FOX television text effect

Step 1:

Create your text (keep it short)and turn it into a graphic symbol.

Step 2:

Place your text symbol on the first layer and place a second keyframe at frame 35. The first keyframe should be the starting point for your traveling text (place it off the screen to the left) and the second keyframe should be the destination.

Step 3:

Create a second layer. Copy and paste the frames from the first layer. Tint the begining and ending keyframes of the second layer a slightly different color. This will help to create the illusion of going around the corner.

Step4:

On layer 1 in the "Transform" panel select "skew" and enter 3.0 and -3.0. Do this for the first and last keyframes. On layer 2 do the same except enter 3.0 and 3.0. This gives us our different angles for each side of the corner.

Step 5:

Add a third layer to be used as a guide. On frame 1 draw a straight line along the bottom of your text and continue the line across the stage to the right. This will show you your text path. On frame 35 be sure to line up the text on this line without changing the x position of the text. Do the same for the other text instance.

Step 6:

On frame 1 of both text layers create a motion tween and give it an ease out of 100. You should now have criss crossing text. Now create a mask layer for each of the text layers. The top text layer should have a rectangle mask to the right side of the screen and the bottom text layer should have a rectangle mask to the left of the screen. Where the two rectangles meet is the corner. You may have to tweek the position of the two masks a bit to get the right effect but I think the result is pretty cool. You should also be able to change the text in the symbol (as long as it is about the same length)and the effect will work the same.

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