the jittery, grungy text look

anna greve

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Feb 7, 2003, 10:59:52 PM2/7/03

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know i should probably know this but i've searched the net and ae help and haven't come up with any tutorials on how to get that jittery jumpy grungy text effect look, without having to keyframe values manually....are there plugins? anyone know of any tutorials?

Chris Poisson

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Feb 8, 2003, 9:02:45 AM2/8/03

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Hi anna,

Just did a fabulous tutorial on the Cow by Marcus called Making Text Fly. It only uses path text, a little known gem. In about 3 minutes you can make a word or sentence fly all the letters in from off screen in a totally random fashion. Only two keyframes needed. I added an adjustment layer over the first part only and put some random glow expressions on it, put about 320° of motion blur on it and it is so cool, and I swear took all of 10 minutes. If you're doing more than one of these in a piece, You can move the keyframes around a little to get more randomness. Oh and I forgot, I also animated the rotation property in path text.

Another is a plugin I have called Animatext by Panopticum, which has individual jitter controls with three different kinds of movement , horizontal and vertical controls and does individual letter and word control. No keyframes are needed, but you can keyframe all the properties or use expressions to make it different over time.

Have fun...

Jim Howells

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Feb 8, 2003, 11:16:29 AM2/8/03

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No keyframes you say? Do it the old fashioned way. Make a new photoshop file. Hand draw your text on a layer, Use a small brush and go over each letter a couple of times. Make a new layer and repeat the process on that new layer with the same text. Do that twenty times on different layers.

Import into AE. Stagger each layer so that each is visible for 4 to 6 frames. Voila Wigglely Text.

Or similar technique if you have vector paint in the Prodcution bundle. Draw the text out in a small brush on the first frame. But instead of redrawing the text every few frames. Set the brush stroke's wiggle property.

gary oldknow

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Feb 8, 2003, 3:29:35 PM2/8/03

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you can make your text judder if you use the wiggler!

anna greve

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Feb 8, 2003, 6:02:01 PM2/8/03

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thnks for your replies!

chris- i actually had had a look at that tutorial- the problem is my logo was already designed in photoshop and the text was quite treated- so i couldn't just re-type it in path text.

jim- i have used that technique for a hand-drawn type animtion before- it gives wicked results- tho not quite the effect i was looking for this time.

gary- tried the wiggler but couldn't get the motion to be random enough.

ended up doing it with expressions! found a cool tuorial at

<http://www.creativecow.net/articles/kahlenberg_roland/expressions/>

they've also got a little video on there which shows you the result and sort of the effect i was looking for(their example isn't taht cool- but you can play with the values and get much cooler results. I normally shy away from expressions- but this one's pretty easy and i'll now what to do next time i need that sort of look- check it out- i'd def recommend it!

thanks, anna

Chris Poisson

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Feb 8, 2003, 9:53:02 PM2/8/03

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Yes! Expressions rule! The wiggler sucks in comparison. Glad you figured it out!

stevo patterson

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Feb 9, 2003, 12:05:00 AM2/9/03

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just to add in late here,
you may also wanna check dan ebberts' tutorial on generating random motion with expressions.

-stev=o