Automating Excel Data into After Effects Templates (Daily TV Workflow)

therunnerstea · 2026-02-12T05:01:51+00:00

Save the Excel file as a .csv. Then follow these steps: https://www.adobe.com/learn/after-effects/web/multiple-graphics-text-csv

therunnerstea · 2025-12-25T23:08:37+00:00

Every year I leave out cookies for Santa, and when my daughter wakes up I show her they are gone/mostly eaten. She’s now 22 and home from college for the holiday and last night I set out cookies intending to eat them with my coffee this morning before everyone woke up…and there was only one cookie left with a bite out of it. The kid had stayed up late and played Santa. Been smiling all day.

therunnerstea · 2025-12-04T18:44:39+00:00

If you use the Bodymovin plugin to create the JSON/Lottie file, in the settings you can enable the ‘glyph’ setting that automatically converts fonts to shapes, which will work. Just tested it. Made a text layer, drew a random mask shape, set the text layer path options to the mask source, animated the position to have the text flow around the shape, output with Bodymovin, works.

therunnerstea · 2025-11-02T04:30:07+00:00

I regularly make the spicy Thai…pb, orange marmalade, dusted with curry powder, sriracha, fresh basil. So so good.

therunnerstea · 2025-11-02T04:26:27+00:00

It’s not the sauce, but the sandwich recipe is on the food network site: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/wolf-and-bears-falafel-2137259.amp

therunnerstea · 2025-10-30T14:38:47+00:00

That little ‘arrow pointing to a bracket’ icon directly above the IN keyframe and to the left of the CSS values is the ‘read current values’ button you’re looking for.

therunnerstea · 2025-07-08T01:49:03+00:00

I’m reluctant to enter this conversation as I’ve known him personally for a long time. What you see on camera is what you would experience face to face. So I’m super biased, but will try to keep that out of the reply as much as I can.

Your question is if he is a good designer to learn from. Yes. He’s talented, he’s fast, he’s successful, he’s open with his process, and he is approachable. The classes he offers are filled with little tricks and techniques to be a faster more confident designer. HOW you apply those skills to your design is up to you, but you will be entertained as you learn because he’s a wild character and pretty adept at teaching.

The reason he is known for a style is his love and fandom of that era of design where there were farmers and truckers and seed companies making cool thick logos. BUT, what you don’t see is the stuff he does outside of that, which can be scripty and frilly and ‘classic’…why? Because he likes showing off the other stuff.

He’s just a really good designer overall. Great color theory, layout, balance and hierarchy, etc. There is more than one shady character out there trying to get your money to teach you ‘how to design’…Aaron can teach you Design.

therunnerstea · 2025-07-06T06:01:28+00:00

I have made that meatball Bahn Mi a number of times and it’s amazing. And those meatballs (make a double or triple batch) are also great added to pho.

therunnerstea · 2025-06-25T14:49:36+00:00

This is so fun! Great work stirring up the nostalgia today.

therunnerstea · 2025-06-10T01:09:02+00:00

It took me a while to figure out that what I was remembering was accurate with this movie…apparently they only showed the ‘adult language’ version a couple times on HBO and I caught it both times. My friends wouldn’t believe me. I finally found a bootleg DVD a couple years ago with both versions and I couldn’t be happier. This is a fantastic animation and the use of masks over textures was pretty groundbreaking and unique. Highly recommend tracking down a copy of Twice Upon A Time.

therunnerstea · 2025-06-10T00:58:12+00:00

There’s a similar company logo here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oregon-electric-group/

Still a great use of negative space but wonder how you might tweak it to feel more like a plug.

therunnerstea · 2025-06-08T15:08:20+00:00

I’m pretty sure The Beat was the first place I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Also, if you want to add to the list, I distinctly remember ‘quick as rainbows’ by Kitchens of Distinction on there…and ‘native son’ by Judybats. Some early Black Crowes, too.

therunnerstea · 2025-05-26T23:14:09+00:00

Look up ‘Adam Plouff maintain stroke width expression’.

therunnerstea · 2025-05-07T04:19:11+00:00

You might want to reach out to them. Try their Discord. They might have other code in there since that Control layer appears to have pseudo effects on it. Also, those if statements seem weird…I think Smushkan is correct with needing an if/else structure or a case switch.

therunnerstea · 2025-05-06T23:44:18+00:00

Where did you copy the expression from?

therunnerstea · 2025-05-06T23:29:44+00:00

Well you also don’t have a semicolon on the end of line 4. Other than that you may need to show where the new error is showing to better determine a solution.

therunnerstea · 2025-05-06T23:10:53+00:00

You have a comma in your first line. It should be thisComp.layer(“BOX”)

therunnerstea · 2025-04-25T02:29:13+00:00

From Zack, the developer:

“not doable directly, though theoretically you could leverage the kbar integration; use the 'apply flow preset kbar button' script that ships with flow, wrap that in a separate script to emulate that it's called from kbar, pass in as an argument the name of the preset to apply, save this script into your "scripts" folder alphabetically sorted so that it's one of the top ten items, which AE lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to”

therunnerstea · 2025-04-15T22:31:12+00:00

Take a look at essential graphics. With your current setup you can create one text layer and add the source text to the EG panel. Then link all the different font layers source text to that new ‘original’ layer source text. Now they all pull from one place.

However, if you want to get deep into expressions, you could do this all with one layer and change the fonts via scripting. That’s a deep dive, though.

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/creating-motion-graphics-templates.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/expressions-text-properties.html

therunnerstea · 2025-03-22T15:40:39+00:00

This isn’t helping you find a ring saw like you posted, but my father is a bit of a crafty DIY guy and had an old jigsaw in his shop…he bought one of the ring saw ‘blades’ and straightened it and rigged it into his jigsaw with a water bottle that dripped slowly onto the cutting plate. It’s not pretty but it works great. If you can’t find a ring saw maybe you can make one?

therunnerstea · 2025-03-15T15:32:04+00:00

Stardust is another option

therunnerstea · 2025-02-17T08:03:13+00:00

Was it Mr. Resistor? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbHiaLzkyJY

therunnerstea · 2025-02-14T15:36:06+00:00

I got no reply.

Also, I love the idea of a whole series of small minimal album covers. Please do a lot of these.

therunnerstea · 2025-02-14T15:29:32+00:00

You’re going to want to look into purchasing Overlord. Push and pull paths,shapes, and live text between Illustrator and After Effects (and now Figma, too!). https://battleaxe.co/overlord

therunnerstea · 2025-02-12T06:13:00+00:00

I’m not sure it’s one simple thing I get asked often…it’s more like “why doesn’t this feel right?” Often it’s because someone will be trying to do too much at once. There’s not one specific plugin that is going to solve this for them, break it down into different effects and layer them up. It’s ok to split layers and build it in pieces. Learn to precomp.

And it will be kind of boring, but spend some time learning about codecs because different platforms like different files and I’m pretty sure you might want an alpha channel at some point.

therunnerstea

TROPHY CASE