How to make this in PS7 & an animator;
Open your base in Photoshop [I'm using 7, but any version should work. I believe.]

Choose and apply your text.

Right click on the text layer. Select Blending Options. Check Stroke & apply the stroke width and color of your choice. Then check Bevel & Emboss. Select outer bevel, make sure the Angle is 120 degrees. Then select your Highlight & Shadow mode colors of choice. Make the shadow color darker then the highlight. Then select Inner glow, select the centering option and select a light color of your choice.

I then have this

Now go to Edit/Free Transform and rotate your text. You can also use the shortcut CTRL+T for this operation.

After you have your text where you want it, select your moving tool.
A window will pop up asking you to Apply the transformation or not, select "Apply" and move your text where you want it.

Now you're ready to begin the animation, which is the most difficult part. :P

Select the text layer and click on your text tool.

Then find this in your upper text tool bar. In the drop down menu select the animation you would like to achieve, for the sake of this tutorial and the time that I have I selected bulge but I'll include a short little statement at the end of this tutorial on how one would animate the 'Flag' or 'Wave' animation smoothly.

Copy & paste your unedited text base into your animation program.

Then make your Warp Text options box look like mine, except that you may want to make a vertical animation. I didn't mess with the two last options as I'm too lazy at the moment. :)


Then hit okay. Copy & paste this frame into your animation program, after your first.

You'll be doing this over & over again with bigger bulged text. I increase by tens, you may increase however you want. In this tutorial I only went up to positive thirty.

I now how an animation that should look like this;


See how unsmooth that is? Yucky. But here's the slightly tricky part.

Duplicate the second to last frame, paste the duplicate after the last frame. Then duplicate the frame right after the first frame and paste it so it's the last frame.

You now have a smooth animation.


And there ya go. All done!

To do a wave or flag animation, you would do the same steps except you would duplicate the first frame and paste it as last. Then you would decrease into negative bend numbers, such as -10 & -20. You'd paste them in increasing order, and then decreasing order for a smooth animation.

And that's about it. Any questions, comments or [constructive!] critism is welcome. :)

PS; check out my horribly layouted graphics community. I am looking for makers to join as well. graphical