Free Video Effect
Paper Cut Effect: Turn Yourself Into a Collage Cut-Out
You become a torn-edge paper cut-out glued onto a notebook collage, with tape, scribbles and ransom-note letters.
Claude Code · Opus 5.59:16Medium
- Run the setup once
- Paste the prompt, fill in the [brackets]
- Approve the preview, get your MP4
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The prompt
effects/paper_cut.py: add a "Paper Cut" effect between [START S] and [END S].
- Background: a light grid, cream notebook paper texture.
- Cut me out with the person mask; add a 14 px white paper edge outside the mask
and make that edge irregular, like torn paper (an edge distorted with Perlin noise),
+ a light shadow. I should look like a paper cut-out stuck onto the page.
- Collage elements (draw them with HTML/Pillow):
- Top left, "[NUMBER/WORD, e.g. 100]" in ransom-note style letters
(each letter a cut paper scrap in a different color, font and slight angle)
- Behind, torn blue and yellow paper strips with colored pen scribbles on them
- Small hand-drawn X's, stars, a spiral line, and semi-transparent tape pieces in the corners
- Animation: for a "stop-motion" feel, all collage elements jitter 1-2 px at random
8 times a second (every 3-4 frames). The elements arrive one by one as if "stuck on"
(scale 1.2→1 in 2 frames, without easing).
- My cut-out also changes its angle very slightly (±0.5°) 8 times a second.Fill in the brackets
| Placeholder | What to put there | Example |
|---|---|---|
[START S] / [END S] | Where the effect starts and ends, in seconds from the start of input.mp4. | 3.0 / 7.5 |
[NUMBER/WORD, e.g. 100] | The number or short word spelled out in ransom-note letters in the top-left corner. Each character becomes its own paper scrap. | 100 |
About Paper Cut
Paper Cut is a talking-head video effect that cuts you out with a torn white paper edge and sticks you onto a cream notebook page, surrounded by tape, pen scribbles and ransom-note letters that jitter like stop-motion. Run the one-time setup, then paste the prompt below into Claude Code with Opus 5.5 and Claude builds the collage from your own footage.
Use it when: You want a playful, hand-made DIY feel for a section of the video.
What the Paper Cut effect does
Paper Cut turns a section of your video into a scrapbook page. Your real background disappears and a cream notebook sheet with a faint grid takes its place. You stay on screen as a cut-out: a white paper border, 14 px wide, runs around your silhouette with a ragged, torn edge and a soft shadow underneath, as if someone snipped you out of a magazine and glued you down.
Around you, the page fills with craft-table clutter. A number or word sits in the top-left corner in ransom-note letters, each one a different scrap of paper. Torn blue and yellow strips sit behind you with pen scribbles on them, and small hand-drawn crosses, stars, a spiral and pieces of tape fill the corners.
When it works and when it hurts
It fits light-hearted moments: a personal story, a behind-the-scenes aside, a number you want to land with a bit of fun. The look says “made by hand”, which can make a polished channel feel more personal for a few seconds.
It hurts in serious content. A collage next to bad news or a sensitive topic reads as flippant. It also hides your room, so if the point of the shot is something behind you, such as a product on a shelf, this effect removes it. And because everything twitches, it gets tiring over long stretches; how long is too long is a judgement call, but short sections are the safer start.
How Claude builds it
The setup prompt has already cut a person mask for every frame, and that mask does most of the work. Claude grows it outwards by 14 px to make the paper border, then distorts the border’s outline with Perlin noise so it tears unevenly instead of tracing you like a sticker. A blurred, offset copy of the shape becomes the drop shadow.
The collage pieces are drawn as separate transparent layers, either in Pillow or as HTML rendered to PNG through Playwright. For each frame, Claude stacks the notebook background, the strips and scribbles, your cut-out, and then the letters and tape on top. A tiny random offset is re-rolled every three or four frames to create the jitter, and each piece lands by scaling from 120% to 100% over two frames. ffmpeg then writes the frames back to MP4 with your original audio.
Make it yours
Swap the notebook for kraft paper, graph paper or an old newspaper page. Change the strip colours to your brand palette, or replace the drawn doodles with scans of your own pen sketches. If the tape and stars feel busy, ask for fewer pieces; if your cut-out feels too static, ask Claude to slide it in from the side as if it were being placed by hand. Change one thing per render so you can tell which edit made the difference.
Questions
Does my background need to be plain for Paper Cut?
No, because the notebook page replaces your background anyway. A plain, well-lit background still helps: the person mask comes out cleaner, and the torn paper edge traces that mask. In a busy room the edge tends to wobble more around hair and shoulders.
Can I use my own paper texture or stickers?
Yes. Put the images in a folder such as assets/paper_cut/ and tell Claude to use them for the background or the collage pieces. Scanned paper, real tape photographed on a white table or your own sketches all work; use transparent PNGs for anything that should sit on top.
Why is the movement deliberately choppy?
Stop-motion is shot a few frames at a time, so objects jump instead of gliding. The prompt copies that: collage pieces shift 1–2 px about eight times a second and land in 2 frames with no easing. Asking for smooth motion would remove the hand-made feel.
Can the ransom-note text be a word instead of a number?
Yes. The placeholder takes either. Each character becomes its own paper scrap with a different colour, font and tilt, so three to five characters fit comfortably in the top-left corner of a 1080×1920 frame. Longer text will need smaller letters or a second line.
Step by step
Run the setup once
Open the folder that holds input.mp4 in Claude Code, choose Opus 5.5 and paste the setup prompt. The person mask it creates is the shape Paper Cut traces for your torn paper edge.
Choose the ransom-note text
Decide on a number or short word for the top-left corner, such as the number in your hook or a one-word label for the section.
Paste and fill in the prompt
Copy the Paper Cut prompt, set the start and end seconds and the ransom-note text, and send it. Add 'Render a 2-second preview first' at the end if you want to check the look before the full render.
Give notes and render
Watch the result and ask for one change at a time, such as 'rougher torn edge' or 'move the tape off my shoulder', then render the full clip.
You need: Setup prompt (run once) · Person mask · A number or short word for the ransom-note letters
Tips
- Keep the ransom-note text to a number or one short word. Every character is a separate scrap of paper, so a long word crowds the top-left corner of a vertical frame.
- The original prompt has no preview line. Adding one costs a few seconds and lets you judge the torn edge and the jitter before a long render.
- The jitter 8 times a second is what makes it read as stop-motion. If it feels too nervous to you, ask for 6 times a second rather than removing it; how much is right is a matter of taste.
- Use it for short stretches. A collage that twitches for a whole minute gets tiring, while a few seconds feels like a fun aside.
If it goes wrong
The torn edge looks like a smooth white sticker outline.
Ask Claude to raise the Perlin noise strength on the border and use larger noise features so the tears look uneven, and to show you a single still frame before re-rendering.
The paper edge crawls or shimmers from frame to frame.
Either the noise is regenerated every frame or the mask edge is unstable. Ask Claude to keep the noise pattern stable over time, smooth the mask in that range and re-render only those seconds.
Collage pieces cover your face.
Tell Claude to keep the face area clear and move the ransom-note letters, tape and doodles towards the corners and edges.
What it does not do
- The torn edge follows the person mask, so flyaway hair, a fast-moving hand or clothing close to your background colour can give a lumpy or flickering border.
- Your real background is replaced entirely. Anything you hold away from your body may be cut off or included only in some frames, depending on the mask.
- It is a 2D composite: the shadow is a fixed soft offset, not a shadow cast by your room's light, and the paper has no real lighting or texture response.
- The variety of the ransom-note letters depends on the fonts Claude can find or install on your computer.
Sources
- Pillow documentation — Pillow. Accessed October 21, 2026.
- Screenshots — Playwright for Python. Accessed October 21, 2026.
- Robust Video Matting (RVM) — GitHub — PeterL1n. Accessed October 21, 2026.
- Claude Code overview — Anthropic. Accessed October 21, 2026.
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