hey everybody its premier gal here and I'm going to be showing you today how to
create a handwriting effect inside of After Effects the key to doing this is
choosing a font that looks like handwriting and that is pretty easy to
trace using the pen tool if you use a very fine font that's very curvy it will
be pretty hard to trace using the pen tool so I've included some links to some
handwriting fonts that I would recommend for producing this effect but let's not
waste any more time and let's get started okay so I'm inside of After
Effects CC 2017 and the first thing we have to do is create a new composition
by clicking on this icon here create a new composition I'm going to leave the
background color white and leave my aspect ratio to be a 16 by 9 1920 by
1080 when I hit OK and now you'll see if I fit this to window that we have a 16
by 9 canvas and now I just want to add the font text of the word that I'm going
to animate which is gal and I'm using the font lekker ly one which I've left
as a link to download in the description box below
so if you just click on the canvas here and type out the word that you want to
produce the handwriting effect with I'm just going to do gal it does take a bit
of time to trace this but once you get the hang of it you can start to do it
more quickly so that's why I'm going to use a short word because I don't want to
hold you guys up so you guys want to do this for yourself so what I'm going to
do is just zoom in here a bit zoom in to about 100% and then you can use the hand
tool by hitting H to sort of Center it you can get a nice view now we're going
to use the pen tool first make sure that the gal is selected down here and then
you're going to go up and hit the pen tool you can use G as a shortcut and now
we're just going to trace this word as if we're writing it and you'll have to
think about what's the natural way that you're going to write this so for the G
we're going to start up here so we're going to just going to create one dot
click if you click and hold you can make it a curved line and then just continue
along the path here try to keep it as centered as
possible it takes a while to get used to it but once you start to get the hang of
it you know it'll be a lot easier to do as you get more skilled and again see
this started a new path we want to make sure that these are connected so instead
what we have to do is command Z and click on this last dot in order to make
sure that it keeps the same path as you're tracing this all right so let's
keep going here if you forget to click and hold you can hit option and click
and it creates the curved line again so I'm just going to go along here and
trace this entire gal and you can follow along with your own work I'm going to
pull this up higher because the a in English we usually start right here and
create the a this way so what you want to do is go up and then start the stroke
here and then make it curved again much work the center as possible and now you
can probably see why I recommended using a font that is not so curvy right
and then the L we want to start here for the L so let's go up around and let's
start the L stroke here so now that we have a pretty good path happening here
we can always make adjustment after we apply a stroke on top of this path to do
this first we have to go up to effect and then go to generate and then we're
going to click stroke and you will see that there's now this white line that
just emerged on top of this path to make it easier to see let's change the color
of the stroke to like a hot pink color so now you can more easily see the
stroke that was applied so right now we need to make sure that this stroke is
completely covering the font beneath it so that means we need to change the
brush size to be much larger so let's go ahead and increase the size of the
stroke until we begin to see it covering the entire width of the font and now you
can see we need to make a few more adjustments here to the path because we
still see a little bit of the font here so let's see if we can move this around
a bit to get it just right that looks pretty good and now to create the
animation of this stroke on top of the Gal font what we're going to do is
animate the stroke so let's go ahead and turn this to zero and let's hit the
keyframe toggle animation next to end and then let's pull it forward in time
to when we want the animation to finish and then we're going to hit 100 so now
you can see that over time the stroke is painting on top of the font right but
now we want to get rid of this hot pink stroke so we just see the font animating
so just go here next to paint style and reveal original image so now we will
just see now if we fit to the window here we will just see
animation and now you have an animated text as if it's hand-drawn so I hope
that you guys found this useful this video was requested by someone just like
you by going to my website PremiereGal.com/tutorials and I will see you
guys next week pa