After Effects is a software that many professionals use to add special effects to videos. One of the most common tasks you might perform in this program is animating text. If you’re new to After Effects, you might be wondering how to animate your text. In this article, we’ll break down the basics of text animation in After Effects.
Step-by-Step Guide to Text Animation
1. Create a New Project or Open a Project
Open After Effects and create a New Project (Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + N) or Open your Project File by going to File > Open Project (or Ctrl + O).
Make sure you go to the composition where you want to add animated text.
If you do not have a composition yet, go to Composition > New Composition.
2. Create your text
With your composition open, select the Text tool (it looks like a ‘T‘ 
) from the toolbar or press Ctrl + T. Click anywhere within the composition and start typing. Adjust the font, size, and color in the ‘Character‘ panel as needed.
If you do not see the ‘Character‘ panel, you can add it by going to ‘Window > Character‘.
3. Opening the Text Animation Options
Here’s where the fun begins! With your text layer selected, click on the small arrow to the left of the layer name. 
This will reveal several options:
Depending on your After Effects version you might have to click on the arrow next to ‘Text‘ to reveal the ‘Animate‘ option.
Click on the ‘Animate‘ drop-down menu. You’ll see a range of properties like: Position, Scale, Skew, Rotation, etc.
Each of these can be animated separately or can even be combined for more complex animations.
Before we dive in:
After Effects comes with numerous text animation presets. Click on the ‘Effects & Presets’ tab on the right side, and open up the ‘Animation Presets > Text‘ folder. Here, you can drag and drop any preset onto your text for instant animation.
4. Start Animating
For beginners, let’s focus on three primary options:
- Position: This controls where the text is located. Adjusting this can make your text move up, down, left, or right.
- Scale: This determines the size of your text. It can grow larger or smaller over time.
- Opacity: This controls how transparent your text is. It can fade in or out.
Select the property you wish to animate (let’s start with ‘Scale‘). Move your timeline indicator to where you want the animation to start and click the ‘stopwatch icon‘ next to the property.This creates a keyframe.
Move your timeline indicator to where you want the animation to end, and adjust the property value. This automatically adds another keyframe. Your text will animate between these two keyframes.
5. Refining your Animation
Right now, your animation might be very basic. Here’s some things you can do to make it look a bit better:
- Easy Ease your keyframes. This smoothens the movement between keyframes.
- After you’ve Easy Eased your keyframes you can open the graph editor to even further improve your animation. Not sure which Graph editor you should use, learn the difference between Speed Graphs and Value Graphs.
- Range Selector:
This powerful tool lets you animate individual characters, words, or lines instead of the entire text block. Once you’ve set an animation, you’ll notice a ‘Range Selector‘ option above it. Adjusting the ‘Start‘ and ‘End‘ values will determine which parts of the text are affected by the animation. For instance, you can animate only one word in a sentence or make each letter animate one after the other.
Animation Properties
We’ll go over some of the most used animation properties:
Position: Allows you to animate the text without editing the layer’s position properties.
This comes in handy if you want to animate text coming in or going out a mask without having to move the mask around.
Scale: Instead of scaling the entire layer, with this you can scale each character in your text individually.
Rotation: This will rotate each character on its own instead of rotating the layer.
Opacity: The opacity property changes the opacity of each character individually instead of the entire layer at once. This is useful if you want to make a per character fade in animation.
Tracking: This is one of the most used text animation properties as it is super easy to use and gives you great effects. This effect is also used a lot on TikTok.
The ‘Tracking‘ property controls the space between each character, slowly animating this can make it look like the layer is slowly growing or shrinking in size. This can also look amazing with fast text transitions.
Character Offset: The Character Offset effect offsets each character by a the defined amount of steps. Let’s say you have the letter ‘a‘, when you set the character offset to ‘1‘ it’ll now show the letter ‘b‘. This property also accepts negative values.
