Animate Lyrics and Place Video Inside of Text with Premiere's Essential Graphics Panel

Animating lyrics for music videos can be a tedious task, but easily achievable. Five Seconds of Summer (5SOS) released a new lyric video for their song “Teeth” and for some of the lyrics they placed video inside of the lyrics. Inspired by the video, I created a tutorial on how to do this using the Essential Graphics Panel’s new “Mask with Text” feature.

Below I break down each step in the blog, but if you need more visuals you can watch the full tutorial here on YouTube.

If you have any other tutorial requests for music video effects, be sure to leave your request here.

1. Create each word on it’s own separate layer in the Essential Graphics Panel

Use the type tool to type out each word (or lyric) you plan on animating. For this tutorial, I used the song “Do you want me?” by the Roosevelts from the Musicbed library. You can scale and position the text in creative ways to fill up the screen.

2. Create a rectangle background layer beneath all text layers

In order for the Masking to work, you need to make a solid color rectangle that you can place below all the text layers. If you do not make this solid layer, the masking will not work.

Before it was transparent, now the background rectangle layer (it can be any color) creates a solid background that will make it possible to mask the text.

3. Animate each text layer using Effect Controls

After you create all the text for the video, you can then time the entry of each lyric to match the vocals by key-framing the opacity or 4-point polygon masks. As seen here:

4. Turn each text layer into a “Mask with Text”

If you want to fill the text with video, you need to select the text layer from the Essential Graphics Panel and then check the “Mask with Text” box at the bottom of the panel and check “Invert.” Do this with every word you want video to be placed within.

5. Place any video on video layer 1 in your timeline (beneath the graphic layer)

In this video, I used stock video from Envato Elements (specifically underwater clips) and I highly recommend Envato Elements as you get unlimited stock video, templates and more with your subscription). Simply, drag and drop your clip beneath the corresponding graphic layer in your timeline and repeats for all clips - it’s that simple!

And after you put all your video clips beneath the masked text, you can get an end result like this:

Of course, to see the full effect with music, you can watch the full tutorial on YouTube. :)