How do you make flourishes, filigree, calligraphic whooshing, and other 10 dollar words for squiggly dos? All you need is after effects, an enjoyment or moderate interest in motion graphics, and the ability to tolerate my voice. Sit back and relax and you’ll be done in no time and be embellishing your text, titles, and mustaches in no time.

For those who need it fast not really that excellent this will teach you the fast way of animating flourishes, filigree, calligraphic whooshing, and whatever else you call squiggly dos.

This effect uses the write on technique with the “stroke” effect. Do you think having “stroke” + “quick & dirty” will help my page rank for this? Can’t hurt right? In for a penny in for a pound I suppose. BOOBS!

This tutorial builds on making flourishes by making something WITH the flourishes. The idea is to combine smaller easy to animate elements into one longer, larger, and more impressive piece without doing much more work. If I could sum up the purpose of After Effects that would be it. Make less work. Did you know that back in the day some poor schmuck had to manually draw special effects onto each frame of this thing called Film Stock? What a world. What a time to be alive. Thankfully we no longer have to suffer those indignities.

This is also a request from http://wwwyoutube.com/Shaf2k8 and if you have an effect or technique you want to learn just let me know and I’ll do my best to help you out.