The video above shows a brief overview of the toolkit in action, from the point of view of an AE artist using it.
The toolkit was capable of updating the size and content of title and subtitle, while having a dynamic, animating, recolourable ribbon resize to fit the content, while allowing custom animation timing of both ribbon and text reveal– all while supporting 16:9, 1:1, and 9:16 formats.
The coolest technical challenge in this piece was supporting the animated ribbon, for the supers text.
While I have already built a system to dynamically reflow paragraph text based on content & target text box size, pairing that with an animated backdrop was a whole other ordeal.
The problem with typical "text backdrop" solutions in After Effects is that they all only consider the entire block of text, whereas our system needed to respect the different lengths per-line.
To that end, I built a system called, rather cleverly, "Amazon Holiday Super-Maker" (...because it makes supers and it's for Amazon Holiday spots. Get it?).
This system allows you to enter in any text or text style, and it will dynamically reflow the text into several lines, while allowing you to animate the text and ribbon to reveal each word to follow the approved project look & feel.
Zack Lovatt focuses on toolkitting, building custom studio pipelines, expression rigging projects, and creating data-driven animation workflows.