After Effects offers an insanely rich set of path text animation settings

The key difference between After Effects' tools and applications like SWiSH and SWfX is the level of control After Effects gives you. In this case I'll animate the free font Fatslab (from chank.com) following a path I created in Illustrator. We'll end up with an animation like this:



If you're already familiar with how to animate text in After Effects, you can skip ahead to the final section on importing and optimizing in Flash.

Creating the artwork

First off, I scanned a photo of my bike and turned it into vector artwork using Adobe Streamline. I opened the file (bike_photo2.ai) in Adobe Illustrator 9 and used the free transform tool to apply a perspective distortion (select the artwork, and while dragging a corner using the free transform tool, start holding down the Command key).

If you want to follow along, grab my source files (textanim.zip - PC/Mac files) or use your own artwork.

You could use Illustrator's pen tool to create the path on which you'll animate the text, but in this case we'll create it later in After Effects.

Setting up the After Effects project

Moving to After Effects, create a new project and a new composition set to 400 x 250, 18fps with a white background; name the comp "bike." Import the Illustrator file as footage, then drag it from your project window to the comp window.

To give After Effects a path for the text, you need to create a solid, then draw the path on it. So, hit Cmd-Y to make a new solid as the composition (400 x 250) and name "text animation." The solid's color doesn't matter since After Effects will only be referring to the path it contains. Once you drag the solid onto the timeline (which centers it and places it above the Illustrator artwork), select it on the timeline. Hit "T" to reveal the layer's transparency settings and lower opacity to 0%; this way you can see the bike underneath. Use After Effects' pen tool to draw and adjust the points of your text path.

You're now ready to add a path text effect to the text layer by choosing

Effect->Text->Path Text

When you do, After Effects presents a dialog box where you can type whatever you want. Hit OK and you'll see your words on the canvas in place of the solid. You should also see the Effects Controls window displaying the text animation controls (see screenshot above). Each of these attributes can be animated separately by setting the stopwatch next to it, then adjusting its value at another point in the composition.

Creating the animation

In the text controls, turn down the "twirly" (disclosure arrow) next to Path Options, and use the popup menu next to Custom Path to choose the text path in your solid (probably called Mask 1). Now that the text is attached to the path, you can begin to finesse it with the many effects controls or the main timeline controls. To make the job more manageable, you may want to set a stopwatch for the attributes you know you want to animate, then close the effects controls and with the text layer selected on the main timeline, hit "U". Now After Effects will display only the attributes you're animating. In my animation I used Tracking, Character Rotation, and Left Margin in the effects controls, plus Opacity on the main timeline, so hitting U made my timeline look as follows:

Exporting and optimizing in Flash

When you're happy with your animation, you can export everything directly to SWF by choosing

File->Export->Macromedia Flash

but I prefer to export to SWF in stages to make it easier to tweak the artwork in Flash. After Effects will export only what's visible, so I use the layer eyeballs to display and export the text animation first, then do the same with the background Illustrator artwork. In the Flash import dialog box, select all the SWFs you generate, and Flash will import and stack them.

It's important to clean up your file in Flash. After Effects builds its SWFs with import accuracy in mind, so running them through Flash can slim them down considerably. You'll notice that After Effects generated some extra wrappers for the Illustrator artwork (details on that in the character animation tutorial TODO ), so in this case it makes sense to make a symbol from the one frame of the artwork and blow away the rest of that layer's frames/symbols. You'll also notice that the Flash transparency model can't display the Illustrator artwork transparency properly, so I removed the transparency and applied a tint to the artwork symbol to achieve a similar effect.

Remember that SWF stores data for every attribute that changes over time, so the more characters you use and the more attributes that change on them (scale, rotation, etc.), the bigger your SWF will be. But by copying the imported keyframes in Flash and making movie clips that you can reuse, you won't increase your SWF size and may even reduce it.

In this modified version (above swf bike_flash2.swf) I imported the After Effects animation, copied it into a clip, and offset three copies of the clip with different alpha values. This allows me to simulate a blur effect without adding a bitmap-creating blur effect in After Effects.