Write-On Effect in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Well, howdy Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day one of 30 days of after effects over the next 30 days, we're going to learn a ton about after effects. And I want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor for this series. The department of motion design at the Ringling college of art and design in beautiful Sarasota, Florida, if a traditional brick and mortar school is what you're looking for. Ringling is an excellent place to get emotion, design education. And I'm not just saying that because I taught there. It's an incredible place with some amazing teachers, including our very own Morgan Williams. Be sure to check them out now onto the lesson for this first lesson, we are going to talk about something. Every motion designer will have to do at some point in their career, right ons. There are a lot of ways to achieve this effect. And I'm going to show you a few different techniques, including one really neat way, which takes a little more time, but gives you an amazing result. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. Now let's hop into after effects and get started.
Joey Korenman : So before I show you guys how to create this really nice painted, you know, right on effect, I'm going to show you a couple of really quick and dirty ways to do it too, because this technique here, while it looks great, it also takes a good amount of time. Um, and depending on the font you have and how many different letters, I mean, it can take hours. So, um, sometimes you don't have hours and sometimes you're doing those jobs that, you know, really you're just paying the bills and it's got to get done quick and you, you know, you can't spend an entire day creating one, right on effect for type. So, uh, first let me show you the quick and dirty way. So I'm going to, uh, create a new composition here. Um, and we'll just call this quick, quick radon.
Joey Korenman : All right. And I'm going to spell out my name and you can, you can spell out my name too, if you want or spell out your name and that's okay, too. All right. So let me just size this up. Um, usually when I do write ons, I'll try to make the type bigger than I know it's going to need to be. And that way I can always scale it down. Um, obviously you don't want to scale things up cause then you're, you're losing resolution. So I'm going to pre-comm this. Now this is a type layer, but I'm going to select it and hit shift command C. And I'm going to name this name PC for pre-com that's my little to my little abbreviation, right? And so now I've turned that type layer into just a big layer that now I can, uh, I can put effects on.
Joey Korenman : And the first way I'm going to show you to do this right on effect is by using the after-effects paint system, the paint system, and after effects is old and crappy to be quite honest with you, but it actually works pretty well for this. So in order to paint on a layer, if I click on this paintbrush and I try to paint on this, right, it's not going to let me, and I'm going to get this warning saying, use the paint and blah, blah, blah, in a layer panel. So here's what it's telling me. Uh, this is my composition panel right here. This is showing me that the end result of all my layers and everything that I'm copying together. Um, if I want to paint on a layer, I have to do it in a layer panel. So that way you get to that is you control, click or right click you layer and you go down to open layer.
Joey Korenman : Okay. And when you click that, you can see now after effects is opened, another window here, and it's really small. So let me stretch it out like this. Okay. All right. So I'm going to click over in this window for a minute and just zoom out. There we go. And then over here, so what I'm looking at is I have two windows up. This is the end results, my composition, and this is just the layer, just this one layer. And right now they're going to look identical. You can see that now with my paintbrush selected and my layer panel open, I can start painting on this. Okay. Now the goal is to basically mimic the way you would write these letters. Okay. So I'm just going to do this for each letter, but first we have to make sure the settings are right. So the first thing is the size of the brush needs to be, you know, thick enough so that when I write down like this, I'm covering up the entire letter.