Gain the skills to animate text and graphics efficiently in After Effects using built-in presets like the Blinking Cursor Typewriter Console. Gain insight into using shape layers, track mattes, and gradient wipes to create dynamic visual effects with minimal manual keyframing.
Key Insights
- The Blinking Cursor Typewriter Console preset animates text one letter at a time with a customizable blinking cursor, offering more advanced features than the older Typewriter preset.
- Various animation techniques are demonstrated, including animating bar charts using scale transformations, revealing labels through track mattes, and creating write-on effects using Trim Paths on shape layers.
- Noble Desktop’s exercise emphasizes hands-on learning by encouraging users to adjust keyframes, explore easing options, and customize preset parameters like cursor speed and shape within the Effect Controls panel.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
So, animating the headline with a preset. So, there's a starter file for this, by the way, on page 154, but the headline is animated with a preset, okay? Specifically, it's called Blinking Cursor Typewriter Console, okay? The bars get animated by animating their scale into position, okay? The country labels appear using a track mat, so the bars basically draw them on. They don't move, but as the bars grow, it reveals the labels, okay? And then the outline gets animated with Trim Paths, which is a shape layer's ability to do the write-on effect.
Shape layers have a native function that mimics the write-on behavior, okay? And the grid gets animated with an effect called Gradient Wipe. That's what it is. At the end of that, there is a self-study section where it tells you, hey, maybe you want to animate the numbers and maybe you want to sequence the animation, which is basically so you can start to do it yourself.
After that, there's an informational section talking about one of the effects that's used to do the fade of the background, okay, which is kind of cool. So, that's 6B. Okay, so, the effect first, the preset first, the preset first.
Text layer, by the way, the Properties panel shows you the name of the text layer. See, there's no space to see nothing anymore. It's that wide.
Whenever you see these double arrows, these chevrons, it means there's more panels here hidden. Effects and presets are right there, okay? So, there's an effect, if you search for it, called Typewriter. There's actually two effects that have the word Typewriter.
Typewriter, okay? So, there are presets here. There's a Typewriter preset. Typewriter preset makes each letter appear one at a time.
It's basically animating opacity in a really sharp way, so it's appear, appear, appear. That's an old preset. It's been around for a very long time.
This is the new one, Blinking Cursor Typewriter Console. It makes the letters appear one at a time, but it also adds a blinking cursor animation to it, which you can customize. It's kind of cool, by the way.
Now, presets have pre-built animation. Wherever the first keyframe, the first keyframe of the animation, when you apply a preset, is always going to be placed wherever your current time indicator is. So, I put it at the beginning of my timeline.
I double-clicked on the preset and animated in Blinking Cursor Typewriter Console. The text vanishes, and if you play, it animates in like that. If you press U, you will see that there are two keyframes for what is called the slider.
That's the speed. If I wanted to slow the animation down, I could pull out that second keyframe, to separate it from the first farther, and now the animation runs slower. It's up to you.
If you want to select those and ease them, you can do that too. Would that make them look better? That is questionable. Okay.
If you only want to ease one of them, out of that one, easy ease. Maybe you want it to start off slower as it's moving, and then speed up. So, it starts moving faster at the end.
Now, why in this case is easing not necessary? Because honestly, we don't really see easing in something like this very well. Movement, scale, rotation, we see easing pretty well. But in this kind of like blinking animation, the way it's moving doesn't really lend itself well to easing, so keep that in mind.
Okay. Now, what do we got? So, in Effect Controls, you can actually control cursor on or off. The cursor shape can be edited here.
It's a dash becoming the cursor, which I don't know that makes any sense by the way. There's an underscore becoming the cursor. So, you can format this certain ways.
Okay. That's kind of cool. The cursor blink speed is this slider.
It tells you what each thing is, so you can adjust it. So, you want the cursor to blink slower, you can make that happen for yourself. So, the preset has a lot of options.
Yeah, it's kind of cool. Cursor blink faster. So, most presets, by the way, do not have that many controls.
Most presets also are only editable inside of the Animator in the layer. This one is a special case, so it has a lot of options. So, presets, depending on what they are, may have one or two options, or they may have 30 options.
Honestly, it varies. Keep that in mind. Okay.
So, by the way, on page 156, there is a note about why use text animation presets. There's many them. You can download thousands more.
It allows you to work on live text and reuse it, which is pretty cool. So, it's a way of basically making a consistent text animation without having to rebuild it every time.