Idea behind this tutorial came from Discord. I saw a post with a text animation and I thought it could make a cool little template. After some tinkering, I put together a template and then this tutorial 🙂

Whole animation is done with simple String Resize – trimming characters from end part of the text. Essentially, we are “typing in” all the characters, one by one and text highlight group follows. Thats about it.

Because we can use data (0%-100% change) in Cavalry easily, I used this animation to drive:

• Unicode Character offset on Highlight Character
• Colour Change
• Opacity Control on Highlight Characetr

This shows the magic of Cavalry – create a simple animation and enhance it with procedural systems.

This template will only work on a single line of text. Text Wrap (paragraph text) won’t really work. In the future, I will look into more sophisticated and complex templates.
You can use multiple Texh Highlight Characters at the end of your Main Text. For example, “ABCDE”. They will randomise and offset each other. But they will have the same colours and same background. Again, in the future, I will try to put more complex setup 🙂

Here are some ideas what you can do with it:

• Add Position animation – Main Text is the one that controls overall position of the whole thing – animate Position to add extra secondary motion
• Animate Main Text background padding, colour
• PreComp it and use Composition Overrides to have easy to use template, that you can use across multiple compositions
• Change Font Type, Weight, Size to make this setup really unique