Split Flap Display

Decided to give it a shot…the demo below was created by prepping two portraits in Photoshop, and bringing them into Adobe After Effects. It was created using 3D layers so that you could see what was going on from the side, but you could just show it from the front if you want. But setting it up as 3D would allow things such as seeing the ends of the flaps come forward and the flap itself in perspective as it falls around.

I’ll caution that this might take a very long time for a beginner, because many steps require familiarity with a long list of After Effects fundamental skills. I am not a pro at this but I know just enough to suggest how this might work.

Edit: Also, Mylenium reminds us in another reply here that there might already be effects in After Effects that do this kind of thing, so maybe you don’t actually have to set up everything I show below.

Ingredients:

• Each portrait set up in Photoshop in a single image of the correct proportions for a top and bottom flap. 
• In After Effects, set up a parent composition at the pixel dimensions of a single flap pair.
• Each portrait image is in its own composition. 
• In each of those, add a vector mask to reveal only the top half. Duplicate the composition and move the mask to reveal only the bottom half. 
• Add this pair of compositions to the parent composition, so that this “flap pair” becomes nested comps within the parent composition. 
• Add another pair of compositions set up for the second portrait. 
• For the layer of the top flap of the first portrait, set up X axis keyframes for the Rotation property. Between the first and second keyframes, apply +180 degrees rotation. 
• Repeat for the layer of the bottom flap of the second portrait, but it should start at -180 degrees and end at 0 degrees. (After Effects pros would probably tell me I need to just parent that property to the other flap so that it follows along.) 

This is only a quick and dirty attempt, so I left out lots of details, and there will be refining to do, such as making sure the layers of the first and second portrait are offset so that they don’t show through each other during the rotation. Again, someone with After Effects training would look at the steps and say “Ah, I get it, and here are the further problems we need to solve to make it look really convincing.”

To build it out further:

Duplicate this parent flap pair composition as many times as needed for as many portraits as you will do.

Then swap out the portrait images with the different ones that need to be in each flap pair, using the Replace Footage command. I am not sure if there is a way to auto-populate each layer with a different portrait using an After Effects script, but it would be worth looking into.

The concept movie you uploaded shows the flaps falling kind of at random all over the board. You do not want to animate this manually. You want to take advantage of After Effects expressions, using a random expression that randomizes the times when each of the flaps starts falling, within a time span such as 5 seconds.

I am definitely not an expert at expressions or scripts…

Hi Jason

its late 2023 and I came across hour post.  I am after the same idea as hou but want it customizable to my liking.  Did you get help with your idea?  Thanks!

There's a ton of presets and template projects for "departure boards" in After Effects and I'm sure you could find similar stock content for whatever is your 3D program of choice. There may also be an action for Photoshop that converts a text layer into such a flap thing look. So it's definitely possible, but you shouldn't expect a canned solution for your specific use case. A lot of this is just cheating because nobody wants to put up with hundreds and thousands of such animated flaps just to display a pixture, so to stick with my AE example (since that's my primary domain of Adobe programs) you'd use effects like Card Dance and Motion Tile to create the repeating flap structure and then find ways to use your photos as textures and then transition through them. At 2224 we're likely talking about just as many compositions in an AE project, though, which is an insanely big project. So again, it is doable, but you should not expect this to be in any way simple or intuitive. Even an experienced artist (that you would have to hire and pay) can easily work his fingers off on this kind of project and it is probably completely unfeasible to do for yourself if you have no such prior experience...

Mylenium