in this project, we're going to create this animated text bubble that is a very, very popular effect people use when showing what people are texting on screen. So you can follow along with this project called texting or you can just bring in the texting video file and create it from scratch. So to start, let's just bring in that texting.mp four file and drag it into a new composition. So what we wanna do is first create this first sort of bubble and then we'll add our text to it. So to create a bubble, what I'm going to start out with is the rounded rectangle tool, click off of any layer in your timeline. So you're creating a shape and let me change my stroke to zero and change my fill to white. And then let's just create this nice little bubble. Cool. So to create that little, you know the little tip of the bubble? What I'm going to use is the pen tool. Let me zoom in so I can see a little bit better. And just using the pen tool, I'm just going to click and create sort of another just...

little tip like that and close it down. It's fine. Cool, so that looks pretty darn cool. I can go in here and if I want to make any changes to the path, I can get a little bit more rounded perhaps. Yeah, that looks, I like that a lot. Cool. So let me just rename this as bubble and then let's add some text. So using the text tool you can type in, What did I say in this other one. Mimi had the donut shop at three. I was guessing what this guy was texting from this video clip. Okay so meet me at the donut shop at three dot dot dot. Okay now let's just change this, make this smaller, gonna make it black, going to turn off the stroke by just clicking and dragging this, making sure that's at zero. And let me see for this one. Yeah I use upper and lower case so turn off all caps and put it sort of in the center and may make it a little bit bigger. Cool. Okay so now we have our text, let's make it a little bit closer together. Yeah that's good. Okay cool so the first thing that we can do is animate this being popping on like so so that's just a rotation animation and a scale animation. So first I want to parent the text to the bubble. So take our parents pick, whip and drag it to the bubble. And then for the bubble, if we rotate it by pressing r we can rotate it down. But I want to make sure that the anchor point is at the very end of this little tip. So with the pan behind tool let me find my anchor point, it's kind of hard to see. It's right here. Let me just put this down at the very bottom of this tip. Okay so let's set a rotation for zero right here at one second and then go back in time and rotate down I think. So then press asked to bring up scale set at one second. Set a scale to 100% and then go back And set it to zero. So that kind of pops on but it doesn't pop on with as much pizzazz as this one. See this one it kind of bounces on. So first let's press you You twice to bring up both key frames. Easy ease them by pressing F nine on the keyboard. That helps but it's not amazing. So click the graph editor with the speed graph, let's just select both key frames and drag them in. So this adds that pop that I'm always adding but I also wanted to kind of pop on and then shrink. So see how this pops on it over rotates and over scales and then rotates back and scales down. And that can be done with the value graph. So if we click on scale we click on the key frame on the right, what we can do is take the handle and drag it up. So this is going to actually make it go bigger than 100% and then scaled down. And then if we take the rotation, Click on the 2nd 1 and then we click the handle and drag down it's going to rotate from 107° two -7 and then back to zero. Hey that looks pretty darn cool I think. Okay so that is our animation of the bubble. Then we want to animate on our text and that's actually very simple to do in after effects that is using the typewriter effect. So type writer. So we have typewriter right here under anime in. So go to right when this pops on around one second and drag the typewriter effect on here. If you press you on your keyboard With this layer selected you see two key frames for This animator that was just added for the range selector. So it's going from 0% to 100%. And basically what that's saying is that it's animating on from 0% of the letters to 100%. So if I change this 100 at the end so let's just move that key frame right there and turned it to 50. It would only animate on 50% of the letters right? So I undid that. So this is pretty cool. I might want it to start sort of animating on a little bit earlier. So let me take them move them a little bit earlier. So they're animating it on as the bubble pops up. one thing that I don't like about this though is that the text goes on all at the same pace and when you're texting you know it goes on sort of sporadically. So you might text meet me at the donut shop and then there might be a pause And then at 3 3 and then a pause and then dot dot dot. So what we can do is basically animate the time. So let's go to right when the donut shop is on Set a key frame, so that's at 76%. Let's take this to the left and then copy it and paste it. So now there's this pause, so meet me at the donut shop, let's actually make it even faster, drag those to the left. Meet me at the donut shop pause pause a little bit longer and then at three and then we're gonna it's another key frame, There's gonna be another pause. So let's copy this key frame at pieced it. So now there's these pauses that make it a little bit more organic. Yeah. See I like that. Meet me at the donut shop at three dot dot dot and this guy is like totally picking his beard and his nose which is kind of funny, cool. So that is cool. And then what we did here was we just had it fade off, it kind of rises up and fades off as another text comes in and I thought that was just kind of a cool way to transition to the next text. So first what I'll do is go to after this text goes on, press p for our position of the bubble, set a position key frame there and then go forward about a second and then move it up. And what I'm gonna do is also for press T. For the bubble At the very beginning of that position animation set the opacity at 100%. Press you to bring up all of our key frames so that we can see where it goes all the way up. And then at this key frame decrease the opacity to zero. So that's cool but when you parent things opacity doesn't affect the parenting. So even though the position of the text moves the opacity of the text doesn't change. So I'm gonna have to copy these two opacity key frames by dragging over them copying them command C then clicking on my text and pacing them command V. So now both of them fade off at the same time. And if I press you on my keyboard you can see those two key frames for opacity. Are there? Okay so when this pops up we want our other bubble to pop on with whoever is texting back that says sounds good. Num num num. Okay so what we can do is just duplicate the bubble so duplicate. Put this on top. Press you and what I'm going to do is delete the scale and rotation keys at the beginning. Okay then I'm going to drag this over to the right and press youth or P. When I have bubble selected because I want this to rise up as the bubble is rising off. So here when the bubble one is off, let's set a position key frame for this, this one and then over here let's drag it down. Okay? And we're going to fade it on. So set a key frame for 100% here And then zero at the beginning. Okay, that's cool. But this thing is not the right orientation so we want it to be flopped so to flop it so that the point of the bubble is on the right right click go to transform and click flip horizontal. So now it's horizontally flipped. Now the problem is that because we flipped it now the position is all out of whack. What I can do is use the anchor point which is our saving grace in all of these situations and drag it over to the right. So using the anchor point, I can drag this over to the right and then maybe I want to just drag the whole layer over to the right so it staggered just a little bit surprised you. So see how that key frames are now staggered just a little bit and then change the color of it so that it's something different. Maybe like a blue so that we see that's different than him texting so we can see that's from someone else. The other thing too is that I want to drop the opacity actually of this bubble. So here the bubble is a little transparent, you can see the background. I like that a little bit. So actually what I'm going to have to do is press T. And for this key frame right here set it at once try 75. Yeah that works. So now for this bubble We'll set this key frame where it's 100% to 75. And this one as well to 75. Okay, so it stays at 75 and then let's add our text. So take our text tool. Sounds good. Um Num num and for this one I didn't have it typing on because it makes more sense that it would just appear with the text. You don't see someone writing to you typing it out. So here when it's already on the screen, let's parent it to the bubble too. And then let's copy and paste all of this opacity. So all four opacity key frames, copy them, paste them to the text. Maybe let's make the color of this shape a little bit lighter. Still want it to be blue but just a little bit lighter. Meet me at the donut shop at three. Sounds good. Nom nom nom. You know, maybe you want it to be a little bit more of a pause, something like that, you can play around with it. Cool. So this is a basic sort of text animation. Something that a lot of people you'll see in real world projects and real world Tv shows commercials really everywhere. You're seeing these kind of text bubbles. Now you can get fancy, you can add different effects and change the bubble style so it's a little bit different change how the text appears, the font, everything like that. But now, you know, the basic process and how to come up with something that's fairly clean and professional. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in another project.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Practice Files

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Philip Ebiner

Professional video & course creator, photographer & teacher to 1mil+ students; 10+ years experience with 1000+ videos.

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Text Bubble Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Lesson Info

39. Text Bubble Animation

Lessons

Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates

Understand the After Effects Workspace

Starting a New Composition

CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage

Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline

Using the Basic After Effects Tools

Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors

Working in the Timeline

Layer Properties

Quiz: After Effects Basics

Animating in After Effects

Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations

Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral

Using the Graph Editor

Challenge - Bouncing Ball

Solution - Bouncing Ball

Quiz: Animating with Keyframes

Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects

Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths

Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients

Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag

Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers

Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear

Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers

Easily Reverse Complicated Animations

Playing with Time

Blend Modes

Stabilize Shaky Footage

CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts

CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time

CC 2019 Content Aware Fill

CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates

Quiz: Important After Effects Skills

Intro to Motion Graphics Projects

Clean Lower Third

Logo Reveal Animation Bumper

Colorful Transition

Text with Mask Path Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Weather App 1

Weather App 2

Weather App 3

Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects

Flat Animation Challenge

Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene

Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect

Removing Green Screen Background

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect

Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge

Intro to 3D

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Build Out Your 3D Composition

Animating Our 3D Scene

Create Stars in After Effects

Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)

Using the Rotoscope Tool

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation

Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool

Easy Screen Replacement with Masks

Replacing a Screen Version 2

Screen Replacement with Mocha

CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin

Quiz: Rotoscoping

Using the Puppet Pin Tool

Animating Your Puppet Pins

Animated Blinking Eyes

Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds

CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool

Quiz: Screen Replacements

Applying Text Animation Presets

Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn