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Nol Honig on getting right to the art.

The Unlock: Nol Honig on getting right to the art.
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Director/designer/animator Nol Honig pushes past the “shoulds” and into the flow state to make creativity happen.

“I use After Effects every day of my life. I use Photoshop most days. It’s completely invisible to me most of the time…I don’t even think about it. Just get right to the art.”

Nol’s tips on using the Properties panel as a consistent option for editing in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.

Style the text.

In Photoshop, double-click the T on the LITTLE SENEGAL layer to activate the text. With the text selected, use the Properties panel (Window > Properties) to change the character style to Regular and choose left paragraph alignment to mimic Nol’s work.

Save layers for animation.

Save your work (File > Save As) and choose Photoshop (PSD) format to preserve the layers when you import it into After Effects.

Import layered artwork.

In After Effects, choose File > Import > File and select the PSD you created in the previous step. Select Composition — Retain Layer Sizes from Import as, check Create Composition, and click Open. On the next screen, select Editable Layer Styles and click OK.

Edit text properties.

Double-click the composition in the Project panel to open it. Then double-click the title layer in the timeline. This is a precomposition, which includes the type texture and title text.

Alt-click (Windows) or Control-click (macOS) on the title text layer and choose Create > Convert to Editable Text. Use the Properties panel (Window > Properties), just as you would in Photoshop, to modify the font style, alignment, and more.

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Animate the title.

To animate individual letters, you first need to convert editable text into shapes. To do this, Alt-click (Control-click) the title layer and select Create Shapes from Text. After Effects hides the original editable type layer so you can edit it later if needed.

Select a letter in the Layer Contents section of the Properties panel. Then, in the Shape Properties and Shape Transform sections, add keyframes to animate the Opacity, Position, Scale, and other properties.

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Export the animation.

Save your file and then choose Composition > Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Choose a format like H.264, which works well across platforms. Click the blue text in the Output File field to name the file and specify the export location.

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