After Effects shapes have so much versatility you would think the application is a graphic tool. That’s only part of the picture. You can do a lot with shapes that aren’t shapes.

Take, for example, text. What can you do by making text into a shape? Well, for one thing, your text can come alive! It can move and gesture or shrink and grow. It can become a caricature, personality or mimic other objects in your composition. The word ’steamy’ can become gradient bubble… then simply vaporize.

Your text can do a whole lot of things just being text but it can’t change it’s shape! Once you convert your text into a shape, you see that it is composed of many ‘pen’ constructed connected lines each with their own connective points. You can use any of these to reconstruct or distort your new shape. You can animate the structure of these points just as you would animate the dimension and construction of a shape.

Let’s do one! Pick a word, if you feel creative today pick a word that evokes an image: delicious, bold, dreamy, vague. Pick a font that accompanies this image to get started and type your word. I’ve noticed a difference between After Effects CS3 and CS4 on the next simple step. In After Effects CS3, with your text layer chosen, select Layer>Create Outlines. This will create a shape layer with the image of your text. It will copy everything, color, fill and stroke if you have stroke defined.

In After Effects CS4 with your text layer selected, select Layers>Create Shapes from Text to produce the same result. Now what? Well, just about anything. Your text is a shape now and you can do anything you want with it. Just for fun I chose the word ‘Happy’. I made it a happy font, light blue color with a light stroke. In CS4 I chose Layers>Create Shapes from Text to create my shape layer.

The first thing to notice is that when you convert your text to a shape you actually create multiple shapes in one shape layer, one for each character. This is a good thing offering you the flexibility to apply individual effects and adjustments to your characters. The next thing to notice as you examine the individual character shapes is that they are indeed made up of pen style connecting points and you can easily edit at that level. If fact, at this point, the rules we learned about modifying shapes absolutely apply here only we do have multiple shapes sharing a single shape layer. Clicking a character you will see the rectangular outline, with a dotted line connecting the handles. In this mode you can move the character about, use the character’s individual transform controls to scale, rotate, change position, opacity. A double click will take you to free transform mode for this individual character where you have the same ‘freedom’ to size, skew, scale, rotate as you do with any shape. A single click will take your character shape back to where all it’s ‘dots’ are selected but there is no overriding mode to convert the entire shape. For me, this is where we can really do some damage so to speak. Here you can select individual points and redraw the character. You can animate your new point definitions. You can select a group of points, half the character for example, and pull it to the right of the screen and back creating a slingshot style animation. Because you can literally do anything here, it’s a great time to engage your imagination.

In my simple example, I created the word ‘Happy’, a happy ‘Happy’ with happy font, light blue color, light stroke and when I converted it to a shape and liberated the individual characters I worked with the ‘H’ and first ‘P” choosing individual points to extend their length and depth basically drawing the beginning of a line underlining the word. This line however, slowly becomes a smile. Just as we can use the ‘G’ key shortcut to choose the different pen options, once we begin to redefine this shape, we can certainly add more points, add curvature to it’s shape, add enough points to draw a caricature smile under the word ‘Happy’ and in my example, I threw in a few teeth that appear at the end.

Consider logos and messages that have visual associations. Your fire sale … can catch on fire! The ‘O’ in your carol can become a wreath and the ‘T’ in your tree can become one. Your words can become true characters in this creative invitation to personification!