How to Animate Text Reveal Rectangles in After Effects, Part 1

What You’ll Be Creating

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to build a great-looking text animation treatment using Adobe After Effects. The animation is very stylish and a great way to improve the look of your project.

What we have in our example are two bars that slide across the screen that at some point start to reveal the text. So the two bars move across from the left to right. And then the text moves across from the right to left, which creates an interesting contrast to the reveal animation.

I’m going to show you how to build this in a way that you can modify using this ready-made comp example:

1980 x 1080
10 seconds duration

I have a background solid in here that is locked, so that I can’t mess with it.

So the first thing I want to do is lay out my text using the Text Tool. Just click into the preview area and begin typing. I’m going to make sure that is right aligned.

I will pull out a guide to help me align the text to where I want it to be. This will help when you want to include another line of text underneath.

So let’s duplicate the text and type in something new. Then place it underneath the original text line.

Change the font of the text at the top to something lighter, like Regular or Light, so that it contrasts with the text underneath.

Then the next thing that I want to do is build out those rectangles to make them nice and long. And I want to find the spot that’s right in between these two layers. You can use another guide to help you do this.

Deselect your layers, grab the Rectangle Tool, and draw a rectangle. Make sure that it is only set to fill and that there is no stroke.

If you need to adjust the size of the rectangle, just jump into the shape properties and make your adjustments from there to get it to where you need it to be. As long as I have this guide here, this will more or less snap the shape in place for me.

Once you’re happy with the shape, slide it over to the right and then create another guide on the right to help you with the spacing.

Name this Rec_1, duplicate it, and place it below the first shape.

Next we need to design a matte so that we have mattes on the left and right of the screen. The mattes will block the text and cut off my little rectangles, making them appear out of thin air.

To do that, I’m going to use a Shape Layer. Create one that is large enough to cover the left side of the screen.

Then duplicate it and slide it to the right side of the screen. Align it so that the long rectangle shapes are just peeking out.

Grab the Anchor Point Tool and then grab the anchor point of this shape (not the layer) and move it to the outer edge of the shape.

Do the same thing for the other shape as well.

Open up the properties and delete the strokes from rectangle 1 and rectangle 2 as we don’t need them.

Go to the Effects and Presets panel, type in “Slider Control”, and add it to the shape layer.

Rename it “Right Side”, and then duplicate it and rename the second one “Left Side”. I’m going to set both of these values to 100.

Go back to the shape properties and select the scale. This is the scale of the rectangles, not the scale of the entire layer.

Now we’ll use an expression by holding Alt on the keyboard and clicking on the stopwatch icon. Then type in x = and then use the pick whip and connect it to the right slider.

Then, at the end of the expression, add a ; and then hit Enter on the keyboard to add another line. Type in y = and then use the pick whip and connect it to the right scale value (which will lock it at 100%).

Then add a ; at the end again and hit Enter to add another line. And then add (x,y). This expression basically says that I want to set the x parameter to whatever the slider control is, and that way I’ll be able to modify it without having to jump down into the layer properties and go right to the scale every time.

Now copy the expression (Control-C) and then go to the other rectangle. Open up the expression by Alt-clicking on the scale stopwatch icon, and then paste it in.

Now we need to make a few modifications to the expression. Replace “Right Side” with “Left Side”. And then change “Rectangle 2” to “Rectangle 1”. And this will allow me to modify all of my mattes in this composition with this one matte control layer. You can change the name of the layer to “Matte Control” to reflect this.

Change the color of the layer to fuchsia so that we can easily identify it, and then duplicate it and call it “Rec Matte_1”.

Delete the slider controls on the Rec Matte_1 layer.

Press U twice on the keyboard to open up the properties and delete both expressions.

Select the scale properties for Rectangle 2 and pick whip it to the scale properties of the same rectangle (Rectangle 2) that is within the Matte Control layer.

Do the same thing with Rectangle 1. Select the scale properties for Rectangle 1 and pick whip it to the scale properties of the same rectangle (Rectangle 1) that is within the Matte Control layer.

Hide the Matte Control layer by clicking on the eye icon.

Select the Rectangle 1 shape layer here and make that Alpha Inverted.

Now, when you select the Matte Control layer and adjust the Right Side slider, you can see how you can animate the top line.

Duplicate Rec Matte 2 and place it below Rec_1 and above Rec_2. Set it to Alpha Inverted as well.

Duplicate the Rec Matte layer one more time, place it above the text layers, and rename it Text Matte_1.

Change the top text line layer to Alpha Inverted.

Duplicate the Text Matte_1 layer and place the Text Matte_2 layer above the bottom text line.

Change the bottom text line layer to Alpha Inverted.

Select all the matte layers and use the pick whip to link them all to the Matte Control layer.

Lock the layers by clicking on the lock icon square, which will prevent you from moving anything around in an undesirable way.

Congratulations

Congratulations! You’ve completed Part 1 of this tutorial. In the next part of this tutorial, we’ll take you through the step-by-step process of how to animate the text reveal in Adobe After Effects.

You can also check out even more tutorials below and apply them to the project.

In the meantime, I hope you’ve found this tutorial useful. I’ll see you next time, on Envato Tuts+!