layer and its text properties in the Timeline.
4.	At time 0;00, click the stopwatch for the Source Text property to create its first keyframe. Creating the first Source Text keyframe
5.	Go to time 0;05, and change the letter A to uppercase B. By animating the Source Text, you're making the figure appear to dance.
6.	Continue changing the letter every five frames. You can either type new letters until you reach the end of the timeline (using both uppercase and lowercase letters if you prefer) or stop after you've made several keyframes and then copy and paste those to the end. We used only six letters to create the figure's six positions in our final movie and then duplicated those keyframes throughout the remaining Timeline.

Adding more Source Text keyframes

Adding the remaining Source Text keyframes

Click the Ram Preview button in the Time Controls palette to see the stick figure groove.