How to animate the appearance of pictures in After Effects in this way?

Question

Adobe After Effects

It should be as follows:
Pictures are attracted by a magnet to the screen, and they construct a regular grid of pictures.
That is, they should not leave the edges, namely, as it were, fly in "from somewhere." It seems to me that it is extremely simple to do it through 3D, but I do not know how.

Answer 1

There are many options here. The simplest one is to activate the 3D mode for the layer (for each layer, this is the last checkmark, in the form of a 3D cube). After that, you create keys for the "flying away" state, and for the correct location on the screen, you get the desired animation.
For a magnetizing effect, you can edit the view of the graph for coordinates and rotation, so that at first the movement is slow, and before it stops, it is fast. To edit the graph, separate the coordinate values ​​("Separate Dimensions"), check the graph icon for the parameter, and activate the "Graph Editor" mode.
If you don't want to move each element, you can use animation presets.
To do this, first arrange the pictures as you need, for example, in a 5 * 3 grid (the main thing is to place exactly to the pixel). Then select all these layers and select Pre-compose from the menu. this will create a nested sequence, essentially merging everything into one layer.
Then assign some preset like "Card Wipe" to this layer. For example "Card Wipe - 3D swing" or "Card Wipe - 3D pixelstorm". In the preset settings, specify exactly the same division into columns and rows (5 by 3). And look what happened.
The advantage of the preset is that the animation is solid and can be easily customized. Although of course there are limitations. By the way, viewing presets is very convenient in Adobe Bridge.
The third option - if you are friends with programming, you can set an Expression in which to animate all the necessary parameters analytically.