Stretch Text Animation – Free Template

Finally, I have this new stretch text animation free template for you to use in After Effects. It’s a small and simple one. But a free template nonetheless.

You’ve probably seen this stretch text animation many times before. Usually, you convert the text to paths and animate the anchor points around. But in this case, I used the ‘CC Scale Wipe‘ effect to create something similar. This way the text remains editable. Which means, you can just download this project file and use it for your projects (link below).

Creating this is actually pretty simple. Just type your text on the canvas and center it. It’s important to not apply the effect to the actual text layer! Because then the effect would be limited to the bounding box if the text layer, which is not what we want.

We first need to pre-compose (or ‘nest’) the text layer. So hit CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + C to create a new (nested) composition.

Stretch text animation with ‘CC Scale Wipe’

Now apply the ‘CC Scale Wipe‘ effect to this new composition. Here we’re gonna have to tweak a couple of settings to create the desired effect. In the ‘Effect Controls‘ panel set the ‘Stretch‘ value to 50. For the ‘Direction‘ value start with a value of 0. We want to animate the text vertically.

Now set a keyframe for the ‘Center‘ value of the effect. Animating this value will actually create the stretch effect. About 1 second into the animation move this value so the text is not stretching anymore.

Switch direction with hold keyframes

From here we need to “switch” both the ‘Direction‘ and the ‘Center‘ value so we can animate the stretch off the canvas. So set the ‘Direction‘ value to 180 and move the center of the stretch past the text.

Here animate the center value so it moves the text out of frame. The very last thing you need to do is you have to add a ‘hold keyframe‘ to the direction so it doesn’t animate (remember we want to switch this value and not animate it!). Do the same for the center value right before that switch halfway into the animation.

And that’s it! That’s the stretch text animation effect with the ‘CC Scale Wipe‘ effect.

Final tweaks

Of course, you can tweak the keyframes, add some easing and polish the timing a little bit so the animation is a little smoother.

For this template, I have added a drop shadow with a solid color. Just keep in mind, when you want to duplicate this main composition you have to do so in the ‘Project Panel‘ to create a real duplicate. If not you’d actually modify the main text layer.