As the After Effects class I’m teaching at the Academy of Art advances I’m having to come up with more and more practical examples of the techniques i’m teaching. Here’s a video i made so my class can learn how to operate a camera parented to a null layer. Is started by importing a Grunge map and making a new composition to the size of the grunge map then animating the text to get the timing right. I then changed the comp size to the standard NTSC DV preset and animated the camera. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

Flower Kinetic Typography from Tim Rice on Vimeo.

I’ve been teaching After Effects at the Academy of Art recently and have been making a lot of new stuff. This is one i made in a few hours to a song a made a few weeks ago. For the background I used two solids, one purple and one dark purple then put a circular mask on the dark one. I then added a particle emitter called Particular to another solid and played with the settings a bit, i came up with the subtle starry background you see. I may end up redoing this and add a 3d camera so you can see that these particals are actually in a 3d space.

I then used the paint effect on a new solid to draw in the background to the text and animated the offset. You have to select paint on transparent otherwise you won’t see the background. I made two text layers of INQL where one was the stroke and the other was the fill and precomposed it. In this way I was able to add a randomized strobe to the precomp and treat them as one.

I then made a new adjustment layer and animated a lens flare on it. I also added a glow to this layer and set it to only glow vertically. I changed the opacity so both the flare and glow would fade out together. After animating the rotation and scale of the text together i added a radio waves effect to the Paint Background and put a Brightness Contrasting effect on the whole comp and faded it out as I reverse animated the Paint Background. The effect you see on “Inquell.net ‘10″ Was called lens blur, and I used a triangle shutter setter. OK, enough talk lets have a look:

This is a pretty neat tool. It lets you copy the logos of other companies but insert your own words. The output isn’t particularly high resolution, but it is fun.

Logo54.com Logo Maker

Here’s an example I made using the Nintendo font.

I’ve been researching typography a lot lately and in turn have downloaded a lot of new fonts. I’ve taken a particular liking to a font called “Mod” and I’ve noticed I’m not the only one. You can find it as the main logo on the music blog Penned Madness and Disco Vs Dubstep, the weekly show at Poleng lounge in San Francisco. The Mod Font can be downloaded for free from Font Fabric. Which is, by the way, a great place to buy and download some really great fonts. However, my favorite place to find free user made fonts has to be Da Font. Here is a quick Inquell logo I made using the Mod font.