It's been over 25 years since I "played" with AE... I'm no longer familiar with how you would set up this sort of animation...
I was able to come up with these "assets" in Motion:
The top line is the "escape" laid out with circles used in a Replicator using the second line "escape" text (font = SF Pro Text Thin; size = 236.5 pts). The bottom line is a "Circle" shape I have set at Radius = 9.
End result:
(the animated circles are a little dim because I left the gradient color to a light blue.)
I was very specific about the font, its size,etc. because finding a good font to "fill" with the circle shapes was very difficult. You could manually draw the characters with bezier curves... up to you! At any rate, if you use something different, it may take you some time to adjust the Columns/Rows, font size/weight, and the circle size to "balance" the placement with respect to the alpha channel (hope that's clear). BTW, you can use the Scale parameter in the Replicator to resize the circles and it won't have any affect on how many circles are drawn — this will help them "fit" with each other a little better.
Once you have the text you want, and the Circle Shape ready, select the Circle and Replicate it (type L).
Set the Shape to Image.
Set the Arrangement to Tile Fill.
Set the Emission Alpha Cutoff to 0.2%
If you use the font specifications I stated above, then you would set the Columns to 60 and the Rows to 20.
Set the Origin to Upper Left and the Build Style to By Row.
To Randomize how the circle shapes are applied, Check Shuffle Order. You can apply the Replicate Seed to change the order of how the circles will be drawn.
How the circles are applied over time is as follows:
In the Cell Controls section, select Color Mode Over Pattern.
Open the Color gradient.
Add a second Opacity tab to the gradient designer — click the mouse in the upper bar of the gradient control and slide the newly created tab all the way to the right side. Select the tab and set its opacity to 0% (it will turn black).
Select the leftmost opacity tab and set its Interpolation to Constant.
Select the bottom left tab and set its color to the color you want for the circles. Select the bottom right tab and just "pull it off" the designer to delete it.
Now, if you select the black opacity tab and go down to the Location parameter and drag it down, you'll see the circles randomly disappear. Slide the Location all the way down to 0% and you can either keyframe it or right click on the parameter and Add Parameter Behavior — Ramp.
If you add a Ramp:
Set the End Value to 100% and move the End Offset to the point in time you want the animation to be finished. You might also like setting Curvature at 100%.
Hope this helps!
