This tutorial shows how to stagger layers with Squash & Stretch to distribute the animations of the characters of a text over a larger period of time.

Tutorial Transcript

Let’s apply the drop behavior to this text and confirm that Squash & Stretch splits the text into individual letters. Now we want to shift the layers in the time using the Layer Stagger tool of Squash & Stretch. We first move one layer to where the staggering should end, because it always staggers the layers between the earliest and the latest point of the selected layers. Then we select all of them, click the stagger layer icon and apply the layer stagger tool.

Let’s say we want to have a bit more randomness. So we just open the layer stagger tool again, choose a lot of randomness and apply it again.

That’s how easy you can stagger the in or out points of your layers with Squash & Stretch.