Making a Motion Graphic Production Element

Motion graphics are fun, but they can be difficult to create. When I was searching for production elements that I could use to consistently brand the book trailers I am creating for FontLife Publications and the tutorials I create for this site, I just couldn't find anything appropriate that adequately says Thank You to our customers. What I did find was this great tutorial on Tuts+ called Create an Elegantly Handwritten Text Reveal by Jurrien Boogert.

I followed the directions explicitly only to find at the end of a 6-hour session that instead of revealing the text, it was being erased instead. I don't know if it has anything to do with the fact that I am using After Effects CC or not, but I discovered that step 15, which sets the masks composition mode to Stencil Alpha, should be set to Silhouette Alpha instead. Then everything works. The results are below.

Since this is a production element, I realized that I needed a 2-second still image at the start of the video to allow for transition effects in the videos in which I use this element. Adding space at the beginning of an After Effects project after all the keyframing is done is hard. In fact, it's a real pain in the neck. So I created the 2-second pause at the beginning with ScreenFlow.

This video can be downloaded for free from Videvo.net.

Download the Adobe After Effects CC project source files. The paper and pen images are in the public domain and can be found on Pixabay.com.