FEBRUARY 17, 2004
Animating a Signature in After Effects
5 Quick tips on mask animations, including paint
 by Ko Maruyama
Several years ago, my PaintBox initiation began with rotoscoping signatures for a game show that featured celebrities' names in the promo. For the show's promotional campaign, I was charged with the task of replicating the light-pen animation that was used on the set to animate each signature for the 15 celebrities that would appear that week. These sorts of effects are much more accessible these days, and programs like Adobe After Effects offer a variety of solutions for creating animated signatures or other writing effects. This week, we'll take a look at a few of the options you can use to create the illusion of writing in your compositions.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]Before we get started, you should know this isn't a tutorial for animating specific fonts. After all, do you sign your name in Helvetica Neue? If you are interested in text animation, you can read about it in Stephen Schleicher's tutorial on text here. Otherwise, read on to learn about animating hand-drawn signatures.

There are are a few things you have to consider when animating a signature.

  • Are you creating the graphic from scratch or scanning an actual signature?
  • Do you want to retain or create the irregularities found in a signature?
  • Do you need to set specific timing for the character animations? ascenders and curves take longer to write by hand, creating irregular speeds in a signature.

You'll have to play around with these tutorials and find out which method is appropriate for you.

1. Stroke
The easiest of animated strokes comes in the form of After Effects' own Stroke plugin.

1. Create a new comp (Command-N) with a new solid (Command-Y).

2. Create a mask (keyboard shortcut to mask/pen tool = g). Note: you can import a spline from Adobe Illustrator and paste it into the mask shape, but let's keep it all in AE for now. (For more on this, check archive tutorial: Copy/Paste.)

3. Apply the "stroke" effect to the layer (found under Effect > Render) and Select Mask1 (your mask) under the "Path" option of the plugin.

There are three elements you want to look at.



  • Start: Controls the distance from the beginning of the path where the stroke will be drawn (percentage of whole stroke)
  • End: Controls the distance from the end of the path where the stroke will be drawn
  • Paint Style: "On Original" - applies the stroke right to the layer. "On Transparent" - applies the stroke as an alpha channel, using the color of the stroke. "Reveal Original" - applies the stroke as an alpha channel for the layer (disregards stroke color).

4. At time=0, set a keyframe for end=0%. At time=end, set a keyframe for end=100%.

Pretty easy stuff. The other parameters in Stroke are self-explanatory. A couple of minutes with this one, and you'll be a pro.

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