Text Animation in After Effects

[Mylenium]

Would be easy in a 3D program using displacement techniques, so probably the good thing to do would be to get Digital Anarchy’s 3DLayer plugin and apply the same methodology. You could also try the Shatter effect with a negative forcefield (so it collapses rather than exploding) or any combination of displacement effects. Regardless of what you do, the main trick will be to build a sufficiently random displacement map using effects such as Fractal Noise, radial gradients, find edges etc.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Tim Wilson]

I’ve done this before, and it’s pretty slick.

Use a noise filter with grayscale output as a displacement map, and animate the amount of displacement to provide the crumpling. You’ll need to experiment with whether the displacement needs to be positive or negative, depending on which part of your image is black and which is white so that the crumple goes in rather than out. (In is better.) Then add a light or two to provide highlights and shadows for enhancement.

Also consider animating the camera view or the 3D orientation of the “paper.” This combines crumpling with a sort of falling over effect. You wouldn’t expect something that crumples to stay in the same orientation. Well, maybe for a can being crushed or something, but certainly not for paper.

To really sell the effect, though, I recommend putting the text on a gray, beige or some similar color background that sort of looks like paper. The text by itself will be too small a surface for anyone to really tell what’s going on, but the paper background will speak for itself.

While you can use any font you like to make it look printed on the paper, handwritten-looking fonts are particularly effective for selling the paper.

Maybe even add lines to make it look like notebook paper, and start with the paper tumbled and rotated to look more like it’s on a desk. This may be moving past what will work for your project, of course, but you get the idea. If you want to sell something crumpling like paper, it helps to provide some visual cues. These can fill in any gaps in your technique — the user gets the idea and fills in the blanks. Something like the idea of persistence of vision….after effects, as it were. 😉

Best,
Tim