Def peotry Jam commercial

[infokill]

If any has seen the commercials on HBO im trying to achieve the effect of ink seeping onto paper. If you've seen the spot its exactlly what i want.
If anyone can help me out it would be really cool.
Thanks.

[Matt Grunau]

If it is at all similar to the ink in Harry Potter, when he is looking at Tom Riddle's book, you can achieve that in a few ways. If you simply want all the ink to appear from the center in a expanding ring going outwards, or somthing similar, you can use a layer mask with a light feather, keyframing either the mask shape to grow over time, or keyframing mask expansion. You could even create a track matte using the Stroke effect, blur is slightly, and have it animated to reveal the ink.

[infokill]

Ha ha just saw Harry potter and thats the exact effect im looking for. Looks like im going to have to read up on how to do layer mask.

[Matt Grunau]

You use the pen tool in AE to make masks. It is not very hard at all. You will have your "ink" layer above your main layer and you will sinply use the mask to reveal the ink over time. Another approach would be to use a black and white image as a Track Matte. This is similar to a Layer Mask in Photoshop, where the white/light gray parts of the image are visible and the black/dark parts of the image are not. While using a track matte would probably give the best results (because you are painting in what you want to see, and by varying levels of gray, when you will see it), if your subject is moving, you would have to motion track the action to get the track matte to move properly. A mask however, is much more easily animated, but to achieve the effect you are wanting, you wil either need multiple masks on a single layer which can get down right tricky, or multiple layers of ink each with its own mask to show as much as you want. When it comes to displaying everything you want on a single layer, a track matte is easier, but comes with its own set of hoops to jump through to get it right. If you want, you can put a picture or clip up and I can take a peek and figure out what your best options are.