Hey, in this video were going to look at creating a type animation in after effects. A nice simple one, just to get us going in after effects.

So were going to grab the type tool, click that once. Now in the middle of our stage here were going to click once, and you'll see we get given a new line once you start typing, lets type in, I'm going to type in BYOL. So I'm going to select it all, so just drag a box over it, select it and I'm going to pick a font. So the fonts over here under character window, if you cant see the character panel, go to window, and you should see it in there, character, to bring it up. And I'm going to make my a little bit bigger. And pick a font, any font, doesn’t matter what font you use. So I'm going to use museo, my favourite new one. I'm going to use the museo slab. 700, size wise, in terms of the drop down menu here you can pick this, its your standard fonts. They only go up to 72 for some magic reason. What you can do though is with it selected watch this. You can just obviously type in there, you can click in here and make it 120 but you'll find that everything in after effects is what’s called ‘scrubbable’ it means that it can be clicked and dragged across. So if I hover above any of these blue things, I'm going to use font size, click, hold and drag it to the right and you can see it updates my font size on the right side. Left down, and right up. So get it up to a big ish size, mines up to 210. I'm not too worried. To physically move it around now, go to this tool here, it’s a little black arrow called the selection tool. So click this, I'm going to move it down and I've got a font, I've got a colour.

Now if yours is coming out a different colour, highlight the font with the text tool and here’s your colour thing here. You can pick some basic black and white or you can click on thus white or black box here, the bigger version and you can use this to scroll up and down. To get the hue, once you’ve picked a hue, I'm going to pick something in there. And you can click in here to pick the colour, can you see it updating here on the right, so you have to click in here. if you want it to be pure white, you click and drag it up to the corner or down here to the black. I'm going to pick something in this murky blue, I'm going to move it and make it a bit more green. Click okay.

The other thing you might notice is that its pretty pore quality. You can see on my screen here, well it depends on how you're viewing your video; you might stick it to HD. But in terms of mine, mines viewing at what’s called quarter, yours is probably defaulting to auto and probably got full. It just means that, with it set to auto its going to try and guess, is your machine old and crappy, it might go auto, it might go down to quarter automatically but if you're machines reasonably good and its not being stretched out at the moment, its probably going to default to full. So leave it on auto and it will jump up and down, as it needs to. If you want to force it, say you want to see the quality of the image, you can force it to be full. I often force it to be full, just because my machines pretty good and I like to always look at it as good quality. But that’s not always true, you might have to jump it down to quarter, it just means quarter quality. It doesn’t change the output of it, the quality is still when you finally render it, its going to be as good as you make it. It’s going to be full HD this one. it just means while you're previewing it its going to be a little bit lower quality.

Alright, so to do our animation, were going to make sure our timeline is all the way back here, this things called our CTI, our current time indicator. No body calls it that though it’s the play head. So we’re just going to call it the play head, so were going to drag it along, right to the zero, zero. You can tell when its 00.00 over here on the left. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom out a little bit. We were on fit before, so I'm going to zoom out to maybe 50% just so I can see the edges. Now you might be working on a really big iMac so you'll be able to see it at full, depending on your screen, I'm working on my little laptop here so I've got it at 50%. What you can also do is for shortcuts for zooming in and out, its really common if you hold down the control key and hit plus, it zooms in and minus it comes out. If you're on a mac, hold down command plus and minus to zoom in and out.

Right, so, what id like to do is my animations going to start off here, on the right. So I'm just going to click and drag it with my selection tool. And what were going to do is were going to animate this layer here called BYOL. We’re going to twirl down the edge, were going to twirl down transform and this is where our basic animation happens. You can see we can animate something called the anchor point, the position where it is on the page, the scale of it, the rotation and how see through it is with the opacity. So, to the beginning here, I want to set my little key frame for position. To do that, can you see this little guy down here, he's quite small, he's a stopwatch, literally I'm going to click the stopwatch and it’s going to start watching what I do. So I'm going to click it, and now it’s thinking and watching what I'm doing. So what its done, its put a key frame here, this little diamond to say at frame 0 I am here at this x and y position. And if I move it along a little bit, how far, it’s up to you. I'm going to go maybe a second and a half. And watch this, I'm going to click hold and drag it across. If you just drag it just go will nilly, if you hold shift while you're dragging it drags it across perfectly straight, its up to you. Can you see its put another key frame in there at a different position.

So my play head here, there he is, is off screen but when I get across to this one, he's on screen. So drag your play head back, hit space bar on your keyboard, preview it. And it slides in. its not very exciting, its just sliding across but yeah, well done. We've done our first bit of animation in after effects. Two key frames, a bit of boring type and it slides in and we are awesome.

Alright, one thing you might notice is mines a little bit jumpy compared to yours, yours might be a little bit more jumpy, when I hit space bar, what were going to do is keep an eye on this info panel here. If you don’t have the info panel, go to window and find it, there he is there. Make sure he's on and what you're going to do is hit space bar, I'm just going to keep an eye over here, and it’s previewing perfectly. How I know its not previewing perfectly, its jumpy and it will go red over here and it will just give you an indication on how fast it’s trying to play. Watch this, if I adjust my key frame a little bit. If I hit space bar now, watch what happens over here, if I hit space bar, it’s trying its best and it caught up with it fine. You might have it where your computer might be a little bit old or full up. It might be running pretty slowly. What ends up happening is it'll play once and try its best to get through and then when it loops back around it will play nice. Can you see mines not quite keeping up but then it plays a second time and its all happy days. Mostly happy days. Its dropping off a little bit, all I have to do is drop it down to half, hit space bar. And it will play oh its still not quite keeping up even at that low quality. The reason mine is doing so badly is because I've got screen capturing happening on mine, so that you can follow along obviously with the videos and it stresses my poor little machine out a little bit. So I'm going to back to auto and then it can decide itself. See its decided half.

Alright, so that’s our first bit of animation, its slides in, the next thing were going to do is get it to pause for a little while. Which is what its doing, you can see it just pauses, pauses, pauses and then what were going to do is were going to get it to maybe drop down. So what we’re going to do is towards the end here, so maybe at about 8 seconds, id like it to start falling. So to do that, what we need to do is we want a key frame here to keep it right here. Because if I start dragging it down here, this happens quite a bit with people. Watch this, I've got a key frame here, where its at the beginning, a key frame here where he slides in. but then all the way between this guy and this guy, he's trying his very best to get down there. What I want to do is between these two key frames here is just to wait for me and then I want the animation to happen in this last little piece here. so I'm going to undo, so instead of dragging it down here, what were going to do is were going to manually add a key frame and that’s what this little diamond down here does, watch, if I click it, hey we've got a key frame over here, it just says remain where you are.

So key frame on the right, in the center, another one in the center so he just sits there and then the last one at 9 seconds. For some reason we've got a bit of black video at the end here, that’s my fault, its not meant to be a black video. That’s just my little mix up when I made the little particle video.

So what were going to do is click hold and drag it down. What was the key I hold down to make sure it goes in a straight line? Shift, you got it. So I'm going to drag it just off screen, now I'm going to hit space bar and its going to play, it comes a long, waits for a little while and then the particles fall and then down he goes. Okay, that’s a little bit of animation, it’s a little bit what I like to call power pointy, its not super slick and hasn’t got any neutering movements, all kind of clunky at the moment but well fix that up in another video. But that’s it, well done buddies, we have made our first bit of type animation. Lets make sure we save it and move onto the next video.