This week on MacBreak Studio, I show Steve Martin from Ripple Training how animate text to “dance to the beat” of a song.

The audio parameter behavior is one of the unsung heroes of Motion. It's so easy to use, yet so powerful at the same time. You can use it to animate just about any parameter of any layer or group: the position of a shape, the birth rate of a particle emitter, or the shakiness of the earthquake filter, to name just a few.

In this episode, I demonstrate how the audio parameter behavior can be used to animate text. By combining it with the Sequence Text behavior, we can animate individual letters over the course of the overall animation, rather than animating the entire block of text at once. It's simply a matter of choosing the appropriate parameter to animate, and then adjusting the settings to get the look that you like. With Motion's realtime playback engine, creating animation like this is incredibly interactive and frankly quite addictive as well. I hope you'll use these ideas to make something you enjoy.