Wiggling Titles

Both RED and Graffiti let you animate the splines that make up each character in your text. Let’s start by creating some text.

Start by creating a new settings file by choosing File > New Settings (Graffiti) or File > New Project (Red). Delete any tracks by Shift-selecting and pressing the Delete key (Macintosh) or the Back Space key (Windows); you will not need them in this tutorial.

There are many ways to add text in Boris Red and Graffiti. In this case you will try the new Text Tool. Choose Window > Show Tool Window to open the Tool window, or press Command-6 (Macintosh) or Control-6 (Windows). In the Tool window, click to select the Text tool or press T. Click the left side of the Composite window and type a word. The illustrations in this tutorial use the word “India,” but you can type whatever you like.

Select the entire word by double-clicking or dragging from left to right. Set the font and size in the Transform tab in the Controls window. These examples use a heavy Textile font and a 168 size, but any font and size will work.

Let’s add stroke and fill to the text. You can use a number of techniques to do this: use text styles in the Text window, apply styles from the Style Palette or change style parameters directly in the Controls window.

Choose Window > Show Style Palette to open the Style Palette, or press Command-7 (Macintosh) or Control-7 (Windows). In the Style Palette, click to select the Text tab. Press the Category menu and browse the categories until you find a style that you like. Once you find a style that you like, double-click the thumbnail for the style that you want to use.

Now you need to convert the text object into splnes. In the Timeline, press the Media icon. Since you are working with a text track, the icon displays as a T.

Choose Spline Object from pop-up menu that appears.

This converts the Text media type to the Spline Object media, preserving all spline information from the text outlines. The Composite window updstes to reflect the new media type.

At this point you can manipulate the spline using the standard spline tools in Tool window. However, automated spline animation is included in Boris Red and Graffiti. With the spline selected, click the Animation tab in the Controls window.

The Jitter X and Y parameters jitter the spline on the X and Y axis respectively. The parameter changes smoothly over time to produce a very organic animation. Set these parameters to 2 using Constant interpolation.

You could also adjust the Velocity parameter to adjust the speed of the jitter, but the default value of 20 is fine for this effect. The Seed parameter varies the animation from frame to frame, basically setting a different starting point for the jitter. This is useful if you do not want to repeat the same pattern of jittering on a duplicate track

Play the effect or Preview to Ram. Observe the smooth subpixel animation of the splines. Adjust the Jitter X and Y parameters if you feel that splines change too much or too little. Enjoy.

How about making a Flash movie to post on the web? This can be done with the Flash option in the Export menu:

This setting is perfectly suitable for Flash export because it contains vector data only. The resulting Flash animation is only 88 Kb, which is much smaller than a 2 second raster image animation:

• Training Home
• Boris TV
• Tutorials
• Webinar Replays
• Training DVD's
• Training Centers
• Demo Scripts