Create the “My Paper Mind” Effect
Tutorial Details
- Requirements: Just After Effects... enjoy
- Difficulty: Advanced
- Run Time: 54:06 min
Final Product What You'll Be Creating
Twice a month we revisit some of our reader’s favorite posts from back in the archives of Aetuts+. Today we’ll look at this tutorial posted back in Aug 2009. This tutorial will teach you how to recreate the “My Paper Mind” effect done by Javan Ivey, but with the environment in mind, Nicolas has come up with a way to save some paper (as well as about 3 days worth of paper cuts!) It is all done in After Effects without any third party plug-ins. Enjoy!
Tutorial
Download Tutorial .flv
File size 253MB
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By Nicolas Plaire
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Cool tutorial mate! Will be looking into it!
Nice tutorial :D
Great Tut! But I am working on something very similar. :(
cool man!!!! thaks a lot!
Nice Look! Now this is the stuff that I like to see on here… this is the stuff I’m talking about. good stuff….
One of the best tuts here…
p.s. -> what’s that song in preview ?
This looks amazing!
I’ll look into it soon.
Awesome tutorial! I knew about Trapcode EchoSpace, but it’s good to see how to do it manually. You can never learn enough expressions!
Thanks for the hard work!
twitter.com/notjerry
Cool… That was exactly my point… trying to teach the if-then-else expression which is basic in programming, but maybe not as basic for the average After Effects user who comes from a design background.
What’s that song?
so nice….thanks my dear friend!!!
The song is “Heart of Darkness”. A music composed bay Khoral a great artist (!) and featuring Roxanne Moreil.
You can chek is officile website here : http://kmore.free.fr/
and his blog here : http://khoral.blogspot.com/
Have fun et bise à Nicolasss
lol!
The internet is a small place after all… Yes the song is called Heart of Darkness from Khoral, a dear friend of mine with whom I already did a few music video and a new one is under way (featuring my friend Simon who left the comment above)(yes internet is small place rascal!)
Anyway, thanks everyone for your comments. My tutorial is a bit long, but it was my first, I’ll try to give just as much information in a smaller amount of time for the next.
Haven’t watched the tut yet, but its on my to do list.
oh and first impression… holy moly OMFG. haha the end result is absolultely stunning.
That is soo crazy looking..pure awesomeness :D
THIS IS THE BEST TUT I’VE EVER SEEN!!! And trust me I’ve spent lots of time looking at tuts around the web. This is great because I always wanted to do this sorta thing ever since I saw the Julias Casablanca and Pharrell video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TlEJ8ZsRpk
Lol my bad Julian Casablancas
Good to see some kiwi’s involved with AE.Tuts, Nice tutorial mate, chur…
Wes, Wellington. NZ
I’m French actually, but I’ve been living in Auckland for almost three years now. But yeah, I feel NZ should be more represented in the AE scene. Don’t leave everything to Australia!
Alexander Perry’s “Send a Robot” is one of the most beautiful examples of this technique I’ve ever seen.
http://alexanderperry.tv/robot.html
Yep… I was toying with the idea when I first saw the Pharell/Santogold/Julian Casablancas video for Converse and I decided to do it when I saw the Send a Robot video. The video is cool, the song on the other hand… absolutly terrible.
Ever since I saw “Send a Robot” I’ve been curious about how to accomplish the effect in AE. I knew it would involve precomposing and plenty of expressions but never got around to playing around long enough to figure it out. So THANK YOU SO MUCH for taking the time to put in all the hard technical work and sharing the technique with us so we can just focus on creating some cool stuff with it. Thanks again.
Ok, I watched the whole tutorial now. Really wonderful execution and nice use of expressions.
Yep, just watched it! Freaking awesome tutorial, cannot wait to try this!
Many thanks!
cool one,I can`t wait learning this stuff~
Dude, this is amazing! Thx soooooo much!
Towards the end of the tutorial all the expressions make total sense. It’s a bit much at first when it’s all thrown in there, but after I can start seeing the affects of the expressions it’s very simple to grasp, and I easily understand the purpose of every line in the code.
Even though English may not be your first language, you still successfully communicated a complex subject to me in order to make it very clear. I created my own project file and everything’s working perfectly.
One change I made was to change the Light Transmission to 70% under the material options so the shadows weren’t so black and opaque to more closely duplicate the shadows in Javan Ivey’s “My Paper Mind.”
Thank you very much.
When I did the french version of the tutorial, I tried to explain right away how the expressions worked and I realised that was a mistake. So for the english version I thought it would be better to write them all done and let them do the talking when you duplicate the layers.
A friend of mine told me that it would have been better maybe to type the first expression and then copy and paste the other as they are based on the same idea.
Cool idea to change the material options. I do not go there very often as it’s very limited, but maybe I should.
Hey, I watched the french one as well… I don’t speak a word but I enjoyed this one so much I wanted to see if I could glean anything from the original. I was very pleased to discover that it was slightly different. I would recommend anyone who liked this as much as I did to do the same. Seriously, this has been my favorite tutorial, anywhere, for quite some time… Please do more expression based stuff as you have a great talent for explaining things.
P.s. Don’t worry about the duration of the tutes either
Much love
The link of he Tutorial didn’t work with me
please check the download link again
Thanks
It’s working fine for me.. try again
please
you send to archive .AE
with the script
please
you send to archive .AE
with the script
it’s always neat to see how new popular videos can be recreated entirely in a digital format. however, it’s way more rewarding if you do the process by hand the old fashioned way.
getting your hands dirty and experimenting with traditional processes will always give you a more impressive product.
Wow, this is very awesome!
It seems to give a lot of work! Yeah, I didn’t watch this video yet, but I will!
Excellent work!
very nice tut, but i have a serious problem, my music, which ive added, sounds horrible like a dinosaur scream :D
pls help me
ohh haha i found it out by myself :D
i just had to switch off the sound on every [paper_stage] layer, except on one…
a big thank you to nicolas plaire for this awesome tutorial ;)
It seems like aetuts have been uploaded tutorials on blip.tv and some countries like mine cannot download. So poor! Is there anyway I can download these tuts?
link die ! help me !
links ! links ! die ! die ! hlep me ! hlep me !
hi nicolas,
thanks for the absolute awesome tutorial you sharing with the world :) i am almost beginner & just did the tut and you really did a fantastic explanation of everything. Your french accent is really nice too^^
… have a problem and couldnt find the source :(
just looked over it again & again…still …
the most important effect (when layer for layer is rotating, must be the coding?!) is static. i see all the layers (depth), but they do not rotate as in your tut, they are somehow static …do you know, where the problem could be? Would be really thankful for your help or from anyone else here :)
Cheers
How do add photographic images? When I drop them into the stage comp. They dont look correct.
not good tut horribke effects no eye candy wash out color
I still dont get how you managed to make the whole thing go forward, like going through a tunnel. Could you explain a little?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whb6fZf1JAw
here’s what I made. I incorporated green screen
hello ….
I try to do something similiar, but i have Expresion problems..
Expresion Disabled.. like “;”.. or “)”..
Why??
Thanksssssss
Great tutorial. I thank you for taking the time to make an English version. I really appreciate that. Your English is great and certainly better than my French.
The preview looks tight as hell
Im goign to try this right now
Anyone know the song he used?
Thank You! Wonderful tutorial. Here is my version:
http://www.vimeo.com/6612661
Help! I typed in all of the expressions but I keep getting an error on the 4th line when I try and pick wipe it to the slider during time remapping. Any advice?
This is absolutley amazing!
What an astonishing affect you can creat with a little bit of imagination.
Simple but extremley effective.
LOVE it!
Great tutorial! It’s really clear.
I do have one problem though. I followed your tutorial step by step, but when I duplicate the Paper_stage layer to create the tunnel stuff, the front layer still shows the movements of the audio, but all layers after the front one don’t show the audio movements, and I don’t know what I might have done wrong.
I humbly ask for your or anyone’s help, since I love the effect and really want to create it myself too.
Thanks in advance, and thanks for the great tutorial!
Hi nicholas,
i was just wondering what the expression was that you used because i can’t see or hear what you typed in clearly. Sorry i’m very new to this and i just couldn’t get what it is.
thanks.
Nice Thx. Ideas are popping up…….:d
Thnx 4 this magnifical tut… Peace !!!
tutorial was a bit slow, but I’m glad I sat through it. You have a lot to teach, and I expect good thing to come from you. You may be the next Maltaannon for expressions. :)
Hi, great tutorial thank you! I would like to know how to reverse the effect half way through, like have the letter ‘the end’ come at the screen and then half way start going away from the screen?
thanks, jo
keyframe in the backward/forward checkbox, then it will automatically reverse or whatever you want it to do
awesome tutorial. But it is not clear because of the bad english
Ok… I’m probably just being very dense as I am very new to AE, so I hope someone can help me with 2 questions I have:
1) I am having problems adding coloured objects to the stage, everything I add takes on the “paper” texture… is there a way to retain the object original colouring?
2) How do I make objects appear and disappear to give the illusion of the object travelling down the tunnel?
I’m sure I have probably missed the explanation for these, but I have watched the tutorial through 3 times now and am running out of hair to pull out.
Kind regards
Kate