[Michael Szalapski]

Are you asking about the credits that the Executive Producer is smacking away while he dances or the comic book look of the actors’ credits?

Since the other credits are just keyframed text, I shall assume you mean the 3d comic look.

You can very easily approximate the look by saving a still of your video and taking it into Photoshop to give it the cartoon look. (There are tons of ways to achieve this effect. Check out the Adobe Exchange for some automated ways to do it.)

To make it have that 3d-type motion try searching the forums for The Kid Stays In the Picture It’s an effect that’s been asked about a lot.
Then it’s just about timing your edit and good animation.
It’s relatively simple to do; it just takes good planning, creativity, and quite a bit of time and work.
The only thing you’d have missing is Tom Cruise dancing in a ridiculous fat suit to a rap song.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Dave’s right. It’s all very basic stuff in AE, it just takes a little bit to set up.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Create a photoshop document with a picture per layer and put the pics in the shape of the words. Then bring that document into AE as a composition. Resize the comp to be the size you need, tie all the pics to a null (and turn the 3d switch on for all layers) move them back in Z space until they’re the size you want. Then it’s just a matter animating the pictures. Start at the last pic you want to slide in and animate backwards.

Or, if you’re pics are spaced along a grid (which you could set up in Photoshop) you could use the card dance or card wipe effects (probably using some precomp with fractal noise and a ramp of some kind) to effect the layers.

Those are two ideas.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

After Effects treats a composition like it’s a piece of footage. Whatever camera and layers you have in your main comp will not be affected by anything in your precomp. It’s as if the precomp is just some .mov or .avi file you’ve dropped on the timeline.

The change happens when you push the “collapse transformations” button. Then any 3d layers you have in your precomp become 3d in the main comp. But, if I’m not mistaken, the camera in the precomp will be overridden by the camera in the main comp.

If you want to have the same movement in the main comp that you had achieved in the precomp you could just copy and paste (or maybe cut and paste) the camera from the precomp into the main one and retie the expressions to their respective nulls..

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I’m with Todd, I don’t know what kind of effect you mean when you say World War II film. I assume, since you said that you colored your footage black and white that you don’t mean the Saving Private Ryan look which has become synonymous with WWII movies these days.

Do you mean the old news reel look? With the flickering, jumpy, scratched look? Or do you mean like a Hollywood film from the 1940s?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I don’t think it was done in After Effects, but you could certainly emulate this look in AE. There’s always Trapcode’s 3d Stroke, but you would not get the full rounded look demonstrated here very well. You could use particular and make lines with it.

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/advanced_camera_tips/ shows something like that

Ah, found the one I was really looking for:

https://maltaannon.com/articles/after-effects/growing-3d-vines/

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I don’t have a huge amount of experience in this regard, but I do know that AE is not the best compressor to use for your HD. Render it out as your favorite lossless format and use a different program to do the final encoding; things will look much better.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You can also use an AE light as the emitter for your particles. The direction, cone width and all that stuff controls the particle emitter.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Digits Man from Eran Stern?

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/stern_eran/Digits_Man1.php
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/stern_eran/Digits_Man2.php

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/stern_eran/Digits_Man_Revisited.php

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You’re very welcome. That is why we’re here.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.