Tutorial on burning through paper effect?

If you want to stay inside After Effects and don't want to spend money on 3rd party plugins, the easiest option I can think of is to use a combination of Fractal Noise, Colorama, and Glow to get some burning looking patterns. Then you can supplement that with a free plugin from Video Copilot called Saber. It's hard to find the download unless you search the Video Copilot Blog. You'll find it right here.  There's a good introductory tutorial to that great free effect on the blog page and you can find some more tutorials for Saber in the tutorials section of their webpage.

The other option is to purchase some stock footage and combine that with procedural mattes and animated masks and fractal noise and color effects to generate the effects. Whatever you do is going to require at least 4 and maybe 5 layers to make a transition between two images. You may end up with a lot more. 

I did a quick search for tutorials but all of them that I found with a web search had been prepared enthusiasts and none of them had good explanations and efficient workflows. Feel free to take a look but most of the tutorials you find using a simple web search end up causing a lot of problems for folks that try and use them.

Whatever you do you're going to need a very good understanding of the basics so make sure you spend some quality time with the User Guide. If you ever find yourself completely confused, that is a good place to look at some well presented and well-organized workflows. There is no one right way to do anything in After Effects and most recipes need to be modified to work with anything that is much different than the original footage used in the examples.

Use an animated, feathered mask instead and ruffle it up with the Roughen Edges effect. All you need is multiple layers with different settings and colorations. If you pre-compose your matte, creating the afterglow on the edges could in fact be as trivial as using the Find Edges effect suitably colorized, again jittered up with another Roughen Edges and treated with glow. It's just going to take time to tweak the look...

Mylenium