#typography tutorials

again, i’m not really sure which effects you’re interested in and i’m not the best person when it comes to tutorials, so i apologize in advance if this turns out messy/doesn’t help much 😔

for this one, the text effect is on the “lose control” line. 

i start by making 3 layers of the text, in 3 different colors (green, black and white) and position them in a way that it looks like a drop shadow of sorts. then i merge all three layers in one by pressing ctrl + E

when i merged them, they became an “image” layer, no longer a text layer. if you’re only making one text layer (you have no interest in making it a 3-color-text) then you have to “rasterize type” to do the next step!

i make a bunch of copies of the layer, like 6 or 7 copies.

ok, here’s where the actual work starts: 

on the first frame of the gif i want the text to appear,  i make #1 visible & change the opacity to 30%. 

on the next frame, i disable #1, turn on #2 & i leave opacity at 100%. 

next frame, disable #2, make #3 visible and go to edit > transform > warp. you’ll see a bunch of points around your text. choose one (or two) of those and pull in one direction. 

next frame, i disable #3 and make #1 visible again, because the lower opacity helps give that “twitching” effect. 

on the next few frames, i warp some other 3 or 4 copies of the text, always in different directions, and alternate between them & between different opacities.

HERE’S THE ORIGINAL TUTORIAL I USED.

this one is a bit trickier. for the murderbot effect:

you have to download this font

similar to the other gif, i created 2 text layers, with 2 different colors and merged them, so the shadow is green.

then, you gotta go to the last frame and position where you want the text to end up at. 

however, the original font has short hanging lines, and i wanted the letters to hand all the way to the middle of the gif. with that in mind, you have to draw the lines all the way to the top (you can use the pencil tool or you can zoom in, select the string the font already gave you and make copies of it how many times necessary until you reach the top).

(i did the “layer via copy” way, because, in this case, every string had a different green shadow).

once all the lines are done it looks like this:

now, you have to make every letter become a separate layer. you do that by selecting the letter + its string and clicking “layer via cut”. 

okay, then it gets a bit complicated. maybe there’s an easier way to make this, but, to me, it’s less confusing to make the next steps in a separate file. so what i do is: create a new file (same dimensions as your original gif) and move the letters to that file. it should be positioned in the same place as in the original gif (also give this file a black background, to make it easier for you to see the letters).

you’ll have one frame, like this one:

duplicate it. you’ll need that second frame to know where you want your text to end up at. in the first original frame, select all the letter layers and position them way up, out of the frame. then select only the first letter of your word and pull it down a bit, so the bottom of it shows in the first frame:

duplicate this first frame, keep the first letter select and pull it down a bit more.

(at this point you have 3 frames: the first one, with just the bottom of the first letter, the second one, with the first letter a bit more down and the third frame, with all the text where it’ll end up)

duplicate the second frame you just made and select both the first and the second letter and pull them down.

keep duplicating the frames and pulling the letters down bit by bit (always selecting all letter layers you want to move and pulling them together). in my case, every time one letter showed up in its entirety (usually 2-3 frames to each letter to “appear”. depends on how much you pull every time), i started pulling the next one down.

use the last frame as reference to know when each letter reached the place it’s supposed to be. once it does, don’t select that letter anymore when you’re moving the next ones.

it’s a bit confusing, but try to estimate how many frames you’re “allowed” to use (like, how many frames you want to use for this falling effect in your original gif), so that you can have a better idea of how “fast” you gotta move the letters.

once all the letters have fallen (lol), go to the first frame and disable the black background.

select all frames (in my case, i ended up with 31 frames) and select “copy frames”

go to your original gif and select 31 frames where you want the letter to fall (or x frames, how many frames you ended up with) and paste frames OVER SELECTION.