Help!

[Ben Griggs]

Michael,

For moving letters about the page like that unless you want them changing from letter to letter as they move, I think particular is going to make things more difficult than they should be. Because of the need to precompose each letter and whatnot.

There are many ways in AE to accomplish what you want. From combining fractal noise with time displacement to Particular and what I would use Card Wipe.

Card wipe is a very useful tool. If your text is properly spaced you can divide up a precomp so that each letter is on it’s own slice. Don’t rotate them or mess with the Z axis, just mess with X and Y axis position and speed jitters -keyframe as desired-
See Tracking and Kerning in the character window of AE to get your letters spaced and ready for Card Wipe.

With this done in it’s own comp you can then track it to the notebook as needed without worry about the positioning of each individual letter in relation to the edge of the page.

Don’t forget details like blend mode and the font/size of the fonts being used to keep away from the student feel.

You can read this post about random letter generation if you think it to be helpful. https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/922207

PS it sounds like a couple of quick and light defocus moves would make it seem a touch more realistic.

Hope that helps,
Ben

[Joey Burnham]

Another way to do this is through text animators. I recently had to do something similar and it worked in my case. Check out Aharon’s recent tutorials (I think there’s 3)
Anyway, you can enable 3d per character and play around with position, opacity, and y axis keyframes. There’s also a randomize offset button which can help. And ease the motion not just on your keyframes but with the “ease high” and “ease log” sliders.
Do you see where I’m going here?
You can duplicate this layer, change the text and keyframes and end up with something nice.
Joey

[Michael Jurkowski]

Thanks man! So correct me if I’m wrong here….I’ll have to create random text (obviously) and use Fractal noise and Particular to create this affect along with the transition Card wipe?

[Ben Griggs]

The basic point was, I don’t think particular would be the best approach. Because it is not so easy to add so many different types of particles, it wants to produce a bunch of the same thing, please correct me if I am wrong.

The card wipe idea was just to divide a bunch of different things (in this case letters) into individual sections that can produce a smooth random movement.

Joey mentioned another good way of doing it by enabling per character 3d. I find that to be rather tedious with multiple elements involved. But by far the best choice for many situations.

It’s up to you how you want to go about it. But just one effect not all piled on each other like you just asked.

[Ben Griggs]

After looking around this seems perfect for BorisFX
https://borisfx.com/downloads/
I haven’t used these before, but title toolkit seems to be the one. They have 14 day full trials.

[Michael Jurkowski]

Never heard of these plug ins before…however, I have a question upon starting this animation piece…..I could use fractal noise on top of the layer/solid and then apply card wipe…sorry if I sound stupid, I just never gone through this process before. Thanks!