How to animate a text shredding

[Johannes5C22]

Hi! 
I'm trying to animate a text that moves down the screen and gets shredded, just like in a paper shredder. What would be the best way to do this? 

What I've done so far is: 

1. Made the text in illustrator and then split the text using a number of rectangles, so each layer is one "paper strip" each. 
2. In after effects I've parented the position of all the text strips to a null object, so the "paper" moves uniformly down the screen. 
3. Tried using the puppet tool to individually move the strips when they go through the "shredder". 

I find it really hard to control the strips with the puppet tool, and I'm sure there are much easier ways to do this. Grateful for any help! 

[Mylenium]

That's extremely clunky. Separating the strips is not even necessary. You can do it all with track mattes in AE. The text needs just to be pre-composed. Otherwise I can imagine several other techniques like using Venetian Blinds or Card Dance to create the strips and then applying e.g. a page turn effect to make them curl and other distortion effects for some randomness. You can even simulate class 3 and higher shredders with the shatter effect. 

Mylenium

[Johannes5C22]

Oh okay! Thank you! So you precompose the text and then parent it to the paper? And if i use venetian blinds and page turn, how would I control the individual strips? Cause right not the page turn effect turns the entire sheet of paper. Sorry if my questions are dumb, I'm new to venetian blinds/card dance/page turn in this context.

Joe

[Mylenium]

You misunderstand. The slicing in Illustrator is not necessary, but you would still need to create individual strips from duplicating pre-composed layers in AE by applying Venetian Blinds, linear wipes to "crop" or using masks. This could be even automated with some simple expressions. It's more a point of flexibility and versatility so you don't have to start over al lthe time and can simply change the contents of the pre-comp or replace the external source file.

Mylenium

[Johannes5C22]

Hmm okay, I think I get what you mean. Thank you so much for helping, it means the world. I've put linear wipes to crop the duplicated pre-comp, but I get this tiny gap in between the strips for some reason. Do you know how to fix that? The duplicated precomps are positioned on the exact same position and the linear wipes are put in 10% increments so that they should line up.