After Effects: Manual masking for staggered text animation

Demo summary
The instructor uses the Rectangle tool to create masks on duplicated text layers, isolating individual words to stagger their entrance animations.
Step-by-step
- Select the text layer in the timeline
- Duplicate the layer for each word in the phrase
- Select the first layer and click the Rectangle tool
- Drag the tool over the first word to create a mask
- Repeat the masking process for each subsequent layer, isolating one word per layer
- Stagger the layers on the timeline by dragging their start points to different times
Options
- Toggle layer visibility using the eye icon to verify individual masks
Watch out for
- The specific layer must be selected before drawing the mask, otherwise you may create a new shape layer instead
Highlights
“this is a really cool”
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