Text Message Animation in After Effects: The ChitChat Way

The fastest way to build a text message animation in After Effects is to stop fighting templates and generate the conversation instead. ChitChat is a chat-flow generator that lives in a panel inside After Effects: you type the conversation, pick a style like iMessage, WhatsApp, or Instagram, click Generate Comp, and it builds the entire animated chat as a native, editable comp. This is the full demo, from installing it to generating chats with GIFs, reactions, profile pictures, and a scrolling long-conversation mode.

A generator, not a template

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A text message template is a locked After Effects project someone else built; your job is to retrofit your conversation into their structure, and the moment the client rewrites the dialogue you are back inside precomps redoing keyframes. A generator flips that. In ChitChat the conversation itself is the source: bubbles, timing, and layout are built from what you typed, so a script change is a regenerate, not an afternoon.

Everything ChitChat outputs is a normal After Effects comp with one editable layer per message. Nothing is baked, nothing is locked, and if you know your way around After Effects you can treat the generated comp like anything you built by hand.

Installing ChitChat

ChitChat installs through Filmit Studio, the desktop app that manages every Filmit tool. If you are new to Filmit, the flow takes a few minutes: create an account at filmit.io, hit Try Studio, download the desktop app, and let the onboarding install the toolkit into After Effects. Then open After Effects, go to Window, Extensions, Filmit Studio, and you will find ChitChat in the tools list along with everything else. We covered the desktop app in depth in the Filmit Studio walkthrough if you want the full tour.

One nice detail: the 7 day free trial is not a ChitChat trial, it is a whole-suite trial. Every plugin, tool, and effect unlocks at once, and the panel even shows the roadmap of what is coming next. And if the full panel takes up too much screen while you work, squish it down and it collapses into a small toolbar that opens any tool as you edit.

Your first chat: GIFs, reactions, Generate

The demo starts with a preset conversation built into the panel, and the loop is exactly what you would hope. Type messages into the Build tab. Search for a GIF right inside the panel and drop it into the flow, no separate download step, no importing footage. Click the little reaction button on any message and attach a heart, and the reaction anchors to that bubble in the animation. Then click Generate Comp, and the finished chat appears in After Effects, animated and ready to render. If a reaction looks slightly odd in the panel UI, ignore it; the generated comp is what counts, and it renders clean.

Speed is the thing to notice here. The whole first chat, GIF and reaction included, goes from empty panel to generated comp in under two minutes of the video, and none of that time is spent in the timeline. The panel is the editor for the conversation; After Effects is the editor for everything after.

Long conversations and Center Focus

Short chats can sit statically on screen, but a long conversation needs to scroll. That is a style choice in ChitChat, not an animation job. In the Style tab, pick Center Focus and the conversation stays anchored in the center of the frame while messages flow through it. There is a preview right in the panel so you can watch how the scroll will read before you generate, and once you like it, Generate Comp does the rest. The result is the classic storytelling-chat look you see all over YouTube and TikTok, without a single position keyframe.

Pro Tip: For long conversations, skip the bubble-by-bubble build and use the scripting method: write the whole exchange as plain text first, paste it into the panel, and let ChitChat parse it into messages. Writing dialogue reads better in a text editor than in a form, and the generate step costs the same either way.

Switching styles: iMessage to Instagram in one click

Not every story happens in blue bubbles. ChitChat ships with multiple chat styles, iMessage, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and a terminal look, and the same conversation can jump between them. In the demo, an iMessage chat becomes an Instagram DM by picking the style and regenerating; the Instagram version brings its own touches like profile pictures in the layout. The designs are being fine-tuned continuously, so styles keep getting closer to the real apps.

Profile pictures deserve a note because the approach is very After Effects native: the picture lives in a pre-comp. Open it, drop in any image, scale it to taste, and every message from that speaker updates. In the demo the picture comes straight from Sourcer, our free royalty-free stock tool, without leaving the editor. Any image you have works the same way.

The demo also has a nice accidental proof of how editable these comps are. After generating the Instagram chat, the speaker's name renders behind another layer; the fix is just grabbing the layer in After Effects and moving it back, because it is a layer, not a baked frame. That is the practical difference between a generator and a render: when something needs a nudge, you nudge it with the tools you already know.

Editing the conversation after the fact

This is where the generator idea pays off. The Build tab holds the conversation as data, so editing is direct: add a new message for an existing speaker, add a whole new speaker to turn a dialogue into a group chat, delete people, or change the color assigned to each speaker. Generate again and the comp reflects the new conversation. Speaker names can be toggled in the Style tab if you want a cleaner look, and you can start a fresh chat or save the current one for later.

The sleeper feature is the script export. ChitChat can export the conversation as a TXT file, which means a client or writer can edit the dialogue in any text editor, no After Effects required, and you paste it back in and regenerate. Excel and Word support for the same workflow is on the way. If you have ever emailed screenshots of a chat comp back and forth with a client to approve dialogue, this replaces that entire loop.

Advanced Mode: the big preview

The panel has a button called Advanced Mode, though a better name might be big preview mode. It pops ChitChat open into a larger view where you can see more of the conversation and a live preview of the animation as you build, scrub down the timeline, and add messages as you go. For long chats especially, building in the big preview and generating when it reads right is a genuinely nice workflow. One honest note from the demo: the previews are a guide, and the final render is cleaner than the preview suggests.

A small update worth flagging: green bubbles, for marking speakers who are not on iMessage, are coming to the style options, and may already be live by the time you read this. Like the rest of the styles, that kind of detail ships continuously.

Part of the Filmit Studio suite

ChitChat is one tool in the Filmit Studio subscription, which bundles more than 50 tools and effects under one login: RoughCut for AI rough cuts, Sync for batch audio syncing, GIFer and Sourcer free, and a whole effects and transitions library. The demo ends with a taste of that library: a VHS effect applied right in After Effects, a Dying VCR preset dialed in from the effect controls, and a Terminator look stacked on top. The same effects run fully live in Premiere Pro, and a little slower in After Effects, because that is After Effects. The point stands either way: if you are trying ChitChat on the trial, everything else is already unlocked too.

So if your next edit needs a text conversation on screen, do not go template hunting. Try ChitChat with the 7 day free trial, type the chat, and generate it. And if there is a chat style or feature you want, tell us in the Discord; the roadmap genuinely comes from those requests.