Here's a demo of my livefont - FUTURA ANIMATED. You can't go wrong with a bit of Johnny Cash.

Designing the animations of each glyph so they referenced and respected the principles of Futura was great fun. This was initially created for a corporate video job at Cobra Creative- when all of the titles were laid out, we struck upon the idea of animating each letter in AE and then typing with the animated movies assigned to the glyphs. This proved a bit more difficult then I initially assumed- after some research, it seemed as though Apple's Motion could use "LiveFonts" but you had to create them in LiveType. So, I installed Livetype, and it creates livefonts with an XML-like format and quicktime references. If you want to use FUTURA ANIMATED, here's the livefont. It loads in both Motion and LiveType.

movecraft.com/clients/movecraft/Futura_animated.zip

For the real job, I just placed precomps in AE.

Bran Dougherty-Johnson @psst3 on twitter asked how to get it working in AE, so we whipped up (with the super crazy support of Kevin, our developer) something that pretty closely matches the functionality of LiveType in AE. The alphabet is laid out on a timeline, then precomped. The precomp is time remapped and then the remap values are driven by the charAt values of a type layer... So, type in what you want in the type driver layer, dupe the precomps, and it should map accordingly, although you have to manually do the kerning adjustments. There is a slider to control time offset and some variables for individual animation duration for holds and outros- all handy if you want to sub in your own glyph animations!

Check it-

movecraft.com/clients/movecraft/livefont_expressions.zip

I'm building another livefont based on Gaudy Sans Hairline for a video remix pack for electronic musician Moldover, which will have speak & spell audio baked into it. Check out a little sneak peak here-

vimeo.com/7421467

Thanks to Cobra Creative for letting me mess around with this stuff for a few days instead of dragging and dropping an AE type preset on the titles. High fives to Ryan and Jake for finishing up some of the glyphs.

cobracreative.com

movecraft.com
@colin_movecraft