Animated Photocopy Look in Premiere Pro / After Effects

So, I tend to get almost as many questions about how I make YouTube videos as I do about photography these days. Well, one thing people have been asking a lot is how I created this photocopy effect that I've used in a couple of my videos. So, I thought I'd make a video tutorial showing you how to do it. And since I use After Effects, and I know not all of you use After Effects, I've also put together an asset pack that you can download and use in Premiere Pro. That way, if you don't want to build the effect yourself, you can get that and you can just drag and drop in your media, type in your text, and it's all done for you. It's been a while since I released an asset pack. And request I've started getting a lot is to have vertical versions of my motion graphics assets. So, from now on, every effect I release will come in both a landscape and a portrait format. I'll make one for 4K video and one for phones. But whether you're working horizontally or vertically, you should be covered. I've actually been making a load of different title and graphics assets for videos and shorts and Tik Toks and whatever you kids are into these days. But from my past motion graphics asset packs, feedback on them, I'm now making them sort of smaller and more focused and cheaper so you sort of just buy the effects you want rather than having one big pack. I've been making loads of different ones. I've made a CRT effect one. That's why I've got this old iMac here. I've been making load of film emulations. I made a grindhouse focus one. And anyway, I'll be releasing these interspersed with my normal photography videos, but this video is about a photocopy effect. So, is the Tardis Times. This is a magazine that I made when I was at school because back then I was really obsessed with Doctor Who. You know, luckily I've grown out of that now. That means I've got loads and loads of photocopied pages. I've got loads of samples, things that went wrong, things where the photocopy messed up. It means I've really been able to analyze how it made up the images, really been able to look at the textures. I've also been able to scan in a load of the textures because it's always better to use real samples than to try and make something digitally. If you try and emulate things digitally, they're never quite as good as using the real thing. So, I've included a folder of these scans in the asset pack, but if you want to build the effect from scratch without downloading those, you can probably find textures online, um, you might have to pay for them. I don't know. If anyone knows of any good resources for that, please leave them down in the comments. So, first I'll show you what's in the asset pack and then I'll walk you through how to recreate the effect in After Effects if you want to do it yourself. These are the time codes on screen now. Please skip ahead to whichever part you're here for. Uh but first let me show you uh what this asset pack can do. Okay, so this is for the Creative Cloud version of Adobe Premiere Pro. And if you are installing these, please make sure you're updated to the latest version to make sure they all run properly. When you download this pack, you'll get this zip file here. And if we expand that, you'll get this folder here. And in this folder, you will have two other folders. You have a paper scans folder and an assets folder. And in the paper scans folder, these are all the scans that I have made of different papers. I've got uncodated paper. You've got dark kind of smeary pages of photocopy. You've got light ones with sort of roller marks on crumpled paper. So, you've got uh 4K versions in here and also vertical versions. And those are for if you want to do anything yourself with those, but they also are part of the assets which are in this folder here. And these are the ones you install into Premiere Pro. Let me show you how to do that. So, to install these in Premiere Pro, you need to get your graphics templates window open. So you can either go to window and find it down here or you can go to workspaces and go to effects. That's what I like to do. And you've got it here. You go to this little plus here and you find your photocopy assets and you click choose. And then if you make sure they're checked. Let's close this. And here are all your assets. So here you've got your 4K 16x9 versions. You've got your 1080 vertical versions for social media, for reals

Tik Tok, whatever. Um, you've got a load of different options. You've got sort of crumple paper media replacement text based ones, grainbased ones, halftonone. You've got some more stylistic ones, some more realistic ones. You got text based ones where you just input the text. You've also got a risograph effect. Um, so a risograph is basically what you'd get if a screen print and a photocopier kind of had a baby together. So you could input your own inks, which meant you could use fluorescent inks. But traditionally, you'd only have a couple of passes. So the paper would often have to go through the machine again, meaning that you got sometimes a bit of misregistration with the colors. So I've tried to mimic that here. So again, you've got your media replacement, text replacement, um vertical versions, too. Using them is pretty simple. You just select one and just drag it onto your timeline. And then in your properties window here, you've got all your controls. So you can flip that down. You've got your media replacement. So I can replace that with a different image. Can change the paper color. I can change the, you know, the contrast, the exposure. Um, I can change things like the half te dot size, change your scale, your position, all that sort of stuff. With your textbased ones, they're pretty straightforward, too. You've got your text here. And you can change your font tracking, your leading. You can change the, you know, rotation. You can change the scale. paper color. Let's make it blue. You can change it to be dark text on light. It's all pretty straightforward, pretty self-explanatory. So, let's add a vertical one. Um, so let's pick this one here. So, I'm going to put this down on the timeline. And if I go to my properties window, uh, we've got four different media replacements here. So, I'm going to turn off two of these cuz I only want two. Um, so media one I'm going to replace with this picture here. And I'm going to make the color of that like a light blue. And then media two I'm going to replace with this image here. And I'm going to make the color of that like a sort of an orangey red. So here we go. And there it is. Uh these are just um two images that I just made and I've just overlaid them here. Now you can use video with these templates. Although they are designed for images and there's a little bit of a workaround. Let me show you what you have to do. Let's start with a half tone based one. So I've got some video here of some astronauts and that sort of runs at uh 24 frames a second. So I'm going to drag this into the image bit and then I you know I can change my exposure whatever. But the issue is if I play this the astronauts play at their full frame rate while the background is only going at five frames a second and there's a bit of a mismatch. So, normally I would go to my effects and I would search for a posterized time effect, which I would drag on to the clip and set it to five frames a second. However, if you do that, it drops frames. And I don't know why it does, but I can't seem to get rid of it doing that. So, here's the workound. You have to export this full bit with the full frame rate. Then once you've done that, you reimpport that clip and then drag that onto your timeline. And then you add the posterized time effect. And you set it to five frames a second. And now it looks fine. And that's all well and good for if you want to use these templates. But make a photocopy effect yourself in After Effects, let me show you how to do that. So, I'm here in After Effects. I made a couple of new compositions. They're just 4K running at 24 frames a second. I've also got my folder full of my scans of photocopy textures. I've scanned these in from my own pages, but if you know of any good resources online, then please do drop a link in the comments so that people can find their own. So, I'm going to select these and I'm going to drop these into one of my compositions, which I've called photocopy loop. And I'm just going to pull them back to the beginning and I'm going to press option and then the right square bracket to make them just two frames long. And I'm going to animation key frame assistant sequence layers. And that's

just going to make them all run just like this. So now I'm going to go to my other composition which I've called final effects. And I'm going to take my photocopy loop composition drop that in here. So what I want to do now is to have this looping for the entire duration of this composition. So I'm going to rightclick it and go to time and enable time remapping. Then I'm going to alt or option click this stopwatch and I'm going to type loop all lowerase then a capital O for out and then brackets like that. And then I can just pull the end and that should just continuously loop. Now the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to drop this spinning car over the top. Um, I'm going to do the same with this. I'm going to go to time, enable time remapping, and I'm going to do loop out again. Um, because I want this running on a loop, too. And I'm just pulling it over the edge here so it runs off because I'm going to add an adjustment layer in later that puts everything at five frames a second. and sometimes it grabs frames from outside the composition. So, I just want to make sure there's something in that frame. So, this looks obviously rubbish. So, we need to make this car look like it's a photocopy. Let's start by making it black and white. Going to go into my effects and I'm just going to drag a black and white effect onto it. We need to add some contrast because photocopies have a very, very low dynamic range. There's very extreme blacks and extreme whites. So, I'm going to get a curves layer. I'm going to drop that on. And here, I'm just going to pull the black point almost to the middle and then the white so it looks very, very contrasty. So, the next thing I want to do is I want to add a bit of noise. So, I'm going to go up here and search for noise. And I'm going to just pull a noise effect down onto the car. I want to uncheck color noise. Go it black and white. I'm going to make that 100%. Now I want it a bit blurry. So I'm going to search for a blur. And I'll probably go for just a gaussium blur. Drag that on. And I want to uncheck repeat edge pixels because that's just rarely a good thing. And I'm going to make that about 5%. And now I'm going to set the mode to difference. We also have to invert this because what this is doing now is it is taking what's light and what's dark and kind of flipping it round. So you get the texture of the paper through the car. So where you've got these streaks here, you can see them coming onto the car. And that looks good in terms of the aesthetic of the car, but the motion still looks not very good. So, we want to have this jump around a bit. So, I'm going to press P to bring up my position. Going to alt click the stopwatch and I'm going to add an expression. I'm going to type a wiggle and I'm going to open the brackets. And the first number here is how many times a second it's going to do this. So, I'm going to do 24 times a second. And then the next value is how many pixels it's going to move by. So I'm going to type 15. So that should jitter around. And I'm going to type R to bring up my rotation. Altclick the stopwatch. I'm going to do another wiggle expression. 24 times a second again. And one degree, which is probably quite a lot. That may even be too much. But let's have a look. There we go. Now it's wobbling around, but it looks too fast. So, we need to right click, new adjustment layer. Then we go to posterize time. And I'm going to drag that onto the adjustment layer. And I'm going to set the frame rate to five. So now the whole thing is running at five frames a second. and looks much more photocopy- like. So, if we wanted to add a different color to the paper, we would make a new solid layer and we could take a color here and then we would set this mode to multiply. There's other things we can do here too to make it more stylistic. We can

duplicate this car layer. And because they've both got these wiggle expressions, they should be jumping around slightly mismatched from each other. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a fill effect and put that on the top one. I'm going to change this to multiply. And then I can change the color to whatever I want. Maybe a pink. Now we've got an interesting looking effect with a sort of color overlay there. Looks a little bit screen print like. I could get an invert effect and add that onto the background. And then I'd have to take the invert off this layer here. So I can turn that off like that. Maybe I'll change the color just for fun of this one. So, we can maybe make it a yellow, a greeny yellow. And there we go. Another variation. And this is really useful for those kind of like really kind of crappy looking CGI things like this car was because it just makes it so much more interesting looking. So, hopefully that will have shown you how to make this effect. um or if you chose to download the asset pack, I want to say a really big thank you because that's basically how I support myself and my family financially and it's a difficult financial time for a lot of people. So, I really do appreciate your support there. Um anyway, I hope to see you uh in the not too distant future with another video. Take care, everyone.