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After Effects text animation tutorial

In this tutorial video we will show you how to animate handwriting appearing out of thin air. It’s a great way to create intro videos. This method is not only useful for texts, but pictures as well, making it appear as if an invisible hand is drawing them.

As an extra visual effect in the video we make it look like the text is burned into the wood via a laser engraver or pyrograph.

At the end of the article we will provide a free download link for the wood texture used in the video.

To create this effect we used the integrated Stroke effect. It’s a great tool that creates the animation for you automatically. The video will also show how to change the length of the scene if it ended up being too fast or too slow.

The other important aspect of this trick is After Effects’ ability to automatically create masks from texts or pictures letting you create your intro video with just a few clicks.

We used a silhouette drawing that only shows the outline of the figure. You can use any kind of picture, but the software will have a hard time creating the mask if you pick a more complex, photo like picture and the Stroke effect won’t appreciate it either. You should try it with many different kinds of pictures, but we know it works perfectly with contour drawings, logos and emblems.

In the video we set the brightness and the glow as well. If you choose a different background it is unlikely to look exactly like this, so experiment away.

As we promised before and in the video as well, here is the link to download and freely use the large wood texture we used in the tutorial: