Vertical Bars growing?

Hi Gang!

Really quick. How would you go about having about 5 vertical bars (at 20px) growing from the bottom of the screen up?
I thought about using paths and stroke effect than animating the end for each.
But something is telling me that there are easier ways, like having the 5 bars drawn and simply animating a mask.
The real question is how to draw those bars evenly shaped?
I might be staring at the obvious, but here it os.

thanks much!
gabi.

After you've created your layer like Joe described, if you want to space them evenly, you could take advantage of the align and distribution tools, or you could use this fun script called Array which creates copies in an array based off of any transform property http://aescripts.com/array/

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj