After Effects and Typography Animation — A Lovely Duo for a Demo Reel Intro!

Even when you use After Effects every day, know it inside out, and whisper bedtime stories to it before it sleeps, this compositing/animation software from Adobe still manages to surprise us.

In animation, the limit is no longer technical — it’s imagination. With technical skill (closely tied to experience), you become more confident, work faster, and handle unexpected problems better.
But what is technical mastery worth compared to ideas? Everyone knows how to use a pen, but not everyone can draw…

Animation and the creative process differ for everyone. For me, it can come from a client’s constraint or personal experimentation. In both cases, the paths that lead to the final animation can be very different.

• Some people tinker, watching their creation come to life as they play with different effects.
• Some rely on tutorials and resources for inspiration.
• And then there are those who have a precise idea in mind and want to bring it to life. In that case, lacking solid technical foundations can quickly become frustrating. What’s more annoying than being unable to shape your ideas due to a lack of technical skill?

I think the best approach is a mix of all three! Have a small idea in mind before starting your animation. Make a mini storyboard, jot down concepts, and keep the best ones.

Don’t start without a goal. Sitting in front of an empty After Effects project with no direction is never truly satisfying — you’ve probably realized that yourself.

Let’s take an example: a showreel intro. Why not mine, just to get a bit of buzz going? :)

Mattrunks
Mattrunks Reel 2008 Type Animation

After creating my “Accordion” tutorial, I wanted to recreate that kind of animation with typography. I knew exactly how I wanted the letters to appear — progressively and fluidly.

Technically, even though I knew how to do it with keyframes, I decided to think things through a bit longer before starting, and in the end, it saved me several hours of work.

A quick visit to some expression tutorial sites, and that was it. No more keyframes for animation — just one expression that automatically adapts based on the layers’ positions.

In such cases, having a solid grasp of the language saves a tremendous amount of time.

In the first stage, I animated simple, flat white text on a black background. The following image shows the different phases, from plain typography to the final “treated” version:

To achieve the final effect, I just tinkered, tested, and experimented! I added effects, played with lights, layer overlays in 3D space, and especially had fun with blending modes!

This whole text treatment phase only started once the animation was complete. That way, I could focus solely on the final look — experimenting with effects until I got a result I liked visually: a sort of 3D typography effect directly in After Effects, which I found cool enough to make the intro for my upcoming showreel!

And there you go — all that for this!

PS: Of course, my full showreel will be out soon ;)

PS: And yes, this animation will be the subject of my free tutorial project on Emob.