This test is all about trying out an animation technique called ‘Write-Out’. The objective is to try and get my chinese characters to look as if they are being painted live on screen. Although it sounds rather simple its actually kind of hard to do, so I started with the chinese characters 我也是 which mean ‘Me Too’ A perspective title for the trailer or film. In photoshop I created the letters then added some effects to try and make it feel like an authentic script written image. Then I imported that file into after effects where I added the ‘write-out’ animation effect, from there I had to use a brush to draw over the photoshop created text.

Each time I moved the brush covering up part of the image I then moved the timeline bar a long a bit more, this is why the reveal is sort of uneven, as well as this I realised from doing this test that I would need to do every single stroke on a separate layer, otherwise I get the overlapping of the strokes as the brush reveals them all at once, by doing this to individual layers I won’t get this and it should allow me to do it much smoother. I do love this technique though, I think for text at the start of the trailer it could look great as it will give the trailer and authentic Wuxia feel

The parts of the character circled in red show where the thickness of the brush has revealed parts of the character I did not want it to yet, so by putting them into separate layers I can stop this.