Pump Up The Jam

[Mylenium]

Unless computers have become sentient over night and actually understand the menaing of words (which I doubt) – no. not sure why you’d want to overcomplicate this simple setup. The words pop in with hard cuts, so timing is simple and multiplying them can be doen easily using motion Tile or similar effects (you may need to pre-compose).

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Mike Clasby]

OK, this isn’t too bad. An expression to choose the right word, controlled by a slider, and Motion tile for the grid like Mylenium suggested.

First, with the Text Tool, put a letter (I used “A”) in the middle of the screen. I made it 100 pixels (for the Bell Gothic Std font) which seems to work when you use the motion tile later.

Add a slider Control, Effect>Expression Controls>Slider Control.

Then add this expression to the Source Text, twirl down, Alt Click the Source Text Stopwatch, then paste in the expression:

s = “honesty,integrity,loyalty,compassion,empathy”;
n = Math.floor(effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”));
s.split(“,”)[n]

Put your song lyrics or the text you want on the screen in place of the “honesty,integrity,loyalty,compassion,empathy” in line one of the expression. Like “pump,up,the,jam”,
as many words as you want. now when the slider is on 0, you get “pump”, 1 = “up”, etc.

So to get the grid of letters, Effect> Stylize>Motion Tile. And to get a 5×5 grid as in your example, setting for my text were (note: My comp was 640×480, change numbers below for different comp):

Motion Tile
Tile Center: 321, 214
Tile Width: 20
Tile Height: 17
Output Width: 100
Output Height: 110

Note: If your choosing numbers out of order, for example you want to choose “Pump” again, or 0 on the Slider, but if follows a 3 for “Jam”, you need to select the keyframes and make them Hold Keyframes, otherwise you’ll flip through the words on you way from 3 to 0 on the slider.

This expression was hacked from a Dan Ebberts expression, again.

Oh, yeah, if the words are way differnt in size, numbers of letters, you could be in trouble with the motion tile, keyframes needed.

Good luck.

[Mike Clasby]

Note: If you put a number on the slider larger than the number of words you have in the expression, you’ll get “undefined” as text (it’s an error). So you might want to Right Click the blue slider number, then set the Min and Max Range for your slider. Remember you need the 0 as that is your first word.