We’ve Spelled Out How To Create Dynamic, Hand-Drawn Text
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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Thanks, this is very useful. How did you get the drawn texture itself animated? Pointing to the seconds in the video would be appreciated.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!!
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!
Have you been inspired by an existing font ?
I’d like to found something similar.
Thanks for this tutorial. Very helpful.
How about using a type like font and the liquify plugin??
the paper is still.. not realistic imo
It’s a stock photo of an actual piece of paper. Doesn’t get much more real then that!
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.