Quote Originally Posted by mwenz View Post
OK. It's been a long time since I made that file and it took a bit of noggin scratching to figure out what I did.

Make a copy of the burnt text.
Delete the effects using the Appearance panel.
Set the Opacity to 100%
Change the color to black.
Add enough of a stroke (in black) to obtain the amount of over-sized look to the burnt text copy. I think I used about 16 pt.
Create a transparent rectangle behind the burnt text copy large enough around the burnt text copy so the following effects don't get clipped by its bounding box.
Select both the text and the transparent rectangle.
Now using the Object menu, convert to an image using the Rasterize command.
Effect, Blur, Gaussian blur. 20 pixels should be about right.
From the Effect menu, Artistic, Film Grain. For the values on the right, I used (from top to bottom) 4,0,10.

Now, your copy likely is going to be lighter. I used the Phantasm plug-in to darken it. Shouldn't matter too much in the eventual effect.

In the appearance panel with the burnt text copy selected, click on the Opacity link. Set it to Color Burn, 20%.

Take care, Mike

one word Mike - AWESOME!! Thank you so so much for taking the time to do this and help me out - I really appreciate it - you have no idea how much!

Cheers!