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Ken Lee sent us a really great movie he created in another animation program, asking us how we would create this easily in After Effects without having to keyframe each and every letter. This can be achieved very simply using the Path Text plug-in.

Note: You can make the same effect even better with the Advanced Text Engine introduced in After Effects 6.0.

Instructions

1. Create a new comp. The sample comp is 720x486, but make it whatever you like.
2. Create a layer in your comp, and call it Text or something like that. It should be the same size as your comp, so that it fills the screen.
   
3. Put a path on your layer mask.
4. You can do this by double clicking your Text layer to open the mask window, drawing it right on the layer (v 5.0), or pasting a path from Photoshop or illustrator. This will be the path that your text bees will glide upon. If you want your text to land straight in your frame, make sure the last portion of your path is a straight line, right through the center of your screen.)
5. Apply the Path Text filter to your Text layer (Effect > Text > Path Text). Type your text, set up your size, colors, etc.
6. In your effects palette, look for Path Options under the Path Text effect. Choose Mask 1 (or whatever your mask may be called)
7. Set keyframes for your left margin. I keyframed it back and forth a bit, so that the bee text would appear to buzz back and forth.
8. Set your jitter settings. Jitter settings make random movements in the characteristic that you set. This is under advanced under Path Text in the effects window. I set all four (baseline, kerning, rotation and scale jitter to 150, and then keyframed them to 0 when I wanted them to stop moving.
9. You can also animate the size of the text, so that it appeared that the bee text was coming from far away and approaching, or going away.
10. I also keyframed the opacity, added a bevel and shadow.
11. Don't forget to turn on motion blur! Use the Enable Motion Blur button () near the top of the Timeline window The checkmark also appears in the Motion Blur switch () for that layer in the Timeline window.