I worked on this with Dominic Taylor who had set up the comps, cameras, and worked with the clients on the direction. I mainly did the flipboard effect.
This was quite a challenging and difficult effect to do in Maya. The main driver of the rotations was expressions; the expression were taking their values from samples from textures, which were generated from AE. The main difficulty lay in the fact that it was slow, and it needed to be baked out before it could be sent to the farm because setAttr was the mandatory method of applying the motions.
The flipboard effect was not only flipping from image A to image B; in fact, it goes through a series of photographs before it resolves into the final, and designing the mechanics of the scene took some tries before getting right.
In retrospect, LW’s nodal displacement in conjunction with Denis Pontonnier’s Part Move nodes is a superior method. Where it took me about week to get all the shots set up in Maya, I think I would have done the same in LW for less than half the time.