new tools for text animation

Whether you're adding visual background noise, using text as a texture, or flashing up words to reinforce some other idea in the piece, text is an important element of your composition.

It is also one of the more difficult elements to animate in most applications. We aim to simplify that. Text Anarchy 2.0 is a set of eight filters for After Effects that provide a unique range of ways to animate text in motion.

Text Grid plugin with a ring-shaped displace map and a lens flare. [play]

Some of the filters use particle systems specifically designed for text. Others allow the animation of characters on a letter by letter basis. And still others use paths to control the look and attributes of the text.

Chaos Stock project #18 uses the Cool Text plugin for its effects [play]

Use TypeOn to create an Instant Message (IM) effect [play]

the idea for text anarchy

The original idea for Text Anarchy actually came from the movie 'Alien'. When the ship is descending down to the planet, there are all sorts of cool digital readouts. The Screen Text plugin came about because of this.

Our idea guy, Jim Tierney, really liked the complex, layered designs by the studio Attik. But layers and layers of text were time consuming to do manually. You'd have to create the element in Illustrator or Photoshop, bring it into After Effects, make a bunch of copies, then animate them all. Ugh.

Yep, it's THAT effect. Find a tutorial to create it on our Tutorial page. [play]

That's why Text Matrix was created. By using a particle system like Text Matrix, you've eliminated the tedious part. As it happened, 'The Matrix' movie came out around the time of our Text Anarchy release. That was a pretty good example of ONE type of effect the plugins could do and certainly made the set popular.