Text Write on with Ink Bleed in After EffectsHow to create an ink write-on effect with ink bleeds using a simple stroke-effect and roughen edges.Find a nice script typeface and create your text. The one I used here is called “Biloxi Script” off of dafont.com. To simulate a bit of an ink bleed, I created an adjustment layer on top of this text with a “simple choker” effect. I choked the text to somewhere around 3 pixels, and animated it to 0 choke over about 3 seconds… pre comp it.Take that pre comp, and add a time displacement onto it. Use a horizontal gradient as a map for the displacement. This makes it so that the “ink bleed choke effect” from the pre comp happens from left to right instead of all at once. We’re trying to simulate a delayed ink bleed that somewhat follows the writing on of the text. We’ll now take our text layer (with the delayed ink bleed choke) and animate a stroke-on effect. My method for this is to create a stroke effect on a separate layer with a path that follows the text lettering (just as you would write it by hand). Animate the stroke end from 0 to 100. When you set the original text layer to use the stroke as an alpha matte, the text will appear to write on…. pre comp that.Lay that pre comp onto a paper texture. Boom. We have the main ink text. Now to create the more smudgy ink bleeds.Duplicate that main ink bleed, and pre comp it. Inside that pre comp, add a simple choke and a roughen edges effect. Choke it and roughen the edges until you get text with a bunch of chunks taken out of it. We don’t want all of our text to bleed, just parts of it. Once you’ve done that, add another choke and roughen edges. Choke the “choked and roughened” text with a negative value so that we expand the text again, and then roughen those edges to simulate the texture of ink. I keyframed these second choke and roughen edges effects to expand over time (as if the ink were flowing outwards over time). I duplicated this smudgy ink bleed layer a couple of times and expanded the ink further and further outwards (as well as lowering the opacity to lessen the effect as it expanded further so it has a bit of a gradient effect.) Done.Go back to the main comp with the paper. Add another time displacement (with horizontal gradient map) onto the smudgy ink bleed layer. This way, the smudgy ink bleed animates on from left to right over time.For the final composition, I added film grain, some stock ink splatter footage (with the same smudgy ink bleed I described), depth of field, and a camera move that follows the text write on. I think the final touch that really sells the effect is the pencil sound design. Spend some time on that! It makes a big difference.