Text Me! in After Effects

Bring your videos a fresh and fun visual element by adding on-screen text message dialogues!

Contemporary storytelling, as seen in TV shows, movies, or web videos, frequently incorporates characters communicating (as they do in real life!) with text messages sent back and forth.  In this course, we’ll recreate this visual effect in After Effects so that you can add this level of animated graphics into your own video projects.  

In this course, we’ll use After Effects to create on-screen text / SMS dialogues, using the following techniques:

• Create shapes and shape layers

• Nest pre-comp’s to organize a project

• Add and animate text using an animator tool

• Animate shapes

• Refine the animation

“Text Me!” is really a continuation of my Creative Split Screens series of tutorials; here we’re focusing on one specific application of a split screen.  In this course, we combine pre-existing video footage with animated motion graphics to create unique, customized text or SMS messages to appear on-screen.  After Effects is a wonderfully versatile tool, in this course we’ll just look at one approach to animating an on-screen text dialogue.   

I teach my online courses in a thoughtful and logical approach, and a complete beginner student could follow along step-by-step to recreate an animation project like the one I use as a demo in the tutorials.  This course is not a comprehensive overview of the software, but an in-depth look at using the specific tools used for this project.  

More advanced students will appreciate the subtle refinements and recommended workflows that I introduce during the tutorials, building your own skill set to apply this knowledge to your other, unique projects.