In this video
- Where kinetic text lives on the Animate tab
- The six entrances: Letter Bounce, Letter Wave, Typewriter, Flip In, Drop In, Scramble
- Wave Loop, which never stops
- Stagger, per-character duration, start delay and easing
- Which languages animate as a whole line, and why
- Three mistakes to avoid
About this video
Kinetic text animates a headline one letter at a time. This tutorial plays every preset on camera, tunes the four numbers behind them, and switches the preview to Arabic and Japanese to show the one rule that surprises people: scripts whose letters join, like Arabic, are drawn as one line on purpose, because split apart they would come out unjoined and backwards. It follows the Animations tutorial, which covers entrances, loops and exits for every object.
Playable Ads Maker - build playable ads and end cards, export to 13 ad networks.
Transcript
Every letter arrives on its own - bouncing, dropping, flipping, or typing itself out. It's one setting on an ordinary text.
In the next few minutes you'll try every letter-by-letter preset, tune its timing, and see which languages animate as a whole line instead - and why.
The Animations video covered entrances, loops and exits for any object. This is the extra set only text gets.
Read the full transcriptShow less
Select a text, open Animate, and look for Kinetic Text. There are six ways in, and one loop.
Letter Bounce grows each letter up from the line. Letter Wave rises them into place. Typewriter makes them appear, one after another. Flip In turns them, Drop In drops them with a spring, and Scramble brings them in out of order.
Wave Loop is different: it never finishes. The letters keep rolling for as long as the scene is on screen - so it lives with the idle loops.
Four numbers tune it. Stagger is the gap between one letter starting and the next. Push it up, and the word unrolls slowly.
Per-character duration is how long each single letter takes to land. And start delay holds the whole line back - handy when a headline should arrive after its background.
Easing is the feel of each letter's move. Back overshoots and settles, elastic springs, linear just goes. Change it, and the same preset reads completely differently.
Now switch the preview to Arabic. The headline doesn't animate letter by letter - it's drawn as one line. Arabic letters join to their neighbours, and pulled apart they'd come out unjoined and in the wrong order. So the line stays whole on purpose. The same goes for Hindi and the other Indic scripts.
Japanese, Chinese and Korean draw correctly one character at a time, so they animate just like English. Thai does too on a modern phone, and falls back to a whole line on an old one.
Three mistakes to avoid. One: a long stagger on a long line. Twenty letters at eighty milliseconds is over a second and a half before the last one lands.
Two: Wave Loop on anything people need to read. Motion that never stops pulls the eye - save it for one short word.
Three: judging it only in English. Preview every language you ship - the Arabic headline won't animate letter by letter, and it's better to see that now than in a review.
That's kinetic text. See you in the next video!