Take Control of Numbers in Adobe After Effects with Digit Fiddler
Whether you’re creating complex infographics or you just want to add a simple countdown timer to your video, the Digit Fiddler plugin for Adobe After Effects can help.
If you’ve ever worked with infographics before, you know how they can quickly become very complex. Something as simple as linking a single text element to an animated shape layer can require a number of expressions—some to keep the numbers absolute, others if you want to add symbols, etc. If you’re working with numbers a lot, writing these expressions can take up a lot of time.
This is why the folks at Plugin Everything have created Digit Fiddler. This plugin is designed to help users quickly and easily format numeric characters while avoiding a lot of complex expressions or controls. Let’s take a look at what this tool can do.
Expressions? No Thanks...
Let’s take a look at this simple infographic. In this example, I’ve connected my text element to a bar graph via a Trim Paths animator. As the graph grows in size, the numbers correspond. The connection is a simple link from the Source Text to the End property of the Trim Paths animator. To keep the numbers from resorting to decimals, I had to add an expression to the Trim Path, which looks like this: Math.round(value)
If you’re not familiar with Expressions and JavaScript, you won’t really understand what’s going on. When you don’t understand, it’s difficult to make additional customizations or correct errors that might crop up...which is the main reason this plugin is wonderful.
Let’s recreate this animation, this time using Digit Fiddler.
Step 1: Apply the Effect
Once I have Digit Fiddler installed, I’ll search for it in the Effects & Presets panel. To create a new text element, I’ll simply grab the effect and drag it into the comp. This will create a new text layer with the effect applied. You can also apply the effect to existing text, but I’ve found it easier to just create a new layer.
Step 2: Customizing Numbers
Digit Fiddler has two modes: Numbers and Time. First, let’s take a look at Numbers. With Numbers, you’ll see quite a few options. I can manually animate the numbers, set a multiplier, add decimal places and integer padding, and even specify whether I want to use dots, commas or spaces, or a combination of these.
Since I want the bar graph to drive the numbers, I’ll link the Numbers attribute to the End property of the Trim Paths animator of the shape layer. Once linked, I can customize the text to my heart’s desire. No need to add expressions. If I do, however, want to use expressions, there are tools for that as well.
For this particular text element, I want to add a percent symbol. For this, I’ll simply double-click in the text box and type out the symbol. Digit Fiddler will automatically place it next to the number. I can use the Custom Text Placement attribute to reposition the symbol on the left or the right. If I’m in the mood to party, I can also keyframe this attribute. Monospacing allows me to lock the numbers in place, so they won’t drift and jump around during animation.
Step 3: Customizing Time
Let’s say that I now want to add a timer to the scene. For this, I’ll drag and drop the Digit Fiddler effect again to create a new text element, this time switching the mode to Time. In this particular mode, the Time property is measured in seconds. Since my comp is three seconds in length, I’ll animate the time from 3 to 0.
I can format the time via hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds. Stylization options include turning off the colons, padding the hour integer, and customizing the placement of added text. Again, I can add expressions and lock the digits into place via monospacing properties.
Okay, enough talk. It’s time to go fiddle with your digits. Have fun!
Disclosure: Boone Loves Video is a participant in affiliate advertising programs designed to provide means for individuals to earn advertising fees by reviewing and linking to products.
I read somewhere that there are only two best-case scenarios for a great screenplay—either it meets the expectations of the audience or it doesn’t. Either they sigh in relief or gasp out loud in shock.
Giving your audience what they want shouldn’t be difficult for a practiced writer. A character has a desire, and they achieve it at the end of the story. Boom! Expectations met!
But there’s something oddly satisfying about not meeting those expectations in a screenplay, leaving the audience shaken in disbelief.
Many compelling screenplays use something called misdirection—it's sneaky, it's intelligent, and it takes viewers somewhere unexpected. It's all about planting subtle clues that seem insignificant until a revelation forces us to reconsider everything.
Let’s examine how this narrative tool, when used thoughtfully, can transform straightforward storytelling into something more complex and satisfying.
What is Misdirection?
Misdirection is distracting the audience to mislead them, preventing them from getting on to your scheme of actions, until you finally reveal the truth. In essence, it is a style of storytelling, where the “audience proposes, filmmaker disposes.”
In misdirection, a filmmaker manipulates information, character(s), and their timing in the narrative while building the conflict, until everything falls into place to reveal an unexpected resolution that does not match the audience’s expectations.
Many times, the audience is also purposefully misdirected by exploiting their biases, prejudices, and gullibility.
Why Would Any Filmmaker Misdirect Their Audience?
A story is as interesting as its narration. Be it a bedtime story or Nolan’s Inception, if the narrative is linear and flat, it may be less engaging to your audience.
Misdirection is one of the finest tools that acts like a hook to your story. Misdirecting elements are thought-provoking, working with the audience’s psychology to throw them off guard.
Fiction gives you the freedom to alter realities, but even while misdirecting, it is important that the dots connect effectively by the end of the story. Information shouldn’t be irrelevant and without context.
How Do You Misdirect Your Audience?
You can use any story element to misdirect the audience, but the most commonly used are characters, sound, props, plot points, strategic information reveal, and the time of the incident of any event.
Examples of Misdirection in Great Films
Gone Girl by David Fincher
Misdirection by unreliable narrator
This is one of those stories that is completely narrated in misdirection.
The film opens through husband Nick’s (Ben Affleck) perspective, who becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), on their fifth marriage anniversary. As the investigation and media frenzy take over, we are let into the lives of our two main characters and led to believe that Amy might actually be dead.
We learn about their failing marriage and Nick’s extramarital affair. Thus, when Nick lies through his teeth about his loving relationship with Amy to the police, he instantly becomes an unreliable narrator in the story.
Thus, even though his alibis are believable, you cannot trust him and can’t take his word. Rather, you, with the police, start suspecting him.
This automatically shifts all your trust to Amy instead, even though you know even less about her than Nick. Wonderfully, you have begun rooting for her now.
What you might not realize is that you have been misdirected to dislike Nick as a character, so that you automatically take Amy’s side right from the beginning, until it is revealed that Amy is alive and purposefully in hiding.
This is one of the many misdirections in the film.
By regulating how the audience judges the characters, their morality, and their intentions, a filmmaker often shatters the expectations of the audience with misdirection to give them a more surprising resolution than expected.
The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan
Misdirection by character
Just by establishing a character in a certain way and revealing information about them strategically, a filmmaker can determine the character’s impression on the audience.
This is what M. Night Shyamalan does in The Sixth Sense. The magician of misdirection keeps both the characters and the audience engaged, looking for the ghost, all the while narrating the events through the ghost’s perspective!
The beauty of a nuanced misdirection lies in the clues left throughout a film’s events, leaving you both frustrated and delighted at the same time that you didn’t pick up on them!
Money Heist by Álex Pina
Misdirection by sound
In the Spanish drama series, Money Heist, the makers use a powerful misdirection but with a genius twist. This misdirection is not only for the audience per se, but for the main character—the Professor (Álvaro Morte), too.
In the Season 2 finale of the drama series, the Professor and Raquel (Itziar Ituño), the love of his life and newly minted partner-in-crime known as “Lisbon,” are sprinting through a dense, shadowy forest. The air crackles with urgency as police hounds close in, their shouts breaking the eerie silence of the forest.
Eventually, they are forced to separate, with a radio as their only mode of communication. Raquel ends up taking refuge in a barn, but not for too long. The police arrive, and she is completely surrounded. A gun to her head, she is ordered to compromise the Professor, but she’s steel-willed and denies the police any information.
All the while, the Professor is on the radio with her, frightened and worried, begging her to tell them everything in exchange for her life. The Professor frantically runs through the forest to reach Raquel, when… bang! A gunshot rips through the radio.
The Professor stops dead, the forest swallowing his anguished cry. But as the episode races to its close, the fog clears. The shot? A cruel ruse. She’s alive and in police custody. The Professor’s despair was their bait, and he bit—hard.
What I love about this particular sequence is that the filmmakers don’t use misdirection as a generalized cliff-hanger of “what happens next.”
Instead of revealing that Raquel is alive in an upcoming episode of the next season, they make a choice to reveal it at the tail end of the same episode.
Raquel is a crucial character in the series at this point, so to lose her in the narrative would have been a huge plot twist. At times, thrillers do go for the cheap surprise, whether it makes sense or not. But in Money Heist, the reveal elevates the value of the misdirection because now the audience knows things are going to change forever—for better or worse.
Final Destination 5 by Steven Quale
Misdirection by props
The sequence leading up to Candice’s fall in Final Destination 5 is a series of brilliantly crafted misdirections that keep us on the edge of our seats until the mishap finally happens.
The misdirections also seem to be symbolic, as the death of poor Candice (Ellen Wroe) is a sharp irony. Throughout the scene, we keep worrying about the loose screw in her gymnastic apparatus but how she is killed by it in the end is absolutely unexpected—just how a nuanced misdirection should be.
Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock
Misdirection by casting
Killing the heroine halfway through the film was a risky but brilliantly used misdirection by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho, especially considering the film dates back to the ‘60s.
An actor’s face value is as important as their acting skills. Big actors usually have strong plot armor and are expected to survive the story.
In Psycho, when a star like Janet Leigh is killed off midway through the movie, the audience is thrown off guard and does not know what to assume, whose story to follow, or what to expect next. This amplifies the shock factor of the plot twist.
Misdirection can turn your story into a fun experience with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. When done well, a reveal should prompt viewers to think, "Of course! How did I miss that?" rather than, "That came out of nowhere!"
The audience hates being deceived. So, not meeting audience expectations doesn’t mean you lie and fill the screenplay with deceiving information, revealed in an untimely way, aiming for a plot twist in the climax that feels isolated and seemingly unmotivated.
Also, be careful not to clutter your narrative with forced misdirections.
For a better understanding, check out the examples in the article—how each misdirection is a strategic literary device, not just a stylized form of storytelling.
