How to Design Text Animation in Adobe After Effects 7

So let's start this lesson by opening up 02-StormTrackerLogo-START.aep, just double-click on that and in the Examples folder, I want you to double-click on the StormTrackerLogo.mov and we are going to preview this and just discuss a little bit what we are going to learn in this lesson. So let's press Play.

So the first thing we are going to do is actually design our text animation. The second thing we are going to do is create our 7 logo and the last thing we will do is create our extrusion for our logo. We can stop this from playing and let's close this. Let's toggle collapse the Examples folder and let's begin the lesson.

So let's go up to Composition and create a New Composition. I want you to name this Text. You will use the Preset NTSC DV and the Duration of 5 seconds, let's click OK. The next thing we need to do is type out our storm. So select the Text tool and I am actually going to switch from the Standard Workspace to the Text Workspace. I am also going to stretch this down just a little bit.

So we can see a little bit more of our Composition window and let's start typing. So click once and let's type STORM in all capitals, S-T-O-R-M and we can drag that to the center and let's make sure we have a couple of things before we move on. So the font needs to be Impact, the Type Size let's set that to about 75. So I am going to highlight this again. Let's just type in 75.

The Text Height and the Text Width, make sure both of those are on a 100 and your tracking should be at zero and your Paragraph should be Centered. If you want, you can tighten up the kerning a little bit by holding down the Option key or on the PC the Alt key and using the left and right arrow. So I can tighten that up just a hair or loosen that up if I need. Actually I am just going to tighten up the R and the M. Let's get our Move tool and let's move on. So I am going to stretch up the Timeline a little bit because I want to make some changes in the Scale and in the Position.

So to do that, easy shortcuts, P for Position, holding down Shift, S for Scale. So let's move our Position to about 300 and actually to be faster just to type it if you want. And on our Y position, let's set that to 240 and we are going to want this a lot larger. So I am going to change in the Scale, let's break the chain because I am going to want this wider than it is taller and in the X value, let's put that to 215 and in the Y value let's set that to 175.

Now we will also want to convert this layer to 3D. So under the cube let's just click that that will convert it to 3D and you can see we have our X, Y and Z positioning and let's collapse this.


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