How to do this Technique?

[Steve Bentley]

We used to do this with grease on glass on a rostrum camera (back in the film days – remember those?) – look up Canada’s National Film Board (NFB). This technique was all the rage for a while. There are tons of excellent examples.
But these days you can use Corel’s Painter with their oilskin layers. So you get the natural materials look (brush strokes and painterly feel) plus the advantage of frame by frame animation and an undo feature which you don’t get in real life. You could do it in photoshop with the animation tools but I think it would turn out better in Painter.
Due to the accuracy they have probably rotoscoped either a 3D animation or something filmed to get the objects moving so perfectly and the perspective.
While there are plug ins that can get you part of the way there, for this kind of thing often you have to just do it by hand to get the look you want. You can often work down at 12-15fps instead of a usual rate and then frame blend between to bring it up to full 24 or 30fps. This adds to to the dreamy smeary look.
If you want to really frustrate yourself you could use a particle system that has imagery mapped to it. The particles would bleed in the direction of the camera travel (you might be able to tie it to the motion blur channels) but I wouldn’t recommend this in AE. While the particle systems available for AE are really nice (Particular etc) they don’t hold a candle to what you can achieve in a 3D package with Xparticles or TP or Turbulence FD or Houdini. Just so much more control and you can feed in other data channels to drive aspects of each particle. But the amount of R&D would be killer.