Tutorial 92: Stacking Text Animators

Joe Clay | Oct 13, 2017

If you're like me, you probably feel like you've animated text every which way by now. I always feel like finding a new way to animate text that looks good and doesn't feel cheesy or forced is one of the most challenging aspects of working on a project and it's often the part I dread the most. It's great when you've figured it out, but I usually procrastinate on my way to getting there.

Unless you're going to split apart text and animate each piece, it's often difficult to get things to work well with animators. In a previous tutorial, Tutorial 26: Text Animations Simplified, we looked at building elements in separate animators to make the task easier. This tutorial expands on that by building those parts into presets that can be quickly combined into more complex text animations. And it's even easier if you add in expression controls like we did way back in Tutorial 05: Sliders and Presets.

This can help to speed up your workflow and hopefully remove a barrier between you and more creative work. I didn't note it in the tutorial, but I also find it great to use animators to move text rather than using position keyframes. That way you can change text and layouts quickly when a client asks for a change.

If you're a patron that gets presets, you'll have access to the presets I built in this tutorial, as well as additional ones I'm going to build into my own library in the coming weeks. We're glad to finally be bringing more presets to you guys. We've basically been building out a campaign for arenas across the country, which means we haven't had much chance to make anything new as we've been resizing and retiming things to fit various LED boards for a bit now, haha.