MIXED MEDIA EFFECT
For Adobe After Effects
What is it?
The Mixed Media Effect offers a creative and time-saving way to transform your HD or 4K footage into an aggressively attention-grabbing collage animation in Adobe After Effects! This animation style practically begs you to keep piling on the chaos—and the more bonkers you make it, the cooler it looks! Which is why this template comes packed with hundreds of custom, copy-and-paste effects to choose from, like texture overlays, hand-drawn doodles, animated scribbles, magazine clippings, transition effects, and a variety of creative text options.
There's no shame in going digital... you don't need to spend days printing, painting, and photographing individual frames of footage. This template blends real-world scanned elements with custom digital effects for a quick, authentic handcrafted look. All you really need is After Effects. That, and to unleash your inner creative beast, let it run loose through this enormous template, and build visuals so bold your viewers can't look away.
Make captivating
mixed media collage
animations in
After Effects!
The Mixed Media Effect is an After Effects template (project file) with over 900 effects. The effects are individual layers, so building your custom collage animation is as easy as copying and pasting layers to your comp, above your footage layer. The majority of the effects have customization controls, so you can adjust their appearance, and a built-in Stop Motion effect automatically applies random variation from frame to frame, to create a choppy, hand-crafted look. The effects incorporate real paper, fabric, and hand-drawn textures for an authentic hand-crafted vibe. For drawing or painting on footage, use the Pen tool to create a path, then customize the stroke with the controls, and animate it to follow your footage.
Scrapbooking is essentially real-world compositing. As the industry-leading compositing program, there's no better solution than After Effects, combined with the Mixed Media Effect template, for crafting rich, scrapbook animations.
How It Works
Features (A Breakdown of the FX)
Alter Your Footage
Included are 182 creative effects that change the look of your footage, such as texture overlays, color grading, transition effects, and artistic, stylized visual treatments. These include 11 "art effects", taken from the Creation Art Effects template, which convert your footage into an animated work of art in various artistic mediums such as pencil sketch, watercolor, halftone prints, paper cutouts, and more. You'll also find 4 "paper stack collage" presets, which instantly deliver a dynamic animation with your footage composited on multiple sheets of torn-edged paper.
Animated Textures
There are 119 dynamic textures made from real-world elements such as fabric, paper, metal, paint, and hand-drawn textures. They're always changing, so no two frame are the same. Animated textures are used everywhere in the template, and are the foundation for many of the effects.
Composite Physical Materials
Included are 168 options for compositing real-world elements over your footage, such as fabric, foil, clay, paper scraps, hand-drawn doodle cutouts, and magazine clippings.
Draw, Paint, & Scratch
There are 140 effects for drawing on your footage. There are custom doodles, scribbles, paint strokes, paper scratches, chalk lines and other animated markings that are ready to composite. The strokes follow a path, so simply draw your path with the pen tool, and customize the stroke with the controls. Keyframe the path to make the stroke move with your footage. To quickly convey an emotion or idea, choose from 67 animated doodles.
Text & Titles
You'll have no shortage of animated text options for your collage animation. The ransom note effect uses hundreds of magazine font clippings to create characters that change on every frame. You can also spell out your words or phrases with dynamic, animated characters that are handwritten in pencil, paper-scratched, or custom-stroke characters that follow a path. For quick and easy titles, use one of the 11 animated text styles taken from the Creation Title Effects template. Simply edit the text and font with the Text tool, and customize the appearance with the controls. Last but not least, the Title Mashup effect is included!
Comps From Demo Video
If you like the look of one of the mixed media animations in the videos above, you'll find the comp in the 4K project file. Just drop in your footage to use the comp as a starting point for your own analog animation.
This video walks you through all the categories of effects, highlighting features and tips for making stunning mixed media animations.
Need to Know
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This template is compatible with Adobe After Effects 2024 and all later versions. A version for the template for AE 2020 and later is available upon request! Works in both Windows and macOS. No plugins required.
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Mixed Media Effect includes two After Effects projects — an HD (1920x1080) and a 4K (3840x2160) version. Comps can be adjusted for any resolution.
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The comps for the animations seen in the videos above are included in the 4K project (not available in the HD project). These animations were tailored for specific footage, so they will contain elements that won't look good on your footage. But they can be customized, or be used as a starting point to get a specific look.
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This template includes public domain images and videos obtained from Pexels.com, Pixabay.com, and Wikimedia Commons. All content is cleared for commercial use, no attribution required.
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This template has been "universalized", so it will work in After Effects running in any language.
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Original Release Date: 02/05/2025
The Mixed Media Effect template is not a plugin, so there is nothing to install. Rather, it's an Adobe After Effects project file, commonly known as a "template" because most of the work is already done and the user needs only to make their own customizations. This template is compatible with version 2024 as well as all later versions of After Effects. An older version (compatible with AE 2020) is available upon request.
Mixed Media Effect contains copyrighted intellectual property. The animations you create with this product are 100% yours and can be used for commercial purposes, but the sharing or online posting of project files with or for anyone other than a client is prohibited. See the Terms and Conditions for more details.
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