Subtitles of the Movie

When Illustrator allows you to distort things it uses what's known as an Envelope, and an Envelope is usually something that you can use to pull and stretch your object. Well, I'm going to show you that we can also use a shape that we draw on our own or a shape that you'll find in Illustrator to also use as an Envelope. So, I'm going to grab my text and I'm going to go to Effect and I can choose from a variety of different distortions. For example, I can go to Distort and Transform and then choose Free Distort, or I can go down to the Photoshop Effects and choose Distort down here as well and choose something like an Ocean Ripple. So, if I have this effect applied I can then draw out a shape like so and as long as this shape is on top of my other text or my other distortion I can simply drag-select both of them like so and then go to the Object Menu and choose Envelope Distort and I can make this with a Warp, make this with a Mesh, or in this case, Make with Top Object. Notice now that the text that I created is inside of that star shape. Now I'll go ahead and zoom in so you can see a little bit better. So I'm going to try a different effect this time just to show you that you can use another type of effect in the Effect Menu. This time I'll go to Effect, Distort and Transform, and Free Distort. Now this dialog box doesn't tell you a single thing, which I think is hilarious. You kind of have to figure it out. You grab a corner and you simply pull, like so, to distort your text. This is a perfect example of an Envelope. It allows you to change the contents of the Envelope so you can Bend it and Distort it. I'll click OK and I'll zoom out just a tad. Once again I can draw a star or any other shape, such as the polygon put it on top, and you may have noticed the fill color does not matter. I'll drag-select both of them, go to Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Top Object. And now we have an effect applied into this shape. It's a really nice way to put text inside of shapes like a flag, or ripples in the ocean, or anything else that has an organic bend or flow to it.