Images as Particles Transition in After Effects

Add a customisable chapter screen to your videos with this easy to reuse transition.

Sorted Food are a food channel here on YouTube producing high quality content and while food is their main focus, they are pretty slick with motion graphics. So when they started using a transition I’d never seen before, my VFX interest was piqued.

If you’re not sure what transition I’m talking about, copies of an image fall from above and stack up to fill the screen. They pause for a moment, before falling off the screen.

So began an investigation to see if I could figure out how to reproduce this effect. And I discovered that while it was simple to acheive using RedGiant Trapcode Particular, it wasn’t possible to do using any of the native particle effects. But I kept going and eventually found a way to animate dozens (if not hundreds) of individual layers to animate themselves to cover the screen.

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