I'm pretty new to AE, a client has asked for animated text, basics are ok
but in one part they want certain letters to drop away and the letters left will spell out a new word eg:

"premier"

the r,m,i would drop away and then the remaing letters would close together and the word "peer" would be formed

Ive got a feeling this might not be easy or certainly alot of graft!
any pointers in the right direction would be most welcome

cheers Russ.

Russell

The easiest way would be to put each letter on its own layer. Then you could keyframe the position of the letters that you want to fall away and then keyframe the remaining letters to come together to form the new word.

Jim

What Jim said. It's pretty easy that way =- should take you less than 30 minutes to do it.

cheers lads :)

Your problem caught my interest and I fiddled a little bit last night in AE, but ran out of time. It looks like you could do this with as few as two layers; one containing just the characters that are to drop out and another for the characters that will squeeze together to fill the space (you'd use keyframed kerning and word tracking to do the "squeeze").

With a lot of tweaking, I think it might even be done with one layer using Animation Groups and keyframes for character kerning and position, and tracking...but probably more hassle than just doing each letter individually as Jim said.

As Pete suggests, an alternate method would be to write your text and then add an animation to it. Open the text layer in the timeline and you'll see a button called animate. Add a position animation, one for each letter, and set your range selector (expand the options for the animation), to the left and right of the letter you want to drop. Then you can keyframe the Y value of the position for each, and control the letters drop speed independently.