Here is another nice text effect tutorial for After Effect from Videolancer. If you want to spice up your boring title animation, you can use this overlapping shadow technique to give it a nice 3D depth look.
Enable per-character 3D
The trick here is to reduce the tracking value so the characters overlap each other. Then in the text layer under the Animator menu select “Enable per-character 3D”. Now you will be able to target each character separately with any animation value.
Now when you rotate the characters on the y-axis a little bit and apply a shadow you will end up with this nice overlapping look.
For the shadow to work properly just duplicate the text layer, give it a nice dark color, shift it a little bit in the z-axis (so it is sitting behind the actual text) and then blur it.
Head over to the video below to see a step-by-step tutorial by videolancer on how to create this in Adobe After Effects: