Pulling a bit away from the motion graphics fundamentals, Joey Korenman pragmatically dissects Cyriak’s recursively fractal hand effect in After Effects where zooming into the fingers of a hand will produce more hands and the whole process continues on, almost indefinitely.

In this tutorial, I did my best to recreate Cyriak’s hand-fingers animation, a video that has given me bad dreams ever since I saw it

Using some footage of a hand opening that was simply shot on a green screen, Joey demonstrates quite a few techniques in After Effects to complete the effect, and provides some tips for keying green screen footage, sharing some tracking techniques, as well as workflows for blending images together naturally.

Joey notes that after recreating this effect, it was a lot more difficult than he had fist anticipated, which is a testament to the genius of Cyriak’s work.

Check out the tutorial for Recreating Cyriak’s Hand-Fingers in After Effects here.