Create fluid text animations using motion blur and easing

Learn how to bring your text to life with polished, natural-looking animations.

Published May 28, 2026

00:01

Introduction

With some animations, you might notice that the movement doesn't look quite natural or maybe it looks jerky.

I'm Sarah, and in this tutorial, I'll show you a few simple ways to smooth out your text animations, so they glide across the screen.

00:13

Setting up text layers and final positions

The first thing we want to do is create our text layers and place them in the composition at their final location, where we want them to be at the end of the animation.

If you want more information on how to get started with this, check out my tutorial Adding Text to a Composition.

Your text placement is completely up to your own artistic expression, but if you would like to make sure that the layers are aligned with each other, you can easily do that using the Align panel.

Simply select two layers and choose the Align button that corresponds to how you want them to look.

For example, I want these two layers here to be aligned with each other.

With both of them selected, we can choose the Align Vertically button to make them even.

Now that we have our text laid out, we're ready to work on our animation.

00:57

Creating and staggering position keyframes

The first thing we're going to do is create Position keyframes for the current position of these layers, by selecting the Stopwatch in the Properties panel.

Once we've done that, we'll move to the beginning of the Timeline and create three more keyframes by selecting the Diamond.

With the Current Time Indicator, or CTI, lined up with the first keyframes, we're going to play with the Position value until the text layers are all offscreen, in the direction from which we want them to animate.

Now we'll take these and stagger them by dragging them in the Timeline, so that each one will come on at a different time.

We want the keyframes to be fairly close together for a quick movement.

After some adjustments to get the timing where we want it, we have a perfectly nice text animation, but we can still make it look smoother than this.

01:44

Smoothing animation with motion blur

Let's turn on Motion Blur.

We'll go to the top of the Composition panel and enable Motion Blur for the composition.

Then we'll select all of the text layers and turn on the Motion Blur toggle.

If you don't see this option, select Toggle Switches/Modes at the bottom of the Layer panel to make it appear.

Now when we preview the animation, we can see the blur effect in action.

One more thing we can do to make this animation even smoother is enable easing on the keyframes.

To do this, select and drag to highlight all of the keyframes.

Right click one of the keyframes and go down to the Keyframe Assistant option.

In this menu we'll select Easy Ease.

We can also use the F9 shortcut with the keyframes highlighted to enable this setting.

The effect is subtle, but this makes the animation smoother, letting the layer naturally slow to a stop at the final position, instead of stopping abruptly.

I think our final product looks much more polished than where we started, and it would look great in any motion graphic.

Keep these tips in mind when you're working on your own projects.

Happy animating!

What you’ll learn

Align text boxes

Use the tools in the Align panel to ensure you’re text boxes are perfectly aligned.

Enable Motion Blur

The Motion Blur effect smooths out the animation, making it look more fluid.

Add easing

Easy Ease gives the animated property a more natural start and stop by gradually accelerating at the beginning and decelerating toward the end.

Instruction by: Sarah John

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