Swinging Text Animation in Adobe After Effects
In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at re-creating a popular kinetic animation in After Effects, the swinging text animation. We’ll be using a special swing expression for the movement and you can edit the values and come up with your own variation of the animation. This method is very useful for creating quick and visually appealing text animations and you can also apply it for template creation. So let’s see how it’s done.
Kinetic Swinging Text in AE
As always, we’ll start by creating a new composition, 1920×1080 pixels,
and we’ll create a new text layer – right click and choose “new – text layer” and type in your text.
Click on the down arrow next to the layer and then click on animate and choose “Enable Per Character 3D”.
We’ll click on Animate again and this time we’ll choose rotation
and set the X rotation value to 0 so the text is not visible anymore.
Now we’ll go back to Add and choose “Selector – Expression”, and we’ll paste in the below expression.
Click on the arrow next to the Expression Selector to bring down the Amount property and then alt+click on the Amount and enter the expression:
swings=1.5;
timeOffset=0.50;
v=valueAtTime(time-timeOffset*textIndex/textTotal);
anim=2*Math.PI*v/100;
amp=easeOut(v,0,100,100,0);
Math.cos(anim*swings)*amp;
We’ll also set a keyframe at the beginning for the Amount value so click on the stopwatch. We’ll set the value to 0, move the cursor in time a few seconds and set it to 100
Right now the text will be swinging from the bottom as the anchor point is set at the base of the text so to fix that, we’ll need to go to expand the “more options” menu for the text layer, and for the Grouping Alignment property, turn back the last value until the anchor points align correctly at the top of the text layer.
This will make our animation swing downwards
You can edit the expression further and change values for the swings, which will determine the determine how many times the text will swing, the timeOffset value, which will represent the time in which each individual letter swings down
If you’d like to have the whole text swing rather than having each individual letter swing, you can go to the Expression Selector 1 and change the “Based On” property to “words”
Thank you for taking the time to read this article, please stay tuned for more cool tutorials and tips and tricks on Adobe After Effects and Premiere pro coming soon.
