Offsetting characters

This examples illustrates how you can easily animate random characters so that they gradually form a legible word or phrase. To do this, specify an Offset Character value and animate the Range selector.


Animating the offset values for the characters in the word "Galaxy"

To offset characters:

1. Create a new composition.
2. Create a new text layer with the word "Galaxy".
3. Position the cursor away from the text in the Composition window and when the type cursor changes to the move cursor , drag to move the text to the bottom and center of the window. Resize it if necessary so that it fits within the window.
4. Choose Animation > Animate Text > Character Offset.
5. In the Timeline window, set the Character Offset value to 5.
6. Expand Range Selector 1.
7. Click the Start stopwatch to set an initial keyframe at 0 seconds and set the value to 0%.
8. Move the current-time indicator to 5 seconds and set the Start value to 100%.
9. Preview the animation.