let's create this swing text animation create a new composition. I'll just call this one. Swing text. Five seconds is fine 1920 by 10 80 1st. I'm going to create a background. So command why to bring up our new solid settings or layer new solid and choose whatever color you want that's our background. And I'm going to lock that in place next let's add our text. And when I build out my connect typography or just my titles, I like to build out the entire scene with all the texts and then animate everything. That is just how I like to work under characters. I'm using the futura font. Let's make it white and then let me just create our text. You I think this is a little too big. So let's just take that dragon down and then I'll duplicate it, making sure our shape path visibility is on, drag it down and I'm holding the shift key to lock it as I drag it down so it stays straight aligned with this top one. Are take my selection tool again, then duplicate drag down and awesome. So build that o...

ut. And then I also want you to move the anchor point to the top of each text layer because we wanted to rotate from that anchor point. So taking my anchor point holding the command button to bring it to the top center for all of these. Cool so what we can do is actually animate the first one and then Copy and paste those settings to the 2nd 2 layers. So with the you text selected. Let's turn on three D. Actually let's do that for both of these other layers. Then press r we're going to be rotating the X rotation. So like I always like to do, I'd like to set my endpoint first. So let's go to say around four seconds and set a key frame for exploitation. This is our landing point, Then go back to zero seconds and let's rotate this backwards Now. This is a little confusing for some people. So typically you would think that rotating at 90° would be perfectly sort of straight and you wouldn't see it because if you rotate 360° it rotates completely one full turn and then splitting that by four. It should be kind of perfectly horizontal but that's not how it works with an after effects composition depending on where a layer is. You might have to adjust the starting rotation point. So I'm going to rotate this to something like about 98. So our 90's yeah 98 to start out with and we'll start from there because we want to swing in like so But we wanted to swing in up and then back and forward. So let's set another key frame around one second and we're going to rotate it all the way up to like negative 40 which is actually bringing it in front of the camera or towards you as the viewer Then let's go back to two seconds, rotate it back To something like And you can play around with these numbers. But so I'm swinging up to 40, Back to 25 up to what's to do negative 10 And then back to zero. So if I play through this you'll see it swing on and okay it's kind of lame. What we have to do is add some easy easing and play with the timing. So select all of our key frames F nine on our keyboard. And now let's go into our graph editor. So just like we did with the bouncing ball. What needs to happen is it needs to sort of hang up in time when it reaches the peak of its swing so it's swinging down, it gets faster faster faster and then when it goes up it slows down. So make sure we're on the speed graph. And then let's select all of these layers are all these key frames and we're just going to drag them in so you can see now if I select all the layers are all the key frames and then take the points or these handles. It affects all of the key frames which is a quick way to effect the speed of multiple key frames. So that's pretty cool. The one key frame that I don't need to do that on is this first one because it's going to be going fast already. It doesn't have to slow into this animation right here. So I'm going to take this first handle, drag it to the left. That's pretty cool. But let's go back to our regular view out of the graph editor and let's just make this a little bit shorter. So this first one about their take these ones in like so with a swing unlike the bouncing ball it kind of gets slower and slower and slower. The bouncing ball when it bounced it got faster and faster and faster until the last little bounce. But now it kind of swings fast. Slow, slow slow. So let's make this first one a little bit less fast or quick. And we'll also add motion blur to all these layers. So for all these layers select the motion blur and enable it right here for our timeline. Cool that looks pretty darn good. We can play with this, finesse the speed but now you have your basic three D. Swinging text animation. I can take all of these key frames, copy them. Just command C. Control C. If you're on a pc then it's like both of these other layers, selecting one shift, clicking the next one and pasting it. It's a command V. So here's what I was talking about with the rotation. So if I bring up the X rotation by pressing you for all my key frames At 98° back. The awesome text is really on the frame so I want to crank this down to Something like and then for the our text probably something like 92. Let's swing that on and that looks pretty good. Loop it a little bit quicker so I can just watch. Yeah that looks pretty good. One thing that makes this animation look better is staggering the animation. So the first one comes down and then as soon as the you text swings down the R. Tech starts to fall down so let's stagger it. So my selection tool just drag this layer to the right. Let's go to where the our text swings down right about there and then start the awesome text right there too. You can kind of see that it staggers and it looks like it's flopping down. That's our basic swinging text animation. And the one that I created originally we have this sort of exit where they all swing around the vertical or the y axis and they disappear. That way. An easy way to do that is with a null object. A null object is basically an invisible object that you can use to affect other layers that are parented to it. So let's walk through that to explain it a little bit more clearly to create an old object, go to layer new no object. Now when I did that, nothing happened. You see this little mark up here that shows where the quote unquote anchor point is for the null object but there's really nothing there When I export this, you're not going to see this little red square which is for that null object, it's just this sort of invisible layer. Think of it as an adjustment layer. If you've worked with adjustment layers in Photoshop not that it adjusts everything beneath this layer but that you can parent things to it. So instead of having to rotate all of these three layers individually and also instead of having to pre comp them, which we could do, we could pre comp these three layers and then spin that pre comp out with a rotation animation on this composition. We can parent them. So let's take these three layers, parent them to the null object. Make the null object a three D. Layer, bring up rotation by pressing R. And now when I spin the y rotation you can see that it is rotating our text. And actually because our text is still swinging down it kind of looks pretty cool. It's kind of like this matrix C kind of effect. That's kind of cool actually. But what we're going to do is just rotate them out once they get down so around 3.5 seconds let's set a key frame for the y rotation. And then at 4.5 seconds let's rotate to the right so we're gonna go to the left go negative actually with our dragging and about their It's a -90. So now if we play through this end part let's just show you what happens. So it rotates and it rotates off pretty much completely which is good. But just to be safe I'm going to trim these three layers to this point. So selecting these three layers, I'm going to press option right bracket. So that's alright bracket for Windows users and now they are off completely. Let's Easy ease this text or these these key frames so right click key frame assistant. Easy, Easy or F. nine. And then let's play with this speed because it doesn't pop. So let's go into our graph editor, Drag the two points in like so that has more of a pop one thing that I did with this text actually which is pretty cool. Is it sort of rotates back and then it rotates off so it rotates to the left and then it rotates right and it disappears. There's different ways to do that. I could create another key frame here where it rotates to the right. Actually. It's writing rotating to the left but are why rotation number is dragged to the right and you could play around with the speed of that and that could work. But there's an easier way to do this and that's with our graph editor. So again going into our graph editor this time we're going to our value graph. So we see that our value graph for the x rotation goes from zero 2 -90 and that's that number right there. That green highlighted number. If I select this key frame and take this handle and drag up what happens is that now it's rotating up so it's rotating too positive Like 15 and then back to negative 90. So that's how you can quickly get that sort of opposite rotation before it rotates off. And doing those little subtle animations. Like that makes it look a little bit more professional, makes it look a little bit more dynamic. So let's increase just a little bit cool. It's kind of like revving up to go, it starts then it speeds up and gets off our frame. Let's go back to our whole composition play through this and this is a really great animation that you can use for all kinds of kinetic typography for all kinds of professional motion graphics for your own projects. It's one of the most frequently used text animations that I use for introducing new text to my viewers. Awesome. If you have any questions let me know otherwise in the next lesson we're going to be moving onto this other composition. Working in three D. Space, literally creating this three D. Space scene

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.

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Lesson Info

53. Swinging 3D Text 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