Skillshare – Design and Animate On-screen Texting for Video

Welcome to the class on how to design and animate on-screen texting for video. Nowadays, as texting has become a ubiquitous part of our digital lives, we cannot avoid it in movies. The question is how to depict it so that it still looks compelling. Should we capture the screen of a mobile device with its content or should we just display the content directly on the screen? A closeup of a screen does its job. It shows us the content of messages that someone received. But this can quickly become boring to watch, it is difficult to capture displays in film, and the phone models become outdated pretty quickly. On-screen texting has many advantages. It can be more dramatically effective because you can see the actor’s reaction at the same time of receiving the text, it is cheaper and, if done right, it also looks more appealing.

In this class, we are going to explore different ways of how to design and animate eye-catching on-screen text messages in Adobe After Effects. We are also going to look at different practices of on-screen texting from movies, to get some inspiration.

In the class project, you will create your own short video clip that portrays texting on screen. This class is designed for beginner to intermediate students. No prior knowledge is required because the class will take you through the whole process step by step. You only need to know how to export a video in the end, because I didn’t cover that in this class.