I tried following along with this tutorial: Kinetic Typography Tutorial | The Crooked Gremlins.

1. Import Audio. Drag it down into your layers. At first I couldn’t hear my audio clip in Preview. The Internet has asked this question already.

“To hear the audio you must play a RAM Preview pressing the Zero on the NumPad…Previews only sound. Hope this helps” -Dalvenjia via Dalvenjia’s Activity – Yahoo! Answers.

Some peeps on the internet said that AE doesn’t “like” mp3s and .wav’s work much better. Online Audio Converter (MP3, WAV, Ogg, WMA, M4A, AAC) – media.io.

2. Prepare your content. What I did was take the lyrics and type them into Adobe Illustrator, create outlines, group the letters into words, put each word on its own layer and label the layer for the word it has. Then arrange them. This is fun. (look at the vid, he shows a slick method.) Then import the file  into your After Effects comp.

3. Video. I converted files from YouTube to mp4 with Media Converter – the fastest free online audio and video converter.

4. Importing. Don’t forget “Retain Layer Sizes”

4. Working the text layers. Remember to have your type rasterize otherwise when you scale up it gets blurry real fast (even though you know it’s vector!). It’s the sunshine button.

5. Animate, Render and Done. I was a bit frustrated that I couldn’t get the audio to work. I think there was something wrong with the audio clip I got. But, here is an excerpt from the Decemberist’s Crane Wife.

Checklist for Classwork:

Review My Timeline
Discover Tutorials
Develop Materials for Executing a Project outline in a tutorial
Work Alongside tutorial until completion
Reflect and Document on newly learned technique