We’ve Spelled Out How To Create Dynamic, Hand-Drawn Text

We’ve Spelled Out How To Create Dynamic, Hand-Drawn Text

on May 23rd 2011 with 13 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Requirements: After Effects, A Pen & Paper, and a Scanner/Camera
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Run Time: 17:06 min
Download Source Files

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

One of the beautiful things about After Effects is how versatile it is. People use it for all sorts of different reasons and with the recent Breath Of Life Series, we saw how to bring your hand drawings to life. Today, we’ll look at applying this same idea of importing hand drawn assets to generate an attractive, dynamic text effect. Would work well with this Quick Tip. :)

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .m4v

File size: 32.8 MB

 
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I'm a freelance motion graphic designer who specializes in start up videos. I live in Northern Idaho so I'm pretty used to working remotely. I love the fact that I get to get up every day and play with After Effects!  

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  • Forward

    Thanks, this is very useful. How did you get the drawn texture itself animated? Pointing to the seconds in the video would be appreciated.

  • http://RemingtonM.com Remington McElhaney
    Author

    Hi,

    Are you referring to the fill inside of the text? I drew it the same way as the stoke (frame by frame) and then when I was finished, I drew the letter again 4 different times. Then looped it to get that effect.

  • http://oprust.dk Kenneth Dahlin

    Hi and thanks for the tutorial!

    I’ve been looking for different ways to make this entirely within after effects and an indie font, and am going to try some different techniques. (the main point is to make it so the text can be easily altered)

    Your tutorial has a great unique look, that cant really be recreated if you use digital text but its hard if you have to use it for like a whole page of text.

    its called “line boil” by the way.

    • Remington McElhaney
      Author

      Your welcome!

      Yeah, I’m assuming you’ve watched Andrew Kramer’s tutorial by now. It doesn’t give you a lot of control with the look but I think if you spent some time with that technique you could get some pretty good results with strokes.

      The great thing about this, is once you put in the work and do the alphabet your pretty much done. I spent close to 30 hours on this project, so it’s definitely time consuming. But as you said, it gives you a result that’s very hard to recreate digitally. Once the letters are drawn out and taken into After Effects, all you’d have to do it rearrange them to change your text.

  • Christina

    Wow, great tutorial! I did the letters using a drawing pad and Illustrator, let me say, the effect was quite close to the one you have and I didn’t spend much time on drawing the letters :) Just mentioning :)) Otherwise: great tut!!!!

    • Remington McElhaney
      Author

      That’s awesome Christina! That’s definitely a good way to do it if you have access to a tablet. I’d love to see your result!

  • Sebastian

    Have you been inspired by an existing font ?
    I’d like to found something similar.
    Thanks for this tutorial. Very helpful.

  • Joe Ma

    How about using a type like font and the liquify plugin??

  • asd

    the paper is still.. not realistic imo

    • http://RemingtonM.com Remington McElhaney
      Author

      It’s a stock photo of an actual piece of paper. Doesn’t get much more real then that! ;)

  • http://www.youtube.com/user/izvarzone AntoxaGray

    You can also loop animation this way, without copying tons of layers:

    Enable Time Remapping (ctr+alt+t) on comp;
    add loopOut() expression;
    extend comp length.

  • Jon

    Thanks for an excellent tutorial!! One thing I was thinking is how the text sits on the folded paper. Could you please explain what would be an easy way to make the text sit on the paper folds, so that the drawn edges bend and follow the paper? I’m guessing there’s some kind of Warp effect to do this fairly easily?
    Thanks!

  • Melody Hill

    Damn impressive!