Ok guys, I've been asked to put up a quick tip that everyone can look at to learn possibly a new aspect of AE. In my final project I really wanted to work with transitions in between scenes and trying to make them as seem-less as possible. So one thing I experimented with is creating new words from letters in old words. For the section in my video that says "no more denying" or the end "pick your doctor and pick your plan" I used some of the letters from the scene before to transfer into the following scene. The scene goes from the text "stability and security" to "no more denying" I used the "n" from "and" to transfer into the next scene. Here I will give you a quick step by step as to what I did and another technique to use in text animation.

Step 1: duplicate the letters that are going to be transferring scenes.

Step 2: change the opacity so that the transferring letters come in when the full text is on screen.

Step 3: fade out the full text leaving only the letters

Step 4: use position keyframes to move the letters to where they are going to be in the new words.

Step 5: either use masks, positions, or opacity to bring in the rest of the word.

In my video I used masks a couple of times to reveal the entire word. For the No More Denying part I used a mask on the "N", created a new layer with "O" and used the position to reveal the word.

This part is very useful: After you created the animation for the word "NO" select both the "N & O" layer and go to the layer tab on the top tool bar, and select "pre-compose" this makes those two layers one layer in your current composition. This keeps things very organized so you don't have millions of layers by the end of your animation. If you wish to manipulate the pre composed layer simply double click on the pre composed file in your composition bin and it will open the pre composed comp in another window, allowing you to manipulate all of the layers in that pre composed composition. I recommend using this as much as possible to keep everything organized and saving you headaches from trying to figure out what is what in your animation. Also, name everything. Organization is key.

Here are two websites with great tutorials, A lot of times learning after effects it's best to follow some tutorials and manipulate what they did to conform to your idea.

1. www.videocopilot.net (this website also has a great basic training section that gives a general overview of the basics of after effects)

2. www.aetuts.com