Shop Vac (kinetic typography animation)

This kinetic typography music video incorporates familiar brand shapes without really stepping on the brands themselves. Adobe people noted it, as it was created using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere and Toon Boom Animate. A labor of love by Jarrett Heather, it took somewhere between 500-1000 hours to finish.

For tutorials and other examples, see Kinetic typography as storytelling.

Kinetic typography as storytelling

Type in motion is increasing popular, as seen in Kinetic typography as a storytelling technique a new survey by Lauren M. Rabaino at the journalism blog 10,000 Words...

Read the rest in Kinetic type in After Effects at Pro Video Coalition.

Tagxedo: tag clouds with styles & stencils

Taking tag clouds a step beyond Wordle to tag clouds with styles & stencils is Tagxedo, which seems to have been done in Microsoft Silverlight (via jnack). You can add a custom stencil in the 2nd pass edit.

Update: Wordlings from Pete Warden seem similar at first glance, http://wordlin.gs/.

Wiggle Transform text

Andrew Devis posted a new tutorial, Wiggle Transform & Text in AE: which shares some basics on Wiggle Transform and converting text to shapes with the Layer menu command "Create Shapes from Text."

See also the CMG video on Wiggle Transform and Alter shapes with path operations in AE Help. Chris and Trish also posted overviews on Shapes in AE Apprentice #9: Shape Layers and The Shape of Things to Come: Shape Layers Introduction.

Wiggly Text selectors are described in AE Help, along with an example found in Examples and resources for text animation. In some earlier video tutorials, Chris and Trish Meyer explained animating text in After Effects, and Aharon Rabinowitz explored Text animators in After Effects Text Tips 2 and After Effects Text Tips 3 and has a few tuts on Shapes too.

Moshun and similar 'animated fonts'

Via the plural blog is Moshun, an "animated font" by Calango. Creator Jeroen Krielaars says:

"Every animated character is on it's own shapelayer in Adobe After Effects. Therefore every character has to be positioned by hand. But since this font is suited for short stuff, instead of bodytext, it's still fairly quick to set up."

Moshun from Jeroen Krielaars on Vimeo.


Bran Dougherty-Johnson noted similar efforts -- Colin Sebestyen's Futura livefont and a 2008 Digital Kitchen thing for the Webbies:

The Beast - Futura Livefont Motion from Colin Evoy Sebestyen on Vimeo.

Webby Awards 2008 Animated Alphabet from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.

“Right To Left” languages in After Effects

UPDATE: Creative Cloud incorporates RTL text in the release of June 2016 (Arabic video; Hebrew demo).




UPDATE:  Typewriter effects in After Effects at PVC (August 2013) updates the status of Right-to-Left writing systems like Arabic and Hebrew.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Saqib Naqvi shows off many tips for Accessing “Right To Left” Languages Within After Effects, a video tutorial at AEtuts:

'Right to left languages are widely used in After Effects, but traditionally these languages are not treated like text in After Effects. We have to instead covert them to vector graphics which limit many possibilities that are only possible with text layers. In this Quick Tip we will learn to enable languages and manipulate “RTL” text right within After Effects [and Photoshop and Illustrator].'

Simpler but limited solutions might be had by using After Effects scripts from AE Scripts: TextReverser (which reverses the direction of selected text layer), ArabicText (which maintains the integrity of Arabic medial letteforms), and RTL Animation Preset Typewriter-RTL. Hebrew users might look at this tutorial from Eran Stern for an alternate way to enter Hebrew into After Effects.

By the way, check out DecomposeText from AE Scripts, which breaks up text by character, word, or line into separate layers.

Screenfonts: movie typography + Making of a 'Hello Brooklyn' video

Motionworks tweeted about Screenfonts (from The Font Feed), a monthly commentary on the use of fonts in movie poster design, music video and more.

It's a welcome addition to other observed efforts, including various Topher Welsh roundups of motion type on AETuts, the Motion Design Love series Nice Type Tuesday, the Typography Gallery at Motionspire, and Type Tuesday by Brad Chmielewski. See also Four techniques for combining fonts + type videos.

In a recent post on a video made to a remix of Jay-Z’s Hello Brooklyn, Screenfonts author Yves Peters noted that beyond the background on the precursor to Helvetica:

"What’s really interesting is that the author of the music promo also posted a Making Of… video, showing how still images were treated with the Vanishing Point feature in Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe After Effects, to create the illusion of motion and depth. The end result is very impressive."


Making of "Hello Brooklyn" Video from Gregory Solenström on Vimeo.

Useful details about CS5 fonts

Typblography, an Adobe blog on type, posted Useful Details About Creative Suite 5 (CS5) Fonts. CS5 includes a number of new fonts, and eliminates 3 fonts that were part of the CS4 font set: Bell Gothic Std Black, Bell Gothic Std Bold, and Eccentric Std.

Also, some products in CS5 will install a basic font set while other products will install an additional font sets, some of which have to be manually selected in the installation.

See also last year's article on Adobe Clean.

Update: Sarthak from the Fireworks team takes another approach in Default Fonts and CS5 release.

ASCII art in After Effects

This article was updated on Pro Video Coalition as ASCII Art & After Effects.

ArabicText: script for Arabic text flow in AE

UPDATE: Creative Cloud incorporates RTL text in the release of June 2016 (Arabic video; Hebrew demo).



 
UPDATE:  Typewriter effects in After Effects at PVC (August 2013) updates the status of Right-to-Left writing systems like Arabic and Hebrew.

____________________________________

AE Scripts has another script for text manipulation in After Effects, ArabicText, by Salahuddin Taha. Arabic, Hebrew, and other texts are written from right to left, but AE flows letters from left to right in the Composition panel (oddly, the Layer Name stays correct).

TextReverser, from LLoyd Alvarez fixes the flow when the letters are standalone, but broke the letter back into individuals. Arabic is cursive and has medial letterforms, and needed another approach.

Later: There's now an Animation Preset, Typewriter-RTL, that "only works with 2 keyframes that reveal the text from beginning to end."

Four techniques for combining fonts + type videos

Via @daleBradshaw is Four Ways to Mix Fonts from Ask H&FJ, which at base says "keep one thing consistent, and let one thing vary" before explaining their 4 approaches:

1. Use a palette with wit -- use typefaces with complimentary moods to evoke an energetic air
2. Use a palette with energy -- mix typefaces from the same historical period whose families have different features
3. Use a palette with poise -- mix typefaces with similar line quality if they offer different textures
4. Use a palette with dignity -- mix typefaces with similar proportions and give each a different role

Also, check out Choosing Fonts for Annual Reports again from Ask H&FJ.

To see stuff in motion, check out the new roundup on AETuts by Topher Welsh, 25 Amazing Typography Videos, and part of series of round-ups by Motion Design Love, Nice Type Tuesday 10.

UPDATE: in late 2014 Lynda.com featured Foundations of Typography: Choosing and Combining Typefaces with Ina Saltz.

 

An Alphabet Soup of Fake Text Particles

Lester Banks noted a new 65-minute After Effects tutorial by Quba Michalski, Tutorial: Alphabet Soup (Fake Text Particles). Quba says:

"Rather than using Trapcode Particular (which many of you may not have installed) or CC Particle World (which really could use an update to its coordinate system) the project fakes particle simulation through use of text animators. This quite lengthy tutorial is derived from another Video Bits project I created a while ago."

Alphabet Soup Tutorial Preview from Quba Michalski on Vimeo.

Shapeshifter AE: new 3D text extrusion plug-in

Shapeshifter AE is a new 3D text extrusion plug-in for After Effects, soon in beta testing. It's part of a new series of plug-ins from Chris Bobotis of mettle.com, developers of the 3D mesh warp filter Freeform AE.

There's more on options for 3D text in After Effects in 3D Text in After Effects (updated), Must.have.3D.text, and, and other posts tagged . Here's a render of Shapeshifter AE:

700+ pictograms, 60 free fonts, 30 vector packs

From maltaannon and others on Twitter:

• Pictodeck v1.0 is a deck of pictograms for Apple Keynote. It’s a collection of over 700 vector pictograms taken from four different sets: PICOL, Android Icons, Pictoico, Komodo Media, and Freshpixel.
• 50 awesome free fonts for professional design from Design Reviver
• 10 Awesome Free Handwritten Fonts from MyInkBlog
• 61 Fantabulous Fonts For Titles! from AE Tuts
  
• 30 First-Rate Vector Packs. Take Them. They’re FREE…. from Francesco Mugnai

For more, see the "Popular" posts of Smashing Magazine, which has made a cottage industry of these sorts of collections. One example is The Ultimate Collection Of Free Vector Packs.

50 free movie-themed fonts

Topher Welsh collected 50 Free Movie Themed Fonts To Download:

"In this font themed roundup I grab 50 fonts from the far reaches of the interwebz and bring you a huge list of movie themed fonty goodness. Maybe you are making some spoofs, maybe you are into the fan film type of genre…"

Update: Topher earlier posted 17 Amazing Inspirational Typography Videos and 40 Spectacular Typography Videos. See also 18 Creative Examples of Typography in Motion.

CS5 After Effects & Premiere: 64-bit only

In a post at ProVideoCoalition, Simon Hayhurst, Adobe's Sr. Director of Product Management for Dynamic Media, confirmed that After Effects & Premiere will be 64-bit only in CS5. See The Future is 64-bit at PVC [note: Autodesk discreet smoke is 64-bit already] and the FAQ at the CS4 Production Premium page. From the FAQ:

"Adobe continues to prioritize 64-bit support based on the potential user benefits and the complexity of the code transition. At this time, After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro are the only products that we are announcing will be 64-bit only in the next major release."

There's a bit more on this from AE Product Manager Michael Coleman in The future of After Effects is 64-bit native. At this point 64-bit might be a problem only for some people on Windows, but there's plenty of time to upgrade before CS5 (next Spring, assuming the usual release cycle).

Well, that's not quite right, since all your old plug-ins -- on Mac and Windows -- have to be 64-bit too, unless there's some emulation. As Frank Wylie remarked on the AE-List , "Looks like some late nights for the after market plug in folks!"

Update: Dav's Techtable there's more on PremierePro in It's Official: The future of Adobe video is 64 bit

Tutorial Gap Friday

Topher Welsh's generic roundups fill some gaps; here's his latest collection of AE and 3D tutorials added late Thursday: 72 Tutorials For Ya!

Of the ones not mentioned here previously, AETuts' Create Harry Potter Titles by Robert Holtby is not complicated, but you do get a Harry Potter font and see how to use a Bevel and Emboss Layer Style to make text seem like 3D, etc.

Two tutorials for changing Source Text and numbers

VideoHive has a new video tutorial by Topher Welsh , AE Quicktips #5 Changing Source Text. Topher discusses using a single layer to animate a variety of Text Layer messages by changing the Source Text parameter, and hiding the Hold keyframe changes in motion blur.



Meanwhile over at Red Giant in Look Ma! No 3rd-party plug-ins!, Aharon Rabinowitz skips the Hold keyframes to share workarounds for using numeric Text (for game scores and other digital readouts). You can do what he's doing with just the Numbers filter, but a door is opened to other purposes as the tutorial uses a Null, a Slider Control, and 2 expressions by Dan Ebberts:

1. (Not sure why it was needed) Round to the nearest whole number:
s = thisComp.layer(”Null 1″).effect(”Slider Control”)(”Slider”);
Math.round(s)

2. Layer marker triggers addition to current value:
s = effect(”Slider Control”)(”Slider”);
n = 0;
if (marker.numKeys > 0){
n = marker.nearestKey(time).index;
if (marker.key(n).time > time){
n–;
}
}
s + n

Update: in another approach Colin Brady helps you in Overcoming limitations of the Numbers effect in After Effects.

Motion 4 will load LiveType projects?

LiveType is not included with FCS3 but word of mouth says that its functions have been made part of Motion 4. Motion 4 will load LiveType projects, which is good for those who invested in the quirky app that others barely touched. While LiveType remains and launches after an FCS3 install, full functionality in the new suite is an unknown.

Apparently LiveType content appears in the Motion Library and the QuickTime component is also still included, so .ipr files in older sequences still work. LiveType features missing from Motion 4 were not confirmed yet in online e-mail lists and forums, or in the comprehensive documentation for the Pro Apps at Apple's Help Library.

Update: Mark Spencer posted some clarification on Cutter-Talk:

'Yes, you can import a LiveType project into Motion 4 - but you could do that in Motion 3, no new news there. Once there, if you want to make changes to it, you need to open it in LiveType. LiveFonts are available in Motion's Library in Motion 4 - just as they were in Motion 3.

Motion has a new text tool, the Adjust Glyph Tool, that allows for the individual manipulation of glyphs, much as you would do in LiveType - thus giving it more of LiveType's functionality, but not, IMHO, "making it's functions part of Motion 4".

Motion does not include any of LiveType's Textures, Objects, or text animation presets - although it does have plenty of its own content.'

On FinalCutPro-L, Philip Hodgetts mentioned that one missing feature is "about changing the color of the font independent of any shadow, ouline or glow. In Motion they change together, in LT they change independently."

Create a Split-Flap Type Display

Mattias Peresini of the pleasant French AE website mattrunks has done his first English tutorial for AETUTS. Create a Split-Flap Type Display helps you build "displays that are found in train stations and airports, where they typically display departure and/or arrival information and do that cool flipping of letters to display the new information. This tutorial does not show how to create the effect from scratch but instead it is a tutorial to explain how to use the example project file."

For a glimpse at future tutorials check out mattrunks; see for example Effet Coverflow 3D automatique sur After Effects (includes the project in English).

Update: see also Flipside Clock by Brandon Smith, which also creates an old school style of a flip clock using Digieffects Buena Depth Cue v2 Flipside:

Also, check out Flip Clock Stater Project Tutorial by ngambles, who has more info and a project file on his Vimeo pages, and Create An Animated Split Flap Clock by Matas Zaloga: