Tweening will work well for pan and zoom. I don't see any skew applied in the video, and it's probably not worth implementing mesh distortion for it. Even in your example image if you took off the border, it would be pretty difficult to tell the difference. You would probably get more impact with parallax and scale rate.
Blending and effects are all up to you to experiment and design around. This is an entire career for people, to utilize existing effects and program new ones. Particles are very commonly used in conjunction with effects to achieve a wide variety of visual results.