motion and FCPX - replicating Spider-Man into the spider-verse opening

Motion has a Page Curl filter in Filters > Distortion that can be animated to "flip" pages. However, if you're talking about the Marvel standard opening credits sequence, you can probably animate layers on with a slight rotation (a touch of X and some Z) and a little y-position animation, and, like you said, some motion blur (or a lot of motion blur). Instead of *actual* motion blur, try using Filters > Time > WideTime instead. The animation is so fast, you cannot really determine much in the way of details of how it is being accomplished. So... whatever looks good.

You can use some of the same basic steps and just set up an Image Sequence (in Motion). Add all your images to a folder, and offset the image starts by 1 frame. In this case you can just type the 'i' key to set an in point. On the last image (at the top of the list) after setting the in point, select the image group and type 'o' to set an out point. Clone the group. Now you can go into Inspector > Properties > Timing (you'll have to hit the "Show" button) and you can set the Speed to about 50% (if you're doing a 24 fps) or about 40% if a faster frame rate. Then you can apply the gradients, blends and other things in that tutorial video using the Clone layer.

Well, you would probably want to the animation to go very quickly, and you will probably want to make it adjustable so you can try out different settings, so what I'm going to suggest is kind of the long way around, but will allow you much better fine control for development. Okay? You may even want to make this in another project until you get what you want, then render it out or copy/paste the necessary layers into your project.

Take your series of images and place them in a group.

Starting from the beginning of the project and the bottom of the list of images, move the playhead to 1 second.

Select the 2nd layer up, then type Command-[ (this will move the start of the second layer to the 1 second mark).

Move another second forward, select the next image and type Command-[ again.

Continue this process until all images are stepped in time.

Add a Page Curl to the bottom layer.

Set the Direction to Close.

Turn off Animate and use the Percent control to view how the Page Curl animates.

Adjust the Angle and Rotation to the effect you want.

Set a keyframe on the first frame with Percent = 0. Move to the one second mark and set Percent to 100%.

Now that you've created one animation on one layer, you can duplicate the exact animation to every other layer by holding down the Option key and clicking on and dragging a copy of Page Curl to all the other layers.

Play. You should see each image flapping down into place (albeit rather slowly). If the animation doesn't progress exactly right, go back and fix the first layer, delete the duplicated Page Curls and replace them with the changed Page Curl on the first layer again.

Once you get the animation working correctly, select the Group containing the images.

Type Command-K to make a Clone of the group and turn off the group (uncheck the group -- but NOT the images!).

Type Command-L to create a Replicator of the Clone.

Set the Shape parameter to Point.

Go down to the Cell Controls section and turn off Play Frames.

Now what you're going to do is animate the Source Start Frame parameter. The value goes from 0 to the number of frames in your project (you will have to click on the number value and drag it upwards to reach it). You only need to animate to the number of frames that the Page Curls end their animation (or go all the way if you need faster).

Try to determine the speed of the animation you want and keyframe Source Start Frame from 0 to the # of frames you need. You can easily manipulate how fast this animation is by moving the second keyframe around.

You can also use a Ramp behavior on Source Start Frame, set the End Value to the number of frames of your project and adjust the End Offset to taste (End offset is counted FROM Length of project down to 0). There is also a Curvature parameter that will accommodate some easing and when set at 100%, its a bit of an acceleration effect.

If you try to do each image individually, and you need to make adjustments, then you'll be dealing with tweaking *every* page curl filter separately, which can get to be a royal pain in ....

Looks like the page curls are working very nicely. I prefer the downward direction to the lateral direction though, although you could slow down the laterals slightly to make it just a little more obvious.

Great work! Thanks for sharing.