This is one of many ways to create a vignette in After Effects. The benefit to this method is it's ability to save as an effects preset. Which is helpful if you're working with a few people and no one has the same plugins and you want the vignette to be uniform.
2. Under Effects > Generate select Circle
3. Set the Circle's Radius to half the width of the comp you're working in. This example is a 720p (1280x720) comp and half of 1280 is 640.
4. Moving down the parameters the next thing to adjust is Feather. Here it becomes more up to taste and what you're going for. I set feather to 400.
5. Next check the Invert Circle box.
6. Select Color and select a dark color that works well with the scene. I selected a dark blue.
7. Now under Effects > Channel select CC Composite and set Composite Original to Overlay and leave RGB checked.
8. Looking at it I am going to adjust the feather to 300. Looks good!
9. Make sure you have the Effects & Presets window open while selecting both effects and then drag them to it.
10. You'll be prompted with a save window, name and click save to create your own effects preset.
11. Adding a little color correction to my scene I'll toggle between vignette on/off. Also I named my layer vignette.
12. If you want to share your preset with other it should be in your User Documents > Adobe > After Effect (version) > User Presets
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Animating text is a common task in After Effects and below I'll share a regular approach I take.
1. Create a new text layer.
2. While making this the company dumbdumb came to mind. It's the company Jason Bateman and Will Arnett have, you should at least watch the video "Prom Date" and see how awesome it is.
3. Clicking the roll-down for that text layer and select the Animate: arrow then Enable Per-character 3D.
4. Repeat navigation and select Rotation. I already have an idea of how I want to animate the text.
5. With the Z Rotation set at +24 you can see that all letters rotate individually anchored. What I had done in the past to effect a single letter would be digging into the values of the Range Selector of that Animator, visible right above the 3 rotation values and adjusting those numbers. That would work but had a very annoying problem associated with it; precisely isolating a single letter. The effect would then bleed or start effecting the next letter in the word. What I eventually found out was the handles that appear on the word can be adjusted with your cursor (red arrows being pointed at by red arrows). When done this way whatever letters you isolate are exactly effected, with no bleed.
6. Isolating just the letter "b" using the animator's range selection handles.
7. When animating I work within the graph editor a lot, getting the best visual reference of how the keyframes are interpreted over time. I also prefer hand making my curves over Easy-Ease which helps understand exactly what's going on. (Shift+F3 toggles in and out of the graph editor)
8. Setting the curves something like this you can see that the animation will hang at 24 degrees for a moment then quickly move to about the 9 value and slowly rest into 0.
9. Next to Animator 1 click the Add arrow and under Property select Position
10. Within the Text Animator controls you're stuck with a 3 value Position control. In this X,Y,Z are represented as one keyframe in the timeline and a little more confusing to understand visually.
Though the function Easy Ease handles the curve adjustments and you can get further controls with Keyframe Velocity I'm going to just show manual curve adjustments.
11. If you want a similar visual representation to what I had earlier click the Choose Graph Type and Options button in the bottom center of the timeline...
and select Show Reference Graph.
12. This view option overlays the 3 separate values in a curve view though only as a representation, no additional handles are gained. X = red Y = green Z = blue
13. Holding shift and moving each keyframe horizontally down to 0 then pulling out each handle will get smoothed movement.. Straight lines = Robotic
For organization rename this animator as "d".
14. This is the animation so far.
15. Add the scale property to the "d" animator.
16. Key framing the Y value in scale will add emphasis to the bounce. I went from 100 to 130 at the letter's highest point then 65 when it lands and back to 100%.
17. Here's what that looks like.
18. A nice thing about text animators is the ability to duplicate complicated animations and by adjusting where the animator's range selection handles are, applying it to the next letter.
For the letter "u" I animated it scaling up, rotating right and moving position left to right. Then I duplicated that animator and changed the range selection to the letter "m" and offset the keyframes a bit.
19. Taking the "d" animator and duplicating that I moved the range selection to the letter "b" and changed the Y position a little. Here's how that looks.
20. For the second half of the word again duplicate all the animations.
...move the range selections and keyframes. Adjusting the last "b" to add a little variation again.
There are so many ways to create extruded text in After Effects and this is probably not the most versatile but I wanted to share. Really I dislike the idea of duplicating one layer a dozen+ times and thought a similar look could be done with less mess. So here's a method I came up with...
1. Create new composition.
2. Make it whatever size you want.
3. Create a new Text layer. (I right click in the timeline)
4. Type in your word/words.
5. Right click on your text layer and select "Create Shapes from Text"
6. To keep things organized I like to make a group for the outlines. Click "Add" then "Group"
7. Click "Add" again and select "Repeater"
8. It'll start out looking like this. Adjust the "Transform: Repeater 1 > Position" values to 0, 0.
9. Having the "Gopher Outlines" layer selected I right-click in the effects panel and navigate to "Expression Controls > Slider Control". I'm going to use this to have easy controls for how many times the repeater repeats.
10. Naming it "copies" works for me.
11. In the timeline I roll out the "Repeater" and "ALT+Click" the stopwatch (same as OPTION+Click). Grabbing the pick whip (spool like icon) and dragging it to the "Slider" value of the newly named expression slider "copies" links the two.
12. Now I'll start by setting the "copies" effect to 50.
13. In the "Repeater" roll down there's a transform section. Here I set the scale to something like 99.9. Now each repetition is scaled down just a little.
14. Selecting the group named "Gopher" within the shape layer click "Add" then "Fill". Move this above the "Repeater" function.
15. Now you can see the repeated letters.
16. Clicking the stopwatch for the Repeaters Anchor Point create this simple expression.
x = 0 ;
y = 0 ;
[ x , y ]
This will separate the values for the anchor point and will change nothing at the moment.
17. "Right-Click" the layer's Position values and "Separate Dimensions". Selecting the "0" for "x" in the expression, pick whip the "X Rotation" value under the layers "Transform" settings. Do the same for "y"
18. Multiplying the x and y rotation expressions by 10 will help create workable values from the layer's rotation to the repeater's anchor point.
19. Rotated +36º
20. In the Repeater "Position" value I use this expression.
a = transform.xPosition - 640 ;
b = transform.yPosition - 360
x = [ a * .0005 ] ;
y = [ b * .0005 ] ;
- [ x , y ]
21. --- Explanation ---
In this expression the "a" and "b" are linked to the layers Position properties. Then I subtract the default position values for x and y so when the shape layer's position is at 640, 360 (center for a 720p comp) the repeater is at 0 resulting in little to no extrusion. I have "a" and "b" being multiplied by .0005 which is just to get slight movement added to the repeater when the layer itself is moved. It's a very arbitrary number and .0005 just started to act the way I wanted.
22. Moving the layer's position and rotation will get this look.
23. Here shows all the repetitions becoming independently distinguishable when scaled up too much. A weird skewing thing is going on too and I skipped on figuring that out.
24. My first thought was to increase the copies slider I made earlier. Nope.
25. Adding another "Expression Controls > Slider Control" on the layer and rename it "size".
26. Connect the "Repeater > Scale" to the "size" slider.
27. Set the slider to 99.98 and those 100 repetitions pull closer together.
28. "Right-Click" on the layer and select "Layer Styles > Bevel and Emboss".
29. Changing just a few things in Bevel and Emboss.
30. Here's Gopher with a little highlight and dark edges.
31. Next add "Layer Styles > Gradient Overlay"
32. Change the Blending Mode, Opacity, and Style
33. Here's the look with Gradient Overlay.
34. Going back into "Contents > Fill 1" and change the color.
35. I made it a blue.
36. Adding some "Inner Shadow" now.
37. This is what I changed.
38. Looking not too bad.
39. Moving the layer around in my comp window I notice its not quite working how I want.
40. Adjusting the multiplier .0005 to .0002 gives me more what I wanted.
