One way to add character to your text animations is by bringing in just one letter at a time.
Hi, I'm Sarah, and I'm going to show you how to do exactly that, so you can create custom text animations for your projects.
To animate a text layer one letter at a time, we're going to use an Animator, which we'll add by opening our text layer properties and then selecting Animate.
Let's add the Position Animator.
Right away the new Position properties are added.
Here is the Range Selector which is the property we need in order to animate each letter on its own.
The Start and End parameters are what we're going to edit to do this animation.
We'll start our animation by dragging the horizontal value for the Position until the text is no longer visible off the right side of our composition.
This will give us something to animate back onto the composition.
Make sure you're doing this with the Position parameter underneath the Animator and not on the layer itself.
Adjusting the position on the layer will move the entire layer, which is not what we're trying to do here.
Now that our text is where we want it to start, add a keyframe for the Start parameter near the beginning of the Timeline.
Leave the value at 0, then move the Current Time Indicator, aka the CTI, down, and add a second keyframe by changing the Start value to 100.
The text will now animate in coming from the right.
If we have text with multiple words, we're going to want to skip over the space between them when the letters are animating in.
To make that happen, we will go down to the Animator parameters and open the Advanced dropdown.
Under Based On, we'll open the dropdown and change it to Characters Excluding Spaces.
For a finishing touch, let's add in an animation for the opacity of the text as it comes on screen.
We'll line up the CTI with the first keyframe and select the Stopwatch next to the Opacity parameter of the text layer to create a starting keyframe.
We want the text to start out invisible and fade up, so we'll change the Opacity to 0 here.
Then we'll move down to the second existing keyframe and create another one for the Opacity and change this one to 100.
Now when we preview the animation, we'll see a nice fade up effect as the text comes onscreen.
There are so many more properties available to animate that we didn't even touch on today.
Experiment with them in your projects and see what you can come up with.
