Kinetic Typography Video?

[MRalvarez]

Hello, does anyone know how one would complete this type of video? I am guessing this is done with After Effects. Would like to teach this in a high school class for students. Any help is appreciated.

David Alvarez

Selah High School

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

If you are new to AE expect to spend about 40 hours learning enough to effectively teach it. It is not intuitive. Then there is the experience necessary to correctly time edits with narration, where the eye goes and when watching a movie, how many frames you need to lead or in some cases follow a cut to make it look in sync when the video is playing back. IOW, creating a useful and effective training syllabus for After Effects is going to take some time. Don't expect your students to complete the assignment of creating a 2-minute long dynamic text animation in anything less than a week of work in the lab

That said, you can certainly use After Effects to create any kind of Motion Graphics you have ever seen in any movie or commercial. AE can create, with the help if 3RD party effects, about any composite anyone can think of. Some involve hundreds of layers and weeks of work for seven or eight seconds of finished video.

To create the kind of animation you showed in your example my approach would be to break the audio track (or video background) up into phrases that were no longer than a few seconds. Probably every sentence would be a separate comp. Then you would use Text Layers and Text animators to create the animations. Putting all 1:33 of that video in a single comp would be possible but editing and making changes to that many layers quickly becomes a nightmare.

You could also do something very similar in Premiere Pro by simply animating titles. The learning curve is not as steep. The little squash and stretch enhancements in the sample video are a little difficult to pull off quickly in Premiere, but the type-on effects are fairly easy to set up with the new graphics tools in Premiere Pro.

If you are willing to invest the time to learn the UI and get comfortable with AE we'll help you with some pointers. To see what you are in for start here: Basic AE

You might want to start your class teaching the "12 Principals of Animation" recently explained in the book "The Illusion of Life"  that were developed by Disney animators almost 90 years ago. Here's what that looks like. Those principals are more important than the tools used to create the animation. Without understanding those principals teaching your students to use AE to make text move is not going to do much to educate them about the art of telling a story with pictures. Enjoy:

One last note. I thought the example you posted showed very little creativity and I didn't see hardly anything that would inspire me to want to create something similar.  The message was pretty good, but the execution could have been a lot stronger if some of the basic principals of telling a story with pictures were followed. A great exercise for a class would be to take that same message and really make it powerful by using the Principals of Animation, Principals of composition, Principals of color and everything else that goes into making an effective movie and applying them to every sentence in the script. That would be a great month long project for a video lab in high school. That would teach your students how to think visually and tell an effective story. Just teaching them to use AE's text animators is not going to do much to prepare them for the future.

[P.M.B]

Kudos for knowing what the technique is actually called. 

AE is perfect for this type of thing.

It's basic key frame animation of text over a video.

If you plan to skip learning the basics of using After Effects After Effects tutorials | Learn how to use After Effects CC

then you can just search the internet for "kinetic typography" tutorials.

You can roll the dice on Youtube or sign up for a free trial of Pluralsight or Lynda.com both of which

offer educational discounts.

[A.I.1]

Kudos for knowing what the technique is actually called. 

AE is perfect for this type of thing.

It's basic key frame animation of text over a video.

But for Kinetic Typography videos in general surely there must be quicker ways to do it than having to manually place and keyframe the text. There are text presets in AE (though they're built based on low res text I think) and it would still be time consuming doing a lot of text with those. I have another program that does this (kinetic typography videos in general, not exactly like the example) where you select templates to place the text in but that can still be time consuming to make it look right.

Isn't there a way to create great looking kinetic typography videos (in general) with text (2D or 3D) moving in lots of different ways that people would want from these types of videos, but which would take hardly any time to do (such as only required only minor editing of the whole text such as which bits of text should be on the same line or a particular colour or whatever)? eg. can anything/any method create a great looking kinetic typeography video  (maybe hundreds of words, lots of different 3D movements in/out of the frame) in just a few minutes?

[Rick Gerard]

You can apply animation presets with the click of a button, then press the U key twice to see how they work and make adjustments to the layers, but even using animation presets an experienced AE user would spend several hours creating a 2-minute video with presets.

The key to having an animation that works and that leaves an impact is in the timing and the motion. Just sliding something in from the left and making it bounce to a stop may look cool, but you have to spend the time figuring out when is the right time to bring it in, where is the viewer going to look, how does it effect perception, and is there some way to anticipate the right move. You can show students how to apply animation presets and slide keyframes and in and out points around with a couple hours of explanation but you have not taught them anything that will help them tell a story. There is no excellence in that approach.

Spend some time teaching about understanding the message, about the principals of visual cognition, composition, color and the impact of timing, and while you are preparing that great, not good but great educational opportunity, take some time to learn AE by doing experiments that you can look at, then turn your attention to teaching the tools and more importantly, teach them how to learn about the tools. Now you have something that could change their lives.

[A.I.1]

I think you have me confused with the OP. I'm not the one teaching. Though I also want to know how to do lengthy (maybe hundreds of words) kinetic typography videos in the shortest amount of time (no more than a few mins if possible).

Can After Effects scripts do anything to semi-automate the process (eg. take a long pre-written text and put sections at a time into the text animation presets)?

edit: Though the After Effecs help says that the text anim presets were created in a "NTSC DV 720x480 composition" - so,. like it mentions they may not work well for bigger projects (full HD) and the presets (according to the help) when used for bigger projects may not enter from fully off the screen or fully exit because of the res difference.

[Rick Gerard]

You can certainly automate the process to some degree. You can use expressions and layer markers to start and end motion. You can set up animations based on in and out points of animation, but you cannot do effective kinetic typography that really tells a story without some serious effort and thought. I have more than 200 animation presets that I have created that move layers based on in and out points. I use them all the time. If the artwork and text layers have been designed and created I can get a 10-minute kinetic typography or explainer videos laid out have been created in about 10 minutes. It takes another couple of hours to fine tune everything and cut a couple of test edits. The whole process, from writing through recording and editing audio, mixing sound and adding effects, artwork design and typography through fine-tuning and polishing the edit would take about a week for every 10 minutes of finished video. It could take longer. I could throw together 10 minutes in a day, but I would not want my name or reputation tied to that kind of work because any uneducated hack with a few scripts could do the same and the value of my time and contribution in my client's eyes would go way down. I would be out of business in less than a year.

The biggest problems with scripting from a long-form text animation would be deciding where to break up the sentences and how to bring them in. You would spend a bunch of time just editing the script and then to make every cut and transition work you may have to adjust the in and out points of each one manually. Some words and sounds work better if the action leads the sound, some actions work better if they follow the sound. Some edits need to be before the beat of the music, some need to be after and you have to look and listen to figure out which one works better.

If you are interested here's an animation preset that will fly a layer in from the left, bounce it to a stop and then drop it out of the frame based entirely on the in and out points. The layer can be any scale and in any position. You just position the layer in the hero position and then apply the preset and adjust the in and out points. This is one of the simpler ones I created and it's not perfect but it may give you some ideas. Dropbox - flyInBounceDropOut.ffx

[MRalvarez]

Thank you for your help! We just got After effects this year and I thought this would be a good project for students. I looked at the keyframes and understand that from premiere pro. Now that I can see those settings and basic animation for text, the only question left is from 0:21-0:23 seconds in the video. Would that be blending modes with black/white layer? Again thank you for your help and response! I now know to look for kinetic typography.

[Rick Gerard]

T  If his:

is nothing more than a shape and text layer pre-composed and used as a track matte for video with a gradient background on the bottom. The gradient can easily be created with a shape layer and an edited gradient.

Remember what I said about spending 40 hours with After Effects. These are all basic principals you should know and understand before you try to teach. At least spend a few hours with the first and second sections of this page and go through some of the tutorials in the second section: Basic AE. If you had done that you would not have these questions. You cannot learn proper workflows by poking around in the UI and asking questions on forums.

[MRalvarez]

You are right. I might have to put this on hold while I try to get the basics down. After effects looks like a lot of fun and worth putting in the time.Thank you for your help.