Text Squishing

[Mike Clasby]

Where do the words come in, screen-wise? When a pushed word expands to fit the screen, it seems like it would blot out the word that pushed it, I can’t quite visualize what you’re after.

[Ej Hassenfratz]

alright, lets say the words were made out of play-dough or something. i want to have a bunch of words come onto a cartoon tv screen, one comes in, another comes in and by that word coming into the screen, both words are squeezing into the edges of the tv, so they both fit but kinda smooshed, but readable. then another word comes in, the other words get compressed more, etc, etc. like putting a bunch of stuffed animals in a clear box, they get compressed as you put more in but you can still see the different animals. hope this explains it more, sorry for the confusion!

ej.hassenfratz
graphic.designer
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[Steve Roberts]

I’d just animate the position and scale (using the handles) of the text layer by hand, with keyframes.

Squash-and-stretch is a rite of passage for an animator. 🙂

[Mike Clasby]

Ok, this will be a bit tedious, but from a quick experiment, I think you can do it with Distort>Reshape, that is many instances of reshape on the same text layer, so you get: Morph>Morph>Morph… as many morphs as you need.

To get a cartoon look for the text, make the word with the text tool, then Simulation>CC Ball Action, with Grid Spacing at 0, Ball Size 500-800 (to taste) to get Ballony text. It could ballon up when it enters the TV.

Then to get the squishing and squashing, use Distort>Reshape, see this tut for details of use (correspondence points are critical):

Morphing In After Effects by Chris Zwar

https://www.creativecow.net/articles/zwar_chris/morph/index.html

After you’ve done one morph, you can just add another instance of Reshape to the same layer, draw a new mask for the shape to be, then reset the Source Mask and Destination Mask, if Source Mask for the first morph was Mask 1 and the Destination Mask for morph 1 was Mask 2, now on the second Reshape (Morph), the Source Mask will be Mask 2, and the Destination Mask will be the new Mask 3. This way with each new instance of Reshape you can pull off a series of Morphs as the letter moves into, then expands to fit the screen, then is pushed out. YOu might need 4 or 5 reshapes, depends on the look you want. You’d have to do this for each word so that one appears to push out the other, but after one go-around, you should be able to reuse the same Reshape Effect and masks for succeeding words, just Highlight then Copy the Masks and Effect, then paste them into the new word.