After Effects CS6 Tutorial - 123 - Creating Long Text Shadows Video Lecture | Adobe After Effects CS6: Complete Course from Novice to Pro - IT & Software

hey everybody how's it going and welcome
to another After Effects cs6 tutorial
I'm your host a buddy Blackford and I
want to talk to you about how to make
these shadows on your text and you can
easily animate these shadows and
everything like that so it's a kind of
like a retro looking feel here and I
talked to you about drop shadows and how
not to use them in other in another
tutorial I had about rules of typography
so this is a way if you really need
shadows to get around that because the
drop shadow looks like crap and these
kind of shadows look cool so we're gonna
use the repeater effect which is in a
different kind of text kind of thing
I'll show you it's a different it's made
differently but it's simple to do so
let's go on with the tutorial I'll shut
my piehole now about all this crap and
let's start so I'm gonna delete these
out and I've got nothing going on here
besides a regular background so let's
create some text there new text and
shadow mania now I'm going to scale this
up so we can see it a lot better and
since you're gonna have shadows you may
end up wanting to separate these out a
little farther so let's come to our
separation let's separate these out so
they're a little farther apart
there we go
because if you have them too close
together the shadows are gonna run into
each other it's gonna look blotching
crappy so we got a shadow here and when
we have a shadow it's usually gonna be
darker than our main text so but you can
do whatever you want and if it looks
good use it but make sure your regular
text here is a lighter color if you want
to follow the norm so let's uh we're
gonna right-click on our text layer and
we're gonna create shapes from text so
do that now we have a new layer here
where we have the shapes created we're
gonna turn back on our text layer
because I got turned off by clicking on
this hide button here and put it on top
of the shadow outlines here now we're
going to tour this open and we have the
add button here we need to use so click
on that and we're gonna add repeater and
it brings up some shadow but it doesn't
look good right now now the reason why
that is is let's turn on open up the
repeater twirl it down and we've got
copies offset composite and then we got
transform here which we want to open up
again and the reason why it looks weird
right now is because the position
defaults at 100 and 0 so let's put those
to 1 and 1 again now we don't can't
really see what's going on - well
because they're the same exact color so
if we click on our layer up here and
come up to the top
there's fill and stroke and all that
stuff so let's change the fill color
here and I'm gonna bring up my color
palette so I can make it look nice
and use my eyedropper tool to bring up
something like here's a red and I guess
I'll make it a little darker okay now we
have a little bit of a shadow behind
there but it's not very longer anything
like that but it's still there so if we
want to lengthen the shadow all we have
to do is come to this copy section and
increase it and now there we go we've
got a longer shadow now this is
animatable so we could have started this
at zero and or maybe maybe one probably
be a little better start our animation
here move up like maybe less in a second
and then bring it out till are there
like that so just make this an easy ease
keyframe so it looks nice
there we go no I shadow is pop-out
so you can also move the position of
your shadow so if we start here and then
we want to come out a couple key frames
or come out a couple frames we can
adjust the position here I put this
maybe two negative one see where that
goes there we go turn off this and I
should have animated the position while
I was doing that so we've got the length
here so we want to set our position is
fine all right let's go one and one
again from the beginning position
come here this is good and then let's
come out a few more frames and go
negative one
we easy is that
let's check this out
we move our shadows around
so that's that's pretty much how you do
that it's fairly simple and you can use
this any way you want you may want to
end up parenting these together because
if you try to move this right now it's
not gonna stay on so we want to parent
this to our text so if we move it now
they are together and I just parented by
clicking on this button here and
clicking on the name of the text layer
which I name is shadow mania and now
they stay together so thanks for
watching the tutorial use these shadows
to your advantage especially when you're
making some retro stuff you may want to
throw maybe a fit stroke around the edge
of your text see what it looks like and
it doesn't look good don't do that so
just keep it like this
and I mean have a have a good one
everybody thanks for watching this one
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