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  • Chalk Board Text Animation

    Posted by Aaron Keeny on March 4, 2008 at 7:50 pm

    Need to do an animation that involves words and things being drawn and erased on a chalkboard. My thoughts are to do the chalk drawings in Photoshop or in real life and photograph the board, think that will be more difficult then doing it in PS however. Then just mask the lines and use a stroke on path in AE to reveal the text and other things. I am looking for any suggestions on creating the chalk effect in PS such as what filters/effects to use as well as creating the erasing look. Being chalk erased off a chalkboard with the smudges and things.

    Thanks in advance.

    Aaron

    Here is a video for a reference of what I am trying to do. Mainly just the straight lines and the name being erased in the intro.

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=gZQCVQkxbOE

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    Aaron Keeny replied 18 years, 2 months ago 5 Members · 8 Replies
  • 8 Replies
  • Joe Moya

    March 4, 2008 at 8:00 pm

    …have you ever tried to find a chalk board to take a photo of?

    I thought it would be an easy task looking for a chalk board and taking a photo to use as a background… at least until I found out finding a real chalk board is waaay more difficult than I imagined. All the boards are white and use eraser pins to write on… at any rate, you might not over look this issue.

  • Jeremy Allen

    March 4, 2008 at 8:01 pm

    i had to do somehting very similar recently and I used the stroke effect for the writing and erasing. For erasing just use a big fat brush. Also, there are alot of free “chalk” looking fonts out there that might help ya

  • Aaron Keeny

    March 4, 2008 at 8:29 pm

    fortunately my mother is a school teacher so i do have access to a chalkboard. but it makes you think a little all the progress we made in terms of the digital revolution from dry-erase boards (LOL) to laptops to the ipod. i mean all these things are great and make life easier but they suck for visual stuff. for example i had to do an animation recently involving text written for a newspaper and i went with typewriter bars writing the text only cause it is way more visual pleasing than typing on a laptop. same thing with an ipod or mp3 player its a great tool but visual a record player looks a lot better and offers more visual parts to work with i think.

  • Aaron Keeny

    March 4, 2008 at 8:30 pm

    Any suggetions of creating the eraser smudges/residue left.

  • Paul Conigliaro

    March 4, 2008 at 9:00 pm

    A combination of a Mesh Warp (or Liquify) and directional blur might work.

    Use a copy of the layer (with a lower opacity) and animate the warp and blur as the clean layer “erases.” It will take a bit of playing around, but it should work.

  • Aaron Keeny

    March 4, 2008 at 9:02 pm

    thanks for the suggestions. ill let you know how things work.

    love me some creative cow.

    aaron

  • Rich Rubasch

    March 6, 2008 at 1:17 am

    iStockPhoto has several chalkboards in green and black for this. There is a font called chalkboard that looks fine, but other script fonts work. We used the stroke effect to “write-on” the text and images and used a huge brush to wipe off the stuff. We didn’t need to leave dust trails behind on the board….the iStock image had lots of those on the board already so it looked pretty good to use what was there. The key is not making the type look too digital on the board. I used noise applied to the font and transfer modes to make it look more like it was chalk on the board, not digital white.

    Rich Rubasch
    Tilt Media

  • Aaron Keeny

    March 6, 2008 at 8:02 pm

    May be a novice question but when you say brush are you talking about a brush in PS not in AE. If so my guess is did you just erase the file in PS in steps save the file out each step then animate in AE.

    Also if you have a link to your final preoject that would be super sweet. Ive been looking for some referral videos but not much luck in that department. i understand if not.

    thanks.

    aaron

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