Just before a big move, the object eases a little the opposite way, as if gathering itself, then springs off fast in the real direction.
Animation principles
Classic principles
Motion given enough character, through clear shapes, lively timing and a hint of emotion, that the viewer enjoys watching it and warms to whatever is moving.
Movement from one point to another follows a gentle curve instead of a straight line, which makes it feel natural and alive rather than mechanical.
Every part of a move is pushed well past what is realistic, a deeper crouch, a bigger leap, a harder squash, so the action reads instantly and with more energy.
When a moving thing comes to a stop, its loose bits (a tail, hair, an antenna) carry on past it, swing back and settle a beat later.
The parts of one moving thing travel out of step: the main body stops cleanly while the looser parts attached to it trail behind, swing past and settle a moment later.
A smaller movement layered over the main one, such as a wave while walking, that adds personality without stopping or competing with the main movement.
A move that gathers speed gently from rest and gently sheds it again before stopping, so most of its frames sit near the two ends and few in the fast middle.
An object keeps the same size, proportions and perspective as it turns and travels, so every angle shows one solid thing with real weight and depth.
A moving body grows long and thin along its path while it travels fast and goes short and wide when it lands, trading width for height so it seems to hold the same amount of stuff.
The frame is arranged so one subject clearly owns it, with everything else pushed back in brightness, size and placement, so the eye goes straight to the action that matters.
Choosing how many frames a move lasts so its speed tells the viewer how heavy, light, urgent or relaxed the thing moving is.
Cycles & loops
An element waiting on screen gently grows and shrinks back in a slow, even rhythm, as if quietly breathing while nothing else happens.
A short series of separate drawings is swapped in one spot at a steady rate, so a subject moves the way pages do when a flipbook is thumbed.
A looping hop in place: the body crouches and squashes, springs up stretched, rounds out at the top, then falls and squashes on landing to start the next hop.
A resting element drifts smoothly up and down in an endless slow wave, as if it were hovering or floating on water.
An animation that plays through to its end, then runs the same motion in reverse back to its start, over and over, so the loop never jumps.
A short looping set of poses in which a figure pushes off, flies with both feet off the ground, lands and pushes off again, repeated so it seems to run without stopping.
A clip whose motion runs in whole cycles so its last frame flows straight back into its first, letting it play on repeat with no visible jump.
A character steps through one full stride of legs and swinging arms that repeats seamlessly, so it keeps walking for as long as the loop runs.
Easing
A move that winds up with a few small hops, each higher than the last, before springing off the final one all the way to its target.
A move that hits its target and bounces back off it in a few quickly shrinking hops, like a ball dropped on a hard floor.
A move whose speed follows a curve you shape yourself by dragging two control handles, so it can lag, rush, pull back or overshoot exactly as you want.
A move that first backs off a little in the opposite direction, then speeds up toward its target and arrives at full speed.
A move that creeps away from rest and then gathers speed sharply along a quarter-circle curve, so it is going fastest at the very end.
A move that creeps away from its start and keeps accelerating, so it is going fastest at the moment it arrives.
A move that barely creeps away from its start, then gathers speed sharply and is travelling at full tilt when it reaches the end.
A move that begins at a standstill and speeds up steadily, reaching its fastest at the very moment it stops.
A move that sets off softly from rest and picks up speed smoothly, following the gentle rise of a sine curve until it reaches full pace at the end.
A move that first pulls back a little away from where it is going, swings across, shoots slightly past the target and then settles back onto it.
A move that pulls away from rest gently, is quickest at its halfway point, then slows just as gently into its stop.
A move that creeps off its start, whips through the middle almost at once, then creeps into its end, so it feels like a snap between two resting states.
A move that picks up speed gently from rest, is quickest at its midpoint, and slows just as gently into its stop, with the speed changing at a steady rate both ways.
A move that barely stirs at first, sweeps almost the whole way in a quick burst through the middle, then crawls to a stop, following a fifth-power curve.
A move that drifts off gently, is quickest right at its midpoint, and drifts to a stop just as gently, its speed rising and falling like a smooth wave.
A move that starts fast, runs a little past its target, then eases back to rest on it.
A move that launches almost instantly at top speed, loses most of that speed right away, and then coasts slowly and smoothly into its final spot.
A move that leaves quickly and then slows down steadily, coming to a soft stop exactly on its target without overshooting.
A move that leaves almost at full speed and then brakes harder and harder, creeping the last stretch so it seems to glide gently into place.
A move that sets off at its quickest and slows down at an even rate, gently coasting to a stop on its target.
A move that sets off at full speed and then slows down steeply, gliding the last stretch into place without overshooting.
A move that sets off at its quickest and then slows softly and evenly until it comes to rest on its target, following a quarter of a sine wave.
A move that first jiggles back and forth around its starting point in ever wider swings, then breaks loose and shoots to its target.
A move that shoots past its target and swings back and forth across it, each swing smaller than the last, until it settles like a plucked elastic.
A move that keeps exactly the same speed from the first frame to the last, with no speeding up at the start and no slowing down at the end.
A move that freezes and then snaps forward in a handful of equal jumps, ticking toward its target like a clock hand instead of gliding.
Physics
A falling object picks up speed quickly at first, then the push of the air grows until it matches gravity and the object settles into a steady top speed.
A ball falls under gravity and rebounds from the floor in ever lower, ever shorter hops, flattening on each impact and stretching as it drops, until it comes to rest.
A string of joined links hangs from a point that moves, and each link trails the one above it, so the whole chain whips along late and keeps swinging after the point has stopped.
A spring-driven move that gets to its target as quickly as it can and settles there without ever going past it or wobbling.
Something released at speed sheds a constant share of that speed each moment, so it brakes sharply at first and then drifts slower and slower into a soft stop.
Something is let go and falls straight down, starting slowly and picking up speed steadily, as if gravity were pulling it.
One object strikes another: the striker stops or rebounds at once, and the one it hit is knocked back, squashes against the blow and wobbles to rest.
A heavy object trails behind whatever drives it, building up speed slowly and carrying on in the same direction for a moment after the drive turns around.
An object shivers rapidly back and forth around where it sits, the shake fading out within a fraction of a second.
Something moving loosely drifts close to a target, gets tugged toward it, then jumps the last stretch and locks on with a small springy wobble.
An object travels round and round a central point on a fixed loop, passing in front of the centre and then behind it.
Something swings to and fro around a resting point in a smooth, regular rhythm, like a pendulum or a weight on a spring.
A spring so heavily damped that it drifts toward its target and slowly settles there, never passing it or bouncing back.
A weight on a stiff arm rocks side to side about a fixed point above it, hanging still for an instant at each end and rushing fastest through the bottom.
Objects float around their resting spot along smooth, never-repeating wandering paths driven by noise, as if carried by a gentle current.
An object tossed across the frame rises, slows and hangs at the top, then drops faster and faster, tracing a parabola from where it left to where it lands.
At the moment it fires or takes a hit, the object snaps backwards a short way, then glides back to its starting spot.
Something tied to a fixed point is dragged away against a tightening band, then let go, so it whips back, shoots past its resting place and wobbles to a stop.
After arriving, an object swings past its resting spot and back a few times, each swing smaller than the last, until it comes to a stop.
The view or an object jolts about in small random jumps that die away quickly, selling the force of a hit.
A shape whose outline is a ring of points held together by springs, so it squashes, bulges and wobbles on impact before settling back like a lump of jelly.
Movement driven by a simulated spring, so a thing shoots toward its target, runs past it and wobbles back and forth in shrinking swings until it settles.
A move driven by a loosely damped spring, so it shoots past its target and swings back and forth around it in shrinking wobbles until it comes to rest.
After a knock, a shape sways and jiggles back and forth about its base, each swing smaller than the last, until it settles where it started.
Principle sub-capabilities
An element holds still for a set moment and only then begins its move, so the action starts later than its cue.
A move comes to a full stop and the subject stays put on that pose for a beat, letting it register before the next move begins.
Once something has stopped, it keeps up a faint, slow drift and swell so the pause feels alive instead of looking like a paused frame.
During a very fast move, several copies of the subject appear in one frame, strung out along its path, so the eye reads speed instead of a jump.
Connected parts make the same move but start it one after another, a beat apart, so each seems to carry its own weight and trail the one ahead.
The moving thing gets a new pose every frame, every other frame or every third frame, so the same motion looks fluid, hand-made or deliberately steppy.
During a very quick move, the object is drawn for a frame or two as one long stretched shape spanning where it was and where it is, instead of jumping between the two.
A shape that gets thinner as it stretches and wider as it squashes, so its overall size stays the same while its proportions change.
Timing that tells you how heavy something is: a heavy object starts slowly, takes longer, and drifts past its mark before settling, while a light one zips off and stops at once.
Stagger
Items in a row or group start their move one after another beginning at the middle, with the timing spreading outward evenly so the outermost items go last.
Items in a sequence start one after another with the gaps between their start times following an easing curve, so they rush in close together and then trail out slower.
The two outermost items of a row arrive first, then each next pair inward, so the entrances close in on the middle and the centre lands last.
Tiles in a grid start their animation one after another by row plus column, so the change rolls across the grid as a diagonal front from one corner to the other.
A row of items all make the same move, each one setting off a fixed beat after its neighbour, so the motion ripples through the list in order.
A set of items each starts its move after a delay that grows with its distance from a chosen point, so the change washes outward from there.
A group of elements animates one after another in rings spreading out from a single point, each one delayed by how far it sits from that point.
Every item in a group begins its entrance after its own random delay, so the set fills in scattered with no visible order.
A row of items each bob up and down on the same repeating cycle, every one starting a beat after the one before it, so a wave seems to roll along the row.
Time remapping
The action slows to a near standstill at its peak while the camera keeps travelling round it at normal speed, then the action speeds back up.
New frames are generated between the existing ones so motion captured at a low frame rate plays back smoothly instead of jumping from pose to pose.
The action stops dead on one instant and the picture stays put for a beat, then everything carries on from exactly where it stopped.
At the moment of a hit the motion stops dead for a handful of frames, then picks up again, so the blow feels heavier.
An existing move keeps its exact path but is played back on a new clock, so parts of it run slower, faster or pause while it still ends where it did.
An animation runs forward and then the very same motion plays backwards, so everything retraces its path and ends where it started.
The action plays at a fraction of its normal speed for a stretch, so a quick moment is drawn out long enough to see every part of it.
A shot whose playback rate glides between speeds, sinking into slow motion and then surging fast again, instead of switching speed in one jump.
The playback speed of a motion changes as it runs, gliding from normal pace into slow motion and then racing faster than real time, without cutting.
Timing & spacing
A move that gets up to speed in a short burst and then spends most of its time gliding gently to a stop.
Each move is given a length of time that grows with how far it travels, so short moves finish quickly and long ones take longer at a similar pace.
A move that can be cut off or turned around partway through and simply heads for its new destination from wherever it is, keeping its momentum instead of snapping or starting over.
When something already in motion is given a new destination, it carries its current speed and direction into the new move and curves round to it, with no stop or sharp turn.
Typography
Counting
A number ticks up to its total while holding a fixed number of decimals and comma groups, its digits set in equal-width slots so the figure stays steady as it climbs.
A big number drops by one at a steady beat, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, until it reaches zero.
A number climbs quickly from zero through every value in between, slowing as it nears its final figure and then holding there.
Credits and crawls
Lines of text lie on a plane tilted away from the viewer and glide up into the distance, shrinking toward a vanishing point and fading out as they go.
Depth and 3D
Words sit on the sides of a solid cube that turns in perspective, each quarter turn bringing the next word round to face the viewer.
A word printed on a strip creased into vertical pleats opens out like a squeezed paper fan until it lies flat and reads in full.
Letters turn over one at a time about an upright axis, like cards, and land showing their reverse side in a new colour or as a new letter.
Flat lettering sprouts a solid side that pushes out behind each glyph until the word reads as a thick three-dimensional block.
Several copies of the same word are stacked at different depths and slide at different speeds as the view shifts, so the word seems to have layers behind it.
Words line the walls of a corridor that recedes to a vanishing point, sliding towards the camera so it feels like flying through a tunnel made of type.
A word casts an upside-down copy beneath itself that wavers in thin horizontal bands and fades downward, as if mirrored in still water, with a gleam of light drifting across it.
Glitch and distortion
Type that sits still until it suddenly tears into sideways-shifted slices with red and cyan copies splitting off it, then snaps back to clean.
Glowing tube-lit lettering blinks on and off in an uneven stutter, sometimes only half lit, before it catches and stays steadily bright.
Strips of a word have their pixels reordered from bright to dark, dragging the letters into hard horizontal streaks that then pull back into clean type.
A word is pulled apart into its red, green and blue copies, which drift sideways so the letters show rainbow edges before lining back up into white.
Thin horizontal strips of the text suddenly slide sideways out of step with each other, in quick bursts, as though the video signal briefly lost its lock.
Glyph swaps
A block of flickering monospaced characters settles so that heavy glyphs gather where the letters are and light ones fade away, until the word stands out in pure type.
A letter in a word shrinks away and an emoji pops up in its exact spot, so the word still reads with a picture standing in for that letter.
Each letter of a word ticks through the alphabet in order and comes back round to itself, the cycling rolling across the word one letter after another.
A line of small icons holds the place of a word, and each icon in turn gives way to a letter until the whole word is spelled out.
Layout and poster
Words laid out one to a grid cell swap places, each sliding along a soft curve to its new cell while staying level and legible.
Oversized words arrive one block at a time, each sliding, scaling or turning into its slot, until together they settle into a composed poster.
Lines of type drop in one after another, each settling on top of the last, until they pile up into a solid block of words.
Liquid and organic
A word goes soft like warm wax: the bottoms of its letters sag and run down past the baseline in tapering drips, and drops fall from the longest ones.
Letters behave like drops of thick liquid, so when two drift close their outlines bulge and fuse into one blob, and stretch a neck before snapping apart.
Letters are pushed around by a smooth drifting noise pattern, so their strokes ripple and bulge like type under moving water before settling.
Rings of motion spread out from one spot through a word, and each one shoves the letter outlines back and forth as it passes, so the type swells and wobbles like a reflection on a pond.
A word starts wound into a spiral, its middle turned further than its edges, and untwists until the letters sit straight and readable.
Looping and marquee
Stacked lines of repeating words slide sideways without end, each line heading the opposite way to its neighbour and at its own pace.
Words built from glowing lamp dots step sideways across a grid of dim lamps, coming in at one edge and running out at the other.
One word in a fixed line keeps changing: it rolls up out of view while the next word rises into its place from below, looping through a list.
Lyrics and captions
A little ball jumps in arcs along a line of lyrics, landing on top of each word right when it should be sung.
A new colour runs through a line of lyrics from left to right, its edge passing each word as that word is sung.
Song words appear a few at a time, each flying, dropping or slamming in its own way, punching on the beat and leaving before the next line takes its place.
Song lines appear one at a time in the same spot, and at each change the current line melts away while the next one fades up through it.
A whole caption of a line or two cuts onto the screen at once when its cue starts and cuts away when it ends, with no motion on the words themselves.
A whole line stays on screen while a highlight colour moves along it one word at a time, marking the word being said.
Masking and clipping
A solid colour climbs up through faint lettering from bottom to top behind a straight level, until every letter is filled in.
The words show up as a scattered grid of pixel dots that multiply in a fixed dither order until the letters are fully solid.
Blots start as specks at a few spots on the word and soak outward with ragged, shifting edges, uncovering the letters until they join and the word is whole.
A title starts as a handful of large flat colour squares and sharpens as the squares get smaller and smaller, until the crisp words are left.
A stack of horizontal slats covering the text turns edge-on one after another, top to bottom, so the words appear through the opening gaps.
The words can only be seen through a shape, such as a circle sliding across them or opening up wider, so the letters appear wherever that window goes.
Big bold letters act as cut-out windows, and a moving picture plays through them while everything outside the letters stays plain background.
Mechanical display
Letters are built from a fixed grid of round dots, each either switched on or left dark, and the words appear as the dots light up.
A number sits on a row of spinning drums and each digit scrolls upward into the next, the left-hand wheels ticking over only when the wheel beside them passes nine.
Numbers are built from seven straight bars per digit, and changing a number simply switches some bars on and others off, like an alarm clock readout.
Each character sits on a hinged card that flips down through a run of letters, clattering cell by cell until the whole board settles on the message.
Morphing
A letter's outline bends and slides continuously until it has become the shape of a different letter.
The outlines of a word stretch and flow, letter by letter, until together they become a single solid shape or icon.
Motion trails
As a word moves it leaves a line of fading duplicates at the spots it just passed through, which catch up and vanish into it once it stops.
Path and orbit
A straight line of lettering curls up into an arch, every letter tilting to follow the curve, then flattens out straight again.
Each letter of a word circles a shared centre on its own oval track, the inner ones lapping faster than the outer ones.
Lettering wrapped around a circle, each glyph standing on the ring, while the whole ring turns steadily about its centre.
Letters are laid along a curved line, each tilted to follow it, and the words glide along that line so they bend through every turn.
Per-unit reveals
A word appears as soft, faint smudges that sharpen into crisp letters one at a time, the focus travelling along the line.
The letters of a word come down from above one after another and land on the line, so the word builds up a character at a time.
Letters push up one after another from behind an unseen line at the foot of the text, each sliding into its place until the whole word stands.
Letters appear one at a time, each turning upright from a tipped-over angle as it fades in, until the whole word stands straight.
The letters of a word show up one after another, each swelling from a point to full size in its own spot until the whole word stands there.
The letters of a word travel in sideways from one edge, each setting off a beat after its neighbour and easing to a stop in its slot.
Two solid panels sitting edge to edge over a line of type slide apart sideways, uncovering the words from the middle out to the ends.
Letters pop into a word one at a time, each shooting a little past its spot on the line, springing back and wobbling to a stop.
A line of text fades in one letter at a time from left to right, each letter starting to appear just after the one before it.
A block of text appears one line at a time, each line fading up in its place after the line above it has fully arrived.
Text shows up in reading order one word at a time, each word fading up from nothing shortly after the word before it starts.
The letters of a word pop into their final places one by one in a shuffled order, so the text fills in patchily rather than left to right.
A word appears with its letters spaced wide apart and draws them together to normal spacing as it fades up, easing to a stop.
The gaps between the letters of a word slowly widen while it holds on screen, so the title drifts outward from its centre.
A straight, slightly soft edge slides across the words and they are visible only where it has already passed, so each line is uncovered from one side to the other.
Words appear one at a time, each tilting up from edge-on around a horizontal hinge until it faces the viewer.
Physics and particles
The text crumbles into a cloud of tiny specks along a moving edge, and the specks blow away and fade until the word is gone.
Scattered letters pour down the screen like a rain shower, accelerating and tumbling as they fall, with bigger near letters passing in front of smaller far ones.
Text fills in or eats away in irregular cloudy patches, as if a noise pattern were being thresholded over it, often with a lit edge along the moving border.
The letters of a word drop in one by one under gravity, knock against the floor and each other, and settle into a jumbled heap.
Letters on springs get shoved aside as a pointer sweeps past, then wobble and overshoot their way back into the word once it moves on.
A word sits still for a beat, then bursts apart, its letters flying outward, spinning and falling as they fade away.
Scramble and decode
A stream of random characters drops down above every letter, and as each stream reaches the line its front character becomes the real letter while the rest fade.
Each letter flickers through random characters before locking onto the real one, the line resolving from left to right.
Shadow
Text rises toward the viewer while its shadow stays low, sliding further away and growing softer and fainter, so the words look raised off the page.
A flat, sharp-edged shadow slides out of the letters along a diagonal, lengthening until it trails far across the frame.
Stretch and squash
Letters bulge wide and flat, then pull narrow and tall, height always trading against width, in a springy wave that wobbles along the word and settles.
A word repeatedly swells slightly bigger and shrinks back to its normal size about its centre, like a steady heartbeat.
A word swells towards the camera, picking up speed until the view passes right through an opening in its letters and the next word emerges from behind it.
Stroke and outline
A word draws itself in as though a pen were writing it, the ink line growing along each letter in the order a hand would make it.
A word shown only as thin hollow outlines fills up with solid colour from the bottom, and the outline melts away once the letters are full.
A pen line travels around the edges of every letter until each outline is closed, and only then does the solid colour fill in.
Hollow outlined lettering whose contour lines repeatedly grow heavier and then slim back down, like the word is slowly inhaling and exhaling.
Surface and light
Letters look like mirror-polished metal, with a reflected sky and horizon that slide and tilt across them as the light turns, and a bright glint that flashes over the surface.
A stripe of blended colours travels through a word from one side to the other, tinting the letters while it covers them and letting them return to plain afterwards.
The fill colour of the lettering keeps turning round the colour wheel, each letter slightly behind the last, so a rainbow drifts through the word.
Text drawn as a thin coloured outline whose soft halo of light slowly swells and fades again, so the letters seem to breathe.
A thin slanted streak of light travels across a word, brightening only the letters it touches, and finishes with a small sparkle as it leaves.
A word falls from oversize onto the frame, squashes slightly as it hits, and flares with light at the moment of contact before settling solid.
Titles and captions
A line sweeps out across the screen and the title climbs up out of it letter by letter, opening the piece.
Typewriter and terminal
A caret sits at the end of a line and eats it letter by letter from the right, leaving the line blank and waiting for new words.
A thin bar or solid block sits just after the last character and flashes on and off at a steady rhythm, as if waiting for the next keystroke.
Monospace lines show up one whole line at a time, like output printing in a console, and the column scrolls upward once it fills.
A short phrase stays fixed while its last word is typed out, backspaced away and typed again as a different word, a caret blinking at the end of the line.
A line of text fills in a single letter at a time from left to right at an even rhythm, a caret leading the way as if someone were keying it live.
Text types itself in but hits a wrong letter, hesitates, backspaces over it and carries on with the right one, like a person fixing a slip.
Variable font
A word stays the same size while its variable font slides along the optical-size axis, its letters tightening and sharpening for headlines or opening up and thickening for small text.
A word tips smoothly from upright type into a leaning oblique and then straightens up again, its baseline staying fixed while the letter tops travel sideways.
A word holds its place while its lettering dissolves from one font into another, the two faces briefly overlapping mid-change.
Letters grow bolder or lighter in one smooth motion by sliding a variable font along its weight axis, for the whole word at once or rippling through it letter by letter.
The letters of a word grow wider or narrower at the same height, sweeping from condensed to extended type while the line re-spaces around them.
Wave and motion
Text jerks sharply from side to side the moment something strikes it, the rattle dying away within a fraction of a second.
Held letters twitch a pixel or two and their edges wobble into a slightly different shape several times a second, as if each frame were traced again by hand.
A word starts with its letters in the wrong order, and each letter glides along a small arc to its proper spot until the word reads correctly.
The letters of a word bob up and down along a sine curve that keeps sliding sideways, so a smooth wave rolls through the line.
Web and scroll
As a pointer moves along a word, the letter nearest it rises and swells while the letters beside it lift a little less, so a soft wave follows the pointer.
Faded text brightens word by word in step with how far the page has been scrolled, running backwards when the reader scrolls back up.
Transitions
Cuts
A hard cut placed in the middle of a movement, so the subject is still moving the same way in the next shot and the motion carries the eye across the change.
A straight cut joins two unrelated scenes through a shape they share, sitting in the same spot and size, so one object seems to turn into the other.
One frame shows the first scene and the very next frame shows the second, with no fade, motion or blend joining them.
The main shot cuts suddenly to a brief second shot, a close look at a detail or a related subject, then cuts right back to the main shot, which has kept going.
The camera stays fixed on one shot, but the edit cuts straight to a moment later, so the subject pops to a new spot while the rest of the frame stays put.
A hard cut where something in the new shot sits in the same spot, with the same shape or movement, as something in the old one, so the change feels seamless.
Where a jump cut would make the subject pop to a new spot, the two shots are warped into line and blended so the subject seems to slide smoothly across the edit.
The camera slides past something close to the lens that blots out the whole frame for a moment, and when it clears the shot has become the next scene.
The first shot runs forward, then suddenly rewinds, and the edit lands on the next shot while the movement is going backwards.
A calm shot is cut off without warning by a loud, starkly different one, with nothing in between to soften the change.
Right before the edit, the outgoing shot jumps back and replays the same split second a few times in a row, then the next shot cuts in.
Dissolves
One scene gives way to the next by stacking their light, so the picture flares brighter in the middle where both are showing before settling on the new shot.
The first shot drifts out of focus, melts into the next shot while both are soft, and the new shot then sharpens back to crisp.
One scene melts into the next: the new picture grows steadily more opaque on top of the old one until the old one is gone.
The picture fades all the way down to black, stays black for a moment, then the next scene fades up out of it.
One scene melts into the next the way two exposures add on film: the brighter parts of each glow through the blend while the darks fade away last, with a hint of grain.
Glitch
The picture splits into horizontal strips that jerk sideways with dropouts, colour fringes and scanlines, and when the noise clears the next scene is in place.
The red, green and blue layers of the picture drift apart sideways into coloured ghosts, the shot changes under them, and they snap back together on the new scene.
Interface and Views
A small card or button stretches out to fill the whole screen, its corners squaring off, while the next view fades in inside it.
An element present on both screens glides and resizes from where it sits on the first screen to where it sits on the second, while the rest of the view crossfades around it.
One screen of an interface melts into the next as a cross-fade of the two whole views, while anything they share slides and resizes straight into its new place.
Light and Flash
Fiery orange and yellow light floods in from the edge of the frame as if the film were scorching, blows the picture out to near white, and cools away to reveal the next scene.
Glowing patches of warm orange and pink light slide across the picture, flare up almost to white, and the next scene is waiting when they clear.
A quick burst of white flashes flips the picture back and forth between the old and new scenes, and when the flashing stops the new scene is left on screen.
The frame blows out to bright white for an instant, the shot changes underneath, and the new scene settles back in as the glare fades.
Motion Blur
The view jerks sideways so quickly that everything streaks into a horizontal blur, and the new scene slides out of that streak and snaps sharp.
Organic and Fluid
The old scene is tugged out like a rubber band, growing long and thin toward one side, then lets go and whips off, leaving the new scene wobbling into place.
The next scene seeps in through spreading blots of ink whose dark, ragged edges creep outward and merge, as if soaking into paper, until it covers the frame.
The shot breaks into a ring of mirror-image slices around its centre that turn like a kaleidoscope, and when the pattern settles the next shot is showing.
Blobs of the next scene bubble up over the current one and run together like drops of liquid, fusing into one pool that takes over the frame.
A wide brush drags across the picture in rows, and each rough-edged stroke it leaves is a window onto the next scene until the whole frame is painted over.
Rings spread outward from a point like a stone dropped in a pond, warping the picture as they pass, and the new scene is left calm behind them.
One outline flows continuously into a different outline, its edges sliding into the new shape rather than cutting or fading between the two.
A ragged bank of drifting smoke rolls across the shot, and the next scene appears wherever the smoke thins out behind it.
The first scene twists around its centre like water going down a drain, hardest in the middle, and the second scene unwinds out of the same whirl.
Page and Fold
The first scene is creased into a row of zigzag pleats that squeeze shut like a closing fan, and the next scene shows through as it folds away.
The picture creases and scrunches up like a sheet of paper balled in a fist, then the wad opens back out flat as the next scene.
The outgoing picture creases like a sheet of paper, folding into flat angled facets again and again until the small folded piece leaves the next scene behind it.
A corner of the current picture lifts like paper and folds back across the frame, its blank underside sweeping over it, until the sheet is gone and the next scene lies beneath.
The old scene winds itself into a tube starting at the bottom edge, and the tube climbs up and off the frame, leaving the new scene where the picture used to lie.
Pixel and Mosaic
The first shot dissolves into chunkier and chunkier square pixels, then the next shot comes out of that blocky mosaic and sharpens back to full detail.
Rotation and 3D
The two scenes behave like neighbouring sides of a box that turns a quarter turn, so the old one swings off to the side in perspective as the new one swings round to face you.
The current shot pivots on one side edge and swings away from the camera in 3D, like a door being pushed open, revealing the next shot behind it.
The whole picture turns over like a playing card about its middle, and the next scene is waiting on the other side.
The whole picture whirls around its centre and shrinks away, and the next scene carries on the same turn as it grows back to fill the screen.
The current scene leans back on its bottom edge like a toppling board and falls flat into the distance, uncovering the next scene behind it.
Shape and Mask
A large word becomes a window cut into the current shot, showing the next one inside its letters, then zooms in until a single letter fills the screen.
Shatter and Break
The first scene cracks like a struck pane of glass and breaks into shards that burst outward and tumble away, uncovering the next scene behind it.
The picture breaks into a grid of squares that each turn over like cards in a rippling wave, and the backs of the squares together make up the next scene.
Slides and Pushes
The camera backs away from one spot on a large board, travels across it and closes in on another spot, so the next scene is a different place on the same surface.
The next scene slides in sideways over the last one while each scene's background drifts slowly and its foreground pieces race ahead, so the move feels deep.
The next scene slides in from one side and shoves the current one out the other side, the two moving together as a single strip.
The next scene glides in from one side and lays itself on top of the current scene, which stays perfectly still underneath until it is hidden.
The next scene slides in beside the current one so both share the frame for a moment, then it slides on across until it fills the screen.
The current scene becomes the top card of a small deck and is flicked off to the side, uncovering the next scene as the card beneath, which comes forward and fills the frame.
The current scene slides out of frame in one direction, revealing the next scene, which was waiting motionless underneath it.
Wipes
A gap opens along the centre line of the old shot and its two edges sweep out to the sides of the frame, uncovering the new shot as it widens.
A rectangle opens out from the middle of the picture and keeps growing to the edges, with the next scene inside it replacing the old one.
The screen is split into a grid of squares and the next scene wipes into every other square first, then into the squares between them, like a chessboard filling in.
A straight edge pinned at the centre of the frame turns one full circle like a clock hand, and the next scene shows up in the wedge it leaves behind.
The next scene spreads out from one corner of the screen in a growing curve until it covers the whole frame.
A straight line tilted at an angle slides across the picture, and everything it has passed over already shows the next scene.
The next scene appears inside a small diamond at the middle of the screen, and the diamond widens until it takes over the whole frame.
The next scene pours down from the top of the frame like wet paint, its lower edge hanging in uneven drips that run ahead until the screen is covered.
The next scene washes in across the frame along a blurred, curving front, its shape set by a black-to-white map that is revealed darkest parts first.
A small heart opens in the middle of the old shot and swells until the new shot, seen through it, fills the whole frame.
A circle opens from a point in the middle of the frame and keeps growing, showing the next scene inside it, until that scene fills the whole screen.
A single straight, sharp line slides from one side of the frame to the other, and the new scene takes over everything the line has already passed.
The next scene seeps in through a greyscale pattern, darkest areas first and lightest last, so the changeover takes on the pattern's shapes.
Several blades fanned out from the centre of the frame all rotate together, each one sweeping the next picture into view until the whole screen has turned over.
The next scene is painted in over the old one as thin horizontal stripes, every other stripe first and then the gaps between them, like an old screen redrawing.
The old shot is sliced into a row of strips that open one after another, each widening from its middle, so the new shot appears band by band.
The next scene unwinds into view along a widening coil that starts at the centre and spirals outward until it fills the frame.
A star shape opens up in the middle of the old shot and grows, turning slightly, with the new shot inside it, until the new shot fills the frame.
The screen splits into a stack of thin bands, and every band opens out from its middle at once to show the next scene, like turning the slats of a window blind.
The next scene slides in behind a line of sharp triangular teeth that travels across the screen, so the cut between the two shots is a jagged saw edge.
Zoom
The view lunges into the first shot in a streaking blur, and right at the fastest point it swaps to the second shot, which pulls back out of the same blur into place.
The subject in the middle stays exactly the same size while the space behind it seems to stretch away or squeeze up close, as if the camera moved one way and zoomed the other.
The frame lunges in toward the subject in a fraction of a second, blurred by its own speed, and lands on a tighter shot or the next cut.
The first shot lunges toward the camera and smears into streaks radiating from the centre, and the next shot pulls out of that smear back into sharp focus.
The current shot backs away from the viewer until it is just a small framed picture, and the next scene appears as the larger world around it.
The camera rushes into the first scene until it blows past the lens in a blur, and the next scene comes up out of that rush and settles into place.
UI and interaction
Buttons
When a button is hovered, its arrow glides off past its edge while a twin arrow glides in from behind to settle in the same spot.
A thin line runs around the edge of a button, tracing its outline on, and the button brightens once the line closes the loop.
When the pointer lands on a button, a block of colour slides across it from one side, and the label switches colour right at the advancing edge.
When the pointer lands on a button, a soft halo of colour swells out from behind it and its rim lights up, the light gently breathing while the hover lasts.
A button filled with a gradient that keeps gliding slowly across it, sliding noticeably further when the pointer rests on it.
A button fills steadily from one side while it is pressed and kept down, and only flips to its done state once the fill reaches the other side.
When the pointer moves onto a button it floats up slightly with a bigger, softer shadow beneath it, and drops back down once the pointer moves away.
A button whose edge swells and stretches toward the pointer as if made of thick liquid, then springs back and wobbles into its normal shape when released.
A clicked button pinches in from both ends into a round spinner while it works, then stretches back out into a button that shows the result.
A button that leans toward a nearby pointer, its label shifting a bit more than the pill, and eases back to its spot when the pointer goes away.
A raised button sinks down into its base as it is pushed, its shadow shrinking flat, and pops back up with a small spring when let go.
A slanted strip of soft light slides once across a button from one side to the other, so its surface looks glossy for a moment.
When pressed, a button flattens and spreads sideways, then springs back past its shape into a brief tall stretch and wobbles to rest.
When a button is tapped, a soft circle spreads out from the spot the finger touched until it fills the button, then fades away.
Cards & media
Large, blurry patches of colour drift and blend into one another behind the content, giving the background a slow, living glow.
Two versions of the same picture share one frame, and a draggable vertical line with a handle slides across it, showing the old version on one side and the new one on the other.
A streak of blended colour chases round and round the outline of a card, lighting each stretch of the edge as it passes.
A gallery that shows one picture at a time, and to move on, the next picture fades in right on top of the current one instead of sliding across.
Cursor & hover
A card leans in perspective towards wherever the pointer sits on it, with a glint following the pointer, and eases back flat once the pointer moves off.
A row of overlapping profile pictures slides apart into separate, evenly spaced circles when the pointer hovers over the group.
Only the stretch of a card's outline closest to the mouse pointer glows, and that bright patch slides around the edge to stay with the pointer as it moves.
A custom pointer made of a dot that sits right on the mouse and an outline ring that drifts after it, trailing on fast moves and re-centring when it stops.
A moving mouse pointer leaves a stream of small dots behind it that drift apart, shrink and fade out, tracing where it has just been.
A custom pointer that changes form when it reaches something clickable, here swelling from an arrow into a labelled disc and shrinking back as it leaves.
As a pointer slides along a row of icons, the one beneath it grows largest and its neighbours swell less the farther away they sit, pushing the row wider as it passes.
When the pointer rests on an image, a circle swells out from the cursor and uncovers a second version of the picture underneath until it fills the frame.
When a pointer rests on a picture, the picture slowly enlarges inside its fixed frame, which crops the edges, and shrinks back once the pointer moves off.
A pointer moving through a softly drifting field of dots shoves the nearby ones aside, and they glide back into place once it has passed.
As the mouse pointer moves over a picture built from flat cut-out layers, each layer slides by a different amount, the nearest the most, so the scene seems to have depth.
A soft circle of light tracks the pointer across a dark card, brightening the surface and the edge nearest it, and fades away when the pointer moves off.
When the pointer rests on a link a line draws out beneath it from one end to the other, and when the pointer leaves the line carries on and slides away off the far end.
Feedback & status
A small number badge swells and springs back to size every time its count ticks up, the new number appearing at the peak.
A ring traces itself around a point and a check mark then strokes in inside it, confirming that something finished.
The small picture shown in a view with no content yet drifts, sways and pulses softly on a short repeating cycle, so the blank screen still feels alive.
A row of vertical bars that leap and drop to the beat, each one tracking how loud its slice of the sound is, like the meter on a stereo.
An input that was just rejected jerks quickly from side to side, each swing smaller than the one before, then settles back in place.
A spinning loading arc closes into a complete ring, fills in with a confirming colour, and a check mark draws itself inside it.
A row of small page dots in which the current page shows as a longer coloured capsule, which shrinks back as its neighbour lengthens whenever the page turns.
A row of numbered step markers joined by empty tracks, where colour flows along each track in turn and fills in every marker it reaches as that step is completed.
A highlight moves from one part of an interface to the next, and each stop gets its own numbered caption that only appears once the previous step has finished.
A small pop-up message slides in with a thin strip along its edge that shrinks away like a timer, and once the strip is gone the message slides off by itself.
Short notification cards glide in from the edge of the screen one at a time, and each new one shoves the earlier cards up so they build a tidy column.
Forms
A text field's label starts inside the empty box like a hint, then shrinks and slides up onto the field's top edge when the field is selected, leaving room for the typed value.
When a control gains keyboard focus, an outline sweeps around it and eases out to sit a little way off its edge.
A text field gains focus and an accent bar spreads out from the middle of its bottom edge to both ends, marking it active.
Clicking the eye at the end of a password field lifts its lid open, and the row of masking dots turns into the typed characters.
Gestures & drag
A strip of cards slides sideways and settles with the next card centred, its neighbours peeking in at the edges while a row of dots shows which one is up.
A row of covers scrolls sideways with the middle one facing you flat while the others stand tilted back on each side, each cover swinging round as it passes through the centre.
When the pointer grabs an item it grows a little and its shadow falls further and softer beneath it, so it seems to hover above the page as it is dragged, then sinks back when dropped.
An empty landing area lights up, its outline turning bright and glowing softly, the moment something being dragged moves over it, showing it will accept the drop.
Something dragged and let go mid-swipe keeps sliding at the speed it was thrown, then slows down smoothly until it comes to a stop.
Dragging a list down from its top opens a gap where a spinner grows and turns, then the list springs back up with fresh items.
A row is lifted out of a list and dragged to a new position while the rows it passes glide aside one by one, keeping an empty slot open beneath it until it drops in.
A deleted row in a list fades and flattens to nothing, and the rows below it glide up to fill the space it left.
A list dragged beyond its first or last item follows the finger more and more grudgingly, then snaps back to its edge as soon as it is let go.
A list item is pulled sideways by a finger or pointer, and coloured buttons such as archive or delete appear in the space it slides away from.
A card slides sideways under a dragging finger and, once let go, either springs back to its place or, if pushed far enough, keeps going and leaves the screen.
Layout & lists
The panels of an uneven, mixed-size grid appear one after another, each fading in and growing slightly into its slot until the whole layout is filled.
A picture first shows as a soft, smeared preview, then comes into focus as the real image finishes loading.
As a list is scrolled near its last row, a brief loader appears and a new batch of rows fades up underneath, so the list simply keeps going.
When a layout changes, every element slides and resizes smoothly from its old spot to its new one instead of snapping there.
Cards of uneven heights stacked in columns slide to their newly packed spots when some are filtered away or the columns change, so each column closes up smoothly.
Loaders
A short row of dots that hop up and drop back one after another in a repeating wave, signalling that something is busy or a message is on its way.
A waiting indicator made of a line of bars that stretch tall and sink back one after another, so a swell keeps rolling across them.
A thin progress track where a coloured segment keeps sweeping from left to right, growing and shrinking as it travels, to show work going on without a known amount.
A waiting indicator where a few small dots circle a still centre point on the same ring, each at its own constant speed, so they keep overtaking one another.
A thick circular stroke sweeps clockwise around a faint track, from empty toward full, to show how far along something is.
A busy indicator where rings keep swelling out of a steady dot and fading away, signalling that something is in progress without saying how far along it is.
A waiting indicator in which a single filled shape keeps reshaping itself, circle to square to triangle and round again, turning slightly with each change.
Flat grey shapes sketch out where text and images will appear, while a soft strip of light glides across them again and again to show the page is still loading.
A busy indicator in which a rounded arc races around a faint circle, stretching out and shrinking back as it goes.
A progress bar whose filled portion is painted with slanted stripes that keep scrolling sideways, showing work in progress even when the fill barely moves.
While something loads, a brand mark is traced out as a single moving line, fills in solid once the line meets itself, then clears and traces again.
Overlays & menus
A closed panel opens by smoothly growing taller until its contents are fully shown, nudging the rows beneath it further down as it grows.
A panel of options rises from the bottom edge of the screen while the view behind it dims, and is pulled back down by its handle to close.
Pressing a control makes the next screen open out of it as a growing circle, which spreads from that spot until the new screen covers the whole view.
A dark veil covers the interface except for a clear rounded window around one control, with a pointer bubble explaining it, and the window then slides on to the next control.
A pop-up menu grows out of the spot where it was clicked, scaling up from the corner at the pointer as it fades in, and opens away from the screen edge.
A menu opens downward from its button, the panel growing first and then each option sliding and fading into place a beat after the one above it.
Buttons for acting on an item stay hidden until the pointer rests on it, then slide and fade in at its edge, and tuck away again when the pointer leaves.
A pop-up box opens by growing from a little under full size while it fades in, as the screen behind it darkens.
Tapping a round button sends a set of smaller option buttons springing out around it in an arc, one after another, while its plus icon turns into a close cross.
A side navigation panel slides narrower until only its icons remain, its labels fading away, while the main content stretches to fill the gap.
A round floating button spins its plus into a cross as a few smaller action buttons pop out of it in turn and spread along an arc.
A small label fades in once the pointer is over something, drifts along a moment behind the pointer as it moves, and fades away when the pointer leaves.
Page transitions
When a screen opens, its pieces arrive one after another in a planned order, the frame and menu first and the content after, each sliding a little and fading into place.
Picking a different tab pushes the current panel out sideways as it fades, while the new panel glides in from the side of the tab that was chosen.
Scroll
As a page scrolls, each section stays invisible until it nears the viewport, then fades in while drifting a short way up into place.
A section locks in place as the page is scrolled down, and the downward scrolling slides its row of panels sideways until the row runs out and the page moves on.
A strip of logos, words or tiles glides sideways at an even pace without end, the set repeating so the row never runs out or shows a gap.
As a page scrolls, its background, headline and content each move at their own speed, the far layers lagging behind the near ones so the page feels deep.
As the page scrolls, one section locks in place on screen and plays out its own animation for a while, then lets go and scrolls off with everything else.
A slim strip along the top edge of a page grows from left to right as the page scrolls, reaching full width at the bottom.
A page scrolled by hand never rests between its full-screen sections: when the finger lets go it eases to the nearest section edge, forward or back.
While a page scrolls, its items lean and stretch more the faster it moves, then settle back square once the scrolling stops.
A line running down a long page fills in as the page scrolls, its leading tip keeping pace with the reader so the stroke grows exactly as far as they have read.
As a page scrolls, the colour behind it eases from one section's hue into the next each time a new section moves into view.
As the page scrolls, a photo starts as a small cropped window that widens and heightens with the scroll until the whole picture is showing.
A pinned picture steps through a numbered run of stills in time with the page scroll, so scrolling down plays the clip forward and scrolling up plays it backward.
As a page scrolls past its sections, the matching entry in a side menu lights up and a highlight slides along the menu to sit on it.
Short blocks of text scroll past a graphic that stays pinned in place, and each time a new block reaches the middle the graphic lights up the part that block describes.
A large header stays fixed at the top while the page scrolls beneath it, squeezing down into a thin bar with a smaller title as you scroll.
Each scroll input sets a target the page then chases, gliding quickly at first and easing gently to rest, so choppy wheel steps become one fluid motion.
The items of a list or grid come into view in turn, each one rising and fading in a moment after the one before it.
As a page scrolls, each card stops when it reaches the top and the next card rides up over it, so the cards pile into a stack instead of leaving the screen.
Text & type
A see-through band of marker colour is dragged across a word or phrase from left to right, leaving it highlighted as if with a felt-tip pen.
When the pointer lands on a label, its letters scroll up and away one after another, each replaced by an identical letter rising into its slot from underneath.
Theme
When the interface switches between dark and light mode, the background, cards and text all ease from their old colours to their new ones together rather than flipping instantly.
Toggles & controls
Clicking an outlined bookmark icon floods it with colour from the bottom up, and it gives a small springy pop once it is solid to show the item is saved.
An empty checkbox floods with colour and gives a small squeeze while a tick mark strokes itself on inside it, short leg first and then the long one.
A three-line menu icon folds into a close cross: the outer lines slide onto the middle one, which disappears, then swing round into an X.
A checkbox showing a flat dash for a partial selection bends that same stroke into a tick when it becomes fully checked.
Tapping a hollow heart squeezes it, then it springs back filled with colour while a ring and a spray of tiny dots and hearts shoot out around it and fade.
Pressing a media button bends its play arrow into the two pause bars, the corners sliding to their new spots instead of swapping icons.
A plus sign turns an eighth of a turn to read as an x while the panel it belongs to expands, then spins back when the panel folds shut.
Picking a radio option makes the dot inside its ring grow from a point, swell slightly too big and settle at its final size.
A little tag pops up over a slider handle as it is dragged, slides along with it showing the live number, and disappears when the handle is released.
When a different option in a row of choices is picked, the coloured highlight behind the current one slides across to it and stretches or narrows to fit its label.
A row of hollow stars fills with colour one after another up to a score, each star bumping as it completes and the last filled only partly for a half or fractional score.
When another tab is chosen, the coloured line under the current tab glides across to it, stretching out on the way and settling to the new tab's width.
A rounded on/off switch whose circular knob glides to the other end of its track as the track changes colour to show the new state.
Shapes and icons
Bounce & pop
A badge drops in from above, slams onto its spot with a quick squash and a rattle, then springs back to size and sits still.
A circle grows from a point, briefly swells beyond its final size, then shrinks back and settles there.
Bursts & particles
A spray of small coloured paper pieces shoots up from one spot, fans out, then spins, flips and flutters slowly back down.
Many tiny dots spread across the frame drift together, each arriving in its own time, until they settle along the outline of a shape or logo.
An image is put together from small square blocks that pop onto a grid one after another, filling in until the full pixel picture stands complete.
A handful of small mixed shapes shoots out from a single point in every direction, spinning as it slows, then shrinks away to nothing.
Characters & rigs
A flat cut-out character built from separate pieces pinned at joints, so turning a shoulder swings the forearm and hand with it as the figure is posed.
A character face blinks and talks by cutting straight between separate drawings of its eyes and mouth, with no tweening between them.
An old-cartoon character style whose arms and legs are smooth, jointless tubes that bend into soft curves instead of folding at elbows and knees.
Cut-out & paper
Paper cut-outs of shapes, colour and pictures slide in one after another and press down on top of each other until they make a finished collage.
A figure built from flat, hinged pieces of coloured paper, each casting a thin shadow, is re-posed in small jerky steps like a hand-moved model shot frame by frame.
A folded sheet opens out one panel at a time, each flap swinging over its crease in perspective, until the flattened page shows what is printed on it.
Depth & shadows
A shape rises and settles while its shadow loosens, slides away and fades on the way up, then snaps back tight and dark beneath it as it comes down.
A flat shape trails a solid, sharp-edged shadow off at a diagonal, and the shadow reaches further out and then draws back in.
Explainer & infographic
Everything but one area darkens, a bright frame closes in around that area, and a small tag appears beside it naming what to look at.
Dots pop onto the screen and straight lines grow between them one after another, until a web of connected points has been drawn.
A row of simple icons in badges appears one at a time, each popping in with its label while a line links it to the one before, so they read as ordered steps.
A teardrop location marker falls from above onto a spot on a map, squashes and hops once as it lands, and sends a fading ring outward from its tip.
A line traces a journey across a map, growing from one stop to the next with a marker at its tip while each place is pinned as the line arrives.
An empty outlined shape floods with colour from one side to the other, the colour advancing behind a straight edge until the whole shape is solid.
Solid blocks drop in from above one after another, each landing with a little squash on top of the last, until they form a standing tower.
Geometric & Swiss style
A few flat primary-coloured circles, squares and triangles glide and turn together from one arrangement into another, settling into a fresh composition each time.
Nested regular polygons each turn by one corner-to-corner step per beat, alternating direction, so the pattern snaps round and repeats without a visible seam.
A thin modular grid draws itself in, a bold rule sweeps across it, and blocks and letters slide one column at a time into the cells so the layout locks onto the grid.
Geometric motion
Simple shapes in a pattern turn, spin and pulse together in a cycle that ends exactly where it began, so it can repeat forever without a visible seam.
A pen pushed by one side-to-side wave and one up-and-down wave at different speeds draws a looping, knotted curve as it goes.
A glowing dot circles a faint ring, and the part of the ring it has just passed lights up behind it and fades away like a tail.
Nested circles share one centre and each turns at its own pace, some one way and some the other, with broken or dashed strokes so the turning is easy to follow.
A single line starts at a centre point and winds outward, laying down one widening turn after another until the whole spiral is drawn.
A pen fixed in a small wheel rolling round the inside of a larger ring draws a looping, petalled line that grows until the pattern closes on itself.
Outlines of the same shape sit one inside another and keep growing out of the centre, so it feels like flying forward through each frame in turn.
Gradients & color
A multi-colour gradient fill whose colours keep sliding across a shape in one direction, so the surface looks like it is flowing.
A still image whose palette is rotated a step at a time, so stripes of colour seem to stream through it although no shape moves.
Several soft pools of colour blend into one smooth gradient and slowly wander about, so the colours keep flowing into new shapes.
Every colour in a graphic slides over to a new colour scheme in one timed move, while the shapes themselves stay exactly where they are.
Hand-drawn & traditional
A form is coloured in a few flat tones with crisp edges between light and shadow, like a cartoon cel, and those shadow shapes slide across it as the light moves.
Movement built from a run of separately drawn pictures, each held for a frame or two and re-inked every time, so the lines wobble and the motion steps like a cartoon.
A shape that stays put while its outline is re-wobbled slightly every two or three frames, so the line seems to crawl as though freshly hand-drawn each time.
Movement built from a handful of held poses a second, each set down by hand a little differently, so the subject steps along with a choppy, homemade wobble like a clay puppet.
Icon animation
When the pointer reaches an icon, the icon briefly swells and rocks, then wobbles back to its resting size and angle on a short spring.
An icon first appears as a thin outline drawing itself on, then its inside floods solid so the line version becomes the filled version.
A line icon switches to a different icon by bending, turning and sliding its own strokes into the new shape, so the change of state reads as one continuous motion.
Isometric
Boxes drawn at an isometric angle push up out of a flat floor grid one after another, building a chart or block city that looks three-dimensional.
An object drawn in a flat isometric view turns about its upright axis in quarter steps, pausing after each so a different pair of sides faces the viewer every time.
Lines & strokes
A line pinned at both ends flexes into smooth arcs and S-shapes as the control handles of its curve swing out and back.
A straight line bends at its joints, corner by corner from the ends inwards, until its two ends meet and it closes into a polygon.
A dashed outline or line stays where it is while its dashes creep steadily along it, like a column of ants on the move.
Outlines of a shape grow out from its edge one after another, each settling a fixed distance further out, so the shape ends up ringed by evenly spaced contours.
An object travels along a drawn curve, turning as it goes so it always points the way the curve is going.
A shape distortion that drives its corners and its sides in opposite directions, so a polygon either sharpens into a pinched star or swells into rounded petals.
Thick coloured ribbons streak across the screen one after another until they cover it, then trail off the far side to leave the next scene behind.
Thin straight strokes stream out behind a fast-moving object, growing with its speed and vanishing when it stops.
A drawn line keeps squirming as its points drift on smooth, ever-changing noise, while its overall shape stays the same.
A straight or curved stroke is bent into a row of sharp, evenly spaced teeth whose height and spacing can grow, shrink or shift over time.
Liquid & organic
A broad brush drags across the area in a few back-and-forth passes, and the picture appears only where its rough, bristly stroke has been laid down.
A ragged blot of ink bursts out from one spot, throwing spiky arms and drops, then calms into a rounded, uneven splat that stays.
A shape fills up from the bottom with liquid whose top edge waves and sloshes as it rises, then calms down when it stops.
A soft rounded shape keeps reshaping its edge, bulging out in one place and drawing in at another, so it seems to breathe and wobble on its own.
Logo animation
A round logo or badge spins around its upright axis like a tossed coin, thinning to its edge and showing front and back in turn before it slows and lands face-up.
A logo swings round on its upright axis in perspective, its thin edge flashing past, and slows until it comes to rest facing straight out.
A logo assembles itself one piece at a time in a set order, the mark first and then each letter, every new part rising into place beside the ones already there.
A logo stutters into view like a corrupted signal, sliced and shoved sideways with red and cyan fringes, until the interference dies down and it sits still and clean.
An angled edge travels across the logo, and the mark appears only on the side the edge has already passed, as if a cover were being slid off it.
Optical & interference
Dense high-contrast stripes ripple in slightly mismatched waves, so the bands swell and pinch and the whole surface seems to shimmer and buzz before your eyes.
Polygon & tessellation
Scattered points drift slowly while lines join them into a web of flat-shaded triangles that keep re-forming, so the area looks like a gently shifting faceted surface.
A single polygon is cut into smaller polygons, and each of those is cut again, step by step until the shape becomes a fine mosaic of pieces.
Repeaters & patterns
Dots on an evenly spaced grid each grow or shrink with the brightness beneath them, so a gradient or shape shows up only in their sizes and drifts as those sizes change.
Hexagons pop into place one after another, spreading out from a single cell until a honeycomb fills the screen.
Straight lines strung between matching points on two edges cross one another so densely that a smooth curve appears, and it bends as the edges move.
A line of identical shapes all perform the same move, each starting a beat after the one before, so the motion rolls along the row.
An image split into a grid of tiles turns over one tile at a time in a sweeping wave, each tile showing a new picture on its back.
Many copies of a single shape sit at equal steps around a centre point and move together, so the ring spins, swells or reshapes as one pattern.
A grid of tiles that each swell and shrink in place, timed so the growth ripples outward across the grid like a wave.
Dozens of small shapes unfurl from a single centre point and settle along curving spiral arms, like the seeds of a sunflower spreading out.
A surface tiled with triangles turns over piece by piece in a sweeping wave, each triangle spinning on its axis to show a new colour on its back.
Shape morphing
A loose, wobbling organic shape pulls itself together into the clean outline of a recognisable icon.
Broken shards of a shape start scattered and spinning, then fly inward and snap into place until the shape stands whole.
Two separate shapes move into each other and fuse into one solid form, the lines where they overlapped disappearing so a single outline remains.
A filled square softens its corners into a squircle and keeps rounding until it is a circle, one continuous shape changing its curvature rather than cross-fading.
A single closed outline built from one polar equation reshapes itself as the equation's numbers change, flowing from polygon to star to petals.
A shape made of a few flat geometric pieces comes apart, and each piece spins and slides into a new spot until together they make a completely different picture.
Sound-reactive
Bars fan out around a circle, each one stretching and shrinking with the loudness of its slice of the sound, so the ring pulses in time with the audio.
Waves & ripples
Thin circles keep spawning at one spot and swell outward, each one growing fainter until it vanishes, the way rings spread after a stone drops into still water.
A shape is bent into a smooth wave whose crests keep sliding along it, so it ripples in place without travelling anywhere.
Particles and generative
Audio-reactive
A swarm of particles that bursts outward, grows and brightens on each loud beat of the soundtrack, then settles back to a slow drift in the quiet between.
Cellular automata
A grid of cells that flash on, fade for one beat and go dark, so a seeded clump bursts into flickering sparks that scatter outward across the frame.
Square cells on a grid switch on and off each step according to how many of their neighbours are lit, so a random scatter boils into blinking, drifting, settling patterns.
A grid of coloured cells where each one advances to the next colour in a loop when a neighbour already holds it, so random static organises itself into rotating spirals.
Grains on a pixel grid drop one cell at a time and slide diagonally off anything below, so a pouring stream builds into sloped heaps that overflow ledges.
A single walker on a grid flips each square it crosses and turns left or right by that square's colour, scribbling a messy blob that eventually shoots off as a straight diagonal road.
Soft glowing blobs on a grid of smoothly varying cells that hold their shape and glide about like tiny organisms, each cell growing or fading by how full the ring around it is.
A line of on and off cells rewrites itself row after row by one simple neighbour rule, stacking into a lattice of triangles and slanted structures that drift across it.
Rows of square cells appear one under another from a single seed cell, each cell switched on or off by a fixed rule on the three above it, spreading into a chaotic triangular pattern.
Electricity
A jagged, glowing streak of electricity jumps between two points and keeps crackling, its zigzag path flickering into a new shape every few frames.
A crooked, forking streak of glowing light shoots out from a point, stutters on and off for a moment, then dims to nothing.
Emitters
An emitter whose particles each play their own little frame-by-frame animation, out of step with one another, while they drift across the screen.
Big blurred circles of coloured light float gently over a dark background, overlapping and slowly brightening and dimming like city lights seen out of focus.
Clear, glinting spheres float upward on a swaying path, swelling slightly as they go, and burst when they reach the top.
Little flat paper pieces in a few colours drift down the screen, swaying and turning over so each one flickers between its full face and a thin edge.
Tiny bright specks float lazily in the air, wandering and glinting as they pass through a beam of light.
Tiny glowing sparks drift upward as if off a fire, wavering on the heat and cooling from bright yellow to dim red before they wink out.
Leaf shapes drift down the frame, each swinging side to side and turning over as it tumbles, like leaves coming off a tree in a light breeze.
Little points of warm light drift around on loose, wandering paths, each one fading up and going dark again on its own uneven timing.
Bright sparks shoot up into a dark sky and pop into rings of glowing embers that spread out, sag under gravity and flicker away.
A stream of particles leaves one point heading upward, bends over under gravity and rains back down around its source.
A steady trickle of tiny shiny flakes falls from one spot, flashing as they tumble, and builds into a glittering mound on the floor.
Slanted streaks of light shoot across a night sky one after another at uneven moments, each a bright point dragging a tail that fades away behind it.
A moving point leaves a stream of tiny dots behind it that scatter, shrink and fade away, tracing where it has been.
Particles spawn along a line or curve, often from a head that travels it, then drift away and fade so the shape is traced in sparks.
A constant scatter of tiny glowing specks floats across the frame on a gentle breeze, each swaying on its own path and fading in and out, the closer ones larger and faster.
Thin slanted streaks pour down the frame in layers of depth, the nearer ones brighter and faster, splashing where they strike the ground.
A source keeps releasing soft, half-transparent blobs that swell, float upward and fade away, piling over each other into a rolling column of smoke.
Soft white dots drift down the frame at different depths, the closer ones larger, brighter and quicker, each wobbling a little from side to side as it falls.
A stream of tiny glowing streaks shoots out of one hot point, curves downward as it flies and burns out in well under a second.
Fire & plasma
Chunky retro pixels of heat rise from a blazing bottom edge, each row cooling and drifting at random, so jagged flames flicker up from white through yellow and orange to red and black.
Several overlapping sine waves are added up and run through a colour ramp, so the whole frame fills with soft, glowing bands that ooze and swirl into each other.
A tiled texture lines the inside of an endless tube that the camera rushes down, the pattern pouring out of a dark point in the middle and sweeping past the edges.
Fluids
A drop of dye falls into still water and sinks, its leading edge rolling outward into curling, smoky plumes while a thin wispy trail hangs behind it.
A stream flowing past a round obstacle curls into swirls that break away from alternate sides and float downstream in two staggered rows.
Soft smoke pours out of a source and rises, rolling into curls and eddies as a computed fluid carries it and it thins away.
A body of liquid built from many small particles that push away from crowded neighbours, so it pours, splashes off walls and sloshes to rest like real water.
Forces
Balls ricochet off the walls and off one another without ever slowing down, big ones knocking small ones away as if they were billiard balls.
A scatter of particles is drawn toward a single point, gathering speed as it nears, whirling round it and spiralling down into the centre.
Particles shoved out of position by a force swing back toward where they started, overshoot it and wobble to a stop as if each were tethered to its spot by a spring.
Each particle is shoved about by a smoothly varying random force that shifts over time, so the swarm churns wildly yet neighbouring points still drift together.
Loose particles are swept along by an invisible wind that swings direction and surges in strength from one spot to the next as it blows.
Fractals
A dot jumps around at random under a few stretch-and-shift rules, and the trail of every spot it lands on fills in, speck by speck, the shape of a fern frond.
A Mandelbrot-style escape-time picture whose folded formula grows a jagged, flame-coloured ship shape, usually shown diving into ever smaller copies of itself.
A straight line keeps doubling by swinging a copy of itself a quarter turn around its end, until the right-angled path crinkles into a jagged dragon silhouette.
A single continuous line winds through every cell of a square grid, each step splitting its turns into four smaller copies until it fills the square.
A Julia fractal whose constant drifts over time, so its lacy outline continuously reshapes from blobs into spirals and back.
A triangle outline that keeps pushing a small pointed tooth out of the middle of every edge, round after round, until it becomes an intricately spiky snowflake.
The view plunges steadily into the ragged edge of the Mandelbrot set, filaments and baby bulbs blooming out of nowhere until a tiny copy of the whole shape appears.
A lumpy three-dimensional fractal whose bulbs sprout smaller bulbs without end, rendered as a lit solid by stepping rays toward its surface, turning slowly in space.
A dot repeatedly leaps half the distance to a randomly picked corner of a triangle, and the trail of landings grows into a triangle riddled with nested triangular holes.
Growth & L-systems
A plant made of branching lines grows up from a single stem, splitting again and again by a simple repeated rule until it fans out into a full, budding shrub.
Dots are added one by one, each turned about 137.5 degrees from the last and set a little further out, so a round seed head grows from the centre with interlocking spiral arms.
A trunk grows and forks into two smaller branches, and each of those forks again at the same angle and scale, level after level, until a full branching canopy has drawn itself.
Interaction fields
Grains spread over a vibrating plate jiggle away from the parts that move and pile up along the lines that stay still, so a symmetric pattern draws itself out of the noise.
A pointer moving over a regular grid of dots shoves the nearby dots outward, less the farther away they sit, and the grid eases back into rows once it passes.
Two fine repeating patterns of lines or rings sit on top of each other, and nudging one slightly makes large wavy bands of light and dark ripple across the whole picture.
A dot hops in a fresh random direction every moment, scribbling a tangled, zig-zag trail that wanders off and gradually fills a region of the screen.
Metaballs & blobs
Separate round dots are softened and then cut back to a hard edge, so whenever two come close they melt into a single liquid shape joined by a stretchy neck.
Gooey blobs of glowing wax swell off a pool, float slowly up, then sink back down, stretching, splitting and merging with each other as they go.
A smooth field is sampled on a grid and each cell is cut where the values cross a threshold, tracing a clean outline around blobs that merge and split as they move.
Noise & fields
A dense field of particles streams along curling, eddying currents that never pile up or leave gaps, so the whole frame churns like stirred smoke or ink in water.
A noise pattern is sampled at positions that further noise keeps shoving around, so soft clouds fold into flowing marble or smoke swirls.
Thousands of particles drift along a hidden map of directions, and the streaks they leave bend together into smooth currents that reveal the shape of the field.
Copies of smooth noise at ever finer sizes and ever weaker strengths are stacked together, turning soft blobs into cloudy, craggy texture with detail at every scale.
Thin lines trace equal values of a hidden, changing field, so the rings drift, swell, pinch together and break apart like a topographic map of shifting ground.
Curved strands sweep out of one magnetic pole and bend round into the other, each following the pull of the field, so they draw the classic looping pattern of a bar magnet.
An area is filled with soft, organic blotches of light and dark that blend smoothly into each other and slowly churn and reshape over time.
Many thin curves follow the direction of an invisible current from point to point, together sketching how the flow bends and where it goes.
A pattern of rounded cells, each glowing at a scattered seed point and darkening toward the seams where it meets its neighbours, like cracked stone or foam.
Particle text & images
A picture is broken into a grid of small particles, each tinted with the colour of the pixel it stands for, which fly in from a scattered cloud and lock into place to rebuild the image.
A filled shape built from hundreds of small dots swirls apart and regathers, every dot travelling to its place in a new shape.
A cloud of tiny specks spread across the frame streams together until the specks sit in the shape of a word.
Reaction & growth
A closed line that keeps getting longer while its points shove each other away, so it wrinkles into tighter and tighter winding folds like coral or a brain.
Drifting particles freeze the moment they bump into a growing clump, which spreads outward as a branching, frost-like fractal.
A blob of square cells grows outward from one seed as new cells are added one by one at random spots along its edge, filling in solid with a rough, jittery outline.
A few dots grow, split and curl into worm-like stripes that keep spreading until an organic maze pattern covers the frame.
Branches sprout from a seed and fork toward a scattered field of target points, consuming each one they reach until a vein-like network fills the shape.
Rigid bodies
A line of standing tiles goes over in turn, each one tipping into its neighbour and knocking it down, until the whole row lies leaning in a slanted stack.
A solid object takes a hit, splits along cracks into hard-edged pieces, and the pieces fly off, tumble under gravity and settle into a pile.
Many small balls pour through rows of pegs, each nudged left or right at random, and stack up in bins so the piles trace a bell curve.
Balls hanging in a touching row pass a swing along the line: one end ball drops in and stops dead, the far end ball leaps out and back, and the ones between stay still.
Solid boxes tumble down one after another, crash into the ground and into each other, and come to rest as a lopsided heap that can tip and slide.
Sand & granular
Grains land one by one on a grid of little stacks, and any stack that grows too tall spills onto its neighbours, setting off chain-reaction slides that are sometimes tiny and sometimes huge.
Soft bodies & cloth
A sheet built from a grid of small weights joined by springs, so it sags, drapes, flutters in the wind and swings loose when one of its pins is released.
A figure made of stiff limbs on loose joints loses whatever was holding it up and drops like a puppet with its strings cut, tumbling and folding into a heap where it lands.
A mesh of dots joined by springy links, where knocking one dot sends a ripple of stretching and squashing through the whole net until it wobbles back into shape.
A line built from many short links that never stretch falls from where it is pinned, swings loosely under gravity and drapes itself over anything it hits.
Space
Several masses all tug on one another at once, so they loop around each other, whip past on near misses and drag smaller particles into swirling orbits.
Thousands of tiny star dots trace curved arms out from a glowing centre, and the whole disk slowly turns, its inner stars circling faster than the outer ones.
Stars spread through depth rush out from a central point toward the edges of the frame, growing brighter as they near and stretching into streaks as the speed rises.
A small body loops round a heavier one on an oval path, drifting slowly at the far end and sweeping fast past the heavy body at the near end.
Strange attractors
A single point is bounced over and over through a small sine-and-cosine formula, and the places it lands build up into a glowing, swirling ribbon of density.
A single point hops endlessly under a simple trig formula, and the places it lands, piled up as glowing density, build a delicate tangle of curling ribbons.
A single point jumps again and again by a simple square-root rule, and the dots it leaves behind pile up into nested, mirrored loops like a lace doily.
A single glowing line traces a never-repeating path that loops around one wing and then the other, gradually drawing a butterfly-shaped figure eight in 3D.
A glowing point spirals outward on a flat disc, gets thrown up into a looping fold and drops back to the middle, its trail weaving a twisted band that never exactly repeats.
A single glowing point traces a never-repeating path through a three-fold symmetric flow, its trail building into a tangled three-lobed knot that swirls through the centre.
Swarms & agents
Many tiny wandering agents leave a fading scent wherever they carry food home, and the rest follow the strongest scent, so bright paths emerge between a nest and its food.
A crowd of small pointed agents, each reacting only to the ones nearest it, sorts itself from a jumble into a single flock that turns and travels as one.
A crowd of blinking dots, each on its own slightly different rhythm, gradually nudges itself into time until they all pulse together.
Two crowds of drifting particles, prey and predators, that swell and thin out in repeating waves, the predators always peaking just after the prey they feed on.
Dots of a few colours each follow a simple table saying which colours they move toward and which they back away from, and an even scatter organises itself into clumps, chases and rings.
A cloud of tiny agents that follow and reinforce each other's trails, so a speckled haze draws itself into a glowing web of veins whose busy paths thicken and quiet ones fade.
A swarm of small moving agents parts and races away from a hunter passing through it, then drifts back together once the hunter has gone.
Moving agents curve round to head for a target at full speed, then brake gently once they get close so each one glides to a stop right on it.
Many little walkers each head for their own goal while shoving off one another and the walls, so streams sort into lanes and pile up at narrow gaps.
Little agents roam the frame on their own, each steering towards a point that drifts randomly on a circle just ahead of it, so they swerve in smooth, lifelike curves.
Terrain
A camera glides low over a mesh of hills shaped by smooth random noise, the ridges emerging from the horizon haze and rolling toward and beneath the viewer.
A mesh of grid lines laid over rolling hills in perspective, the landscape streaming steadily toward the camera as if flying low over it.
Tiling & patterns
Small dots scattered over an area swell to different sizes, nudging one another aside, until the whole area is filled with snugly touching circles.
A cursor wanders through a grid of boxed-in squares, breaking down the wall in front of it and backing up at dead ends, until every square is linked into one finished maze.
Two kinds of rhombus, one wide and one slim, lock together into a star-shaped, five-fold pattern that spreads across the frame without ever repeating.
One rectangle is cut in two at an off-centre point, and its pieces keep being cut the same way, until it has become a grid of blocks of every size.
A grid of square tiles, each carrying the same pair of corner arcs turned one of two ways, whose arcs link up into flowing maze-like lines that re-route as tiles rotate.
Scattered points each claim the patch of space closer to them than to any other point, tiling the frame with polygons whose borders shift as the points wander.
Bunched-up points each claim the area closest to them, then keep sliding to the centre of their own patch until the cells even out into a calm, cell-like tiling.
A grid of undecided cells settles one cell at a time, each pick narrowing what its neighbours may become, until a seamless tiled pattern covers the whole grid.
Water & light
A tall block of water held at one end of a tank is released and slumps into a fast surge that runs along the floor, crashes up the far wall and sloshes back.
A surface made of a grid of heights is simulated as water, so each drop dents it into rings that spread, bounce back off the edges and cross one another before settling.
A water surface swells and rolls as several waves cross it at once, their crests pinched to sharp ridges between wide, smooth troughs.
A shifting net of bright, wavy light lines plays across a surface, like sunlight bent through moving water onto the bottom of a pool.
Camera moves
3D motion
A flat plane in 3D is wrapped onto an arc about an axis across it, curving smoothly from flat into a curl or tube while keeping its length.
Lettering built as a thick solid with softly rounded front edges, lit so the bevels facing the light gleam and the rest fall into shade as the word turns.
A tidy pile of cards opens into an arc, every card tilting about a common point below so they splay out like a hand of playing cards.
A single 3D block is repeated into a grid of rows and columns on a floor, and a moving wave or field lifts and recolours the copies while the camera circles the whole array.
A greyscale image raises a flat surface point by point, light areas pushing up and dark ones staying low, so the flat picture grows into a 3D relief.
A field of identical 3D copies where a moving zone of influence lifts, swells, turns and recolours each copy by how near it is, leaving a travelling bump in the set.
A built-up 3D object pulls apart along one axis, its layers spreading out with gaps between them so each part and where it fits can be seen.
A flat outline is pushed back into space so solid side walls sweep out behind it, and the thickness keeps growing until the shape reads as a solid slab.
An object rendered in a single glowing colour, partly see-through and striped with fine scanlines, that flickers like light beamed into the air.
A floor of grid lines runs out to a far horizon and keeps sliding toward the camera, so it feels like gliding forward over it forever.
The scene is seen without perspective from a corner angle where all three axes look equally shortened and 120 degrees apart, so parallel edges stay parallel.
A 3D shape is made of a few large triangles, each painted one solid shade by how it faces the light, so it turns like a cut gem with crisp facets instead of smooth shading.
A 3D shape keeps bulging and sinking all over as its surface points are nudged in and out by smoothly changing noise, so it looks soft and alive.
A 3D object first appears only as a lattice of dots on its surface, then a sweep fills those dots in until it stands as a solid, shaded form.
Many small tiles sitting on the surface of a turning ball fly through depth and settle into a flat, evenly spaced grid that faces the viewer.
An object is scaled more and more along one axis, so one end keeps its size while the other squeezes in towards a point or flares out wider.
A wireframe four-dimensional cube turns through its extra axis, so the small inner cube swells outward and the big outer cube folds inward until they trade places.
A solid object turns round its upright axis at an even pace, as if on a record player, showing its front, sides and back in turn.
A solid block winds round its own upright axis, each level turned a little more than the one below, so it spirals up like a wrung-out cloth and then unwinds.
A 3D model made of little cubes puts itself together one cube at a time, each dropping into its slot from the ground up, while the camera slowly circles it.
A flat 3D sheet is pushed up and down by a regular sine wave whose crests keep rolling across it, so the surface undulates in place like cloth or water.
A 3D object shows up first as a see-through skeleton of lines, then solid shaded surfaces fill in over that skeleton until the object looks finished.
An object's solid outside fades to a glassy ghost of itself, letting the parts built inside it show through.
Camera moves
The camera lifts up through the air in a smooth curve while angling down, so the subject stays centred but is seen from ever higher above.
The camera travels forward toward the subject and then back again, so close objects grow and drift apart faster than distant ones as the depth of the scene opens up.
The camera cruises forward high above the ground, angled down, so a wide landscape pours in from the horizon and slides away underneath it.
The camera tips sideways about its lens, so the horizon and the upright lines in the shot sit on a slant and the picture feels off balance.
The camera glides forward along a route through a 3D space, slipping between and under the objects around it as they rush past the edges of the frame.
The view chases a moving subject a beat behind it, so the subject stays roughly centred while the scenery slides past around it.
The whole picture drifts, bobs and tilts by a few pixels in a restless, uneven way, so the shot feels filmed by someone holding the camera rather than from a fixed mount.
The camera glides smoothly through a place while time races by around it, so hours of light, weather, crowds and traffic pass in the few seconds the move takes.
A still picture fills the screen while the view creeps across it and gently pushes in, so a photo moves like footage.
The camera stays in one spot and swivels to look in every direction, so a scene that surrounds it on all sides slides past and comes back round to where it started.
The camera carries the viewer from one subject to the next in a single unbroken move, so the whole sequence plays without a single cut.
The camera holds its spot while its lens tightens or widens, so the whole picture grows or shrinks evenly toward its centre without the depth in it shifting at all.
The camera swings round a subject on a curved path while staying pointed at it, so the subject holds the centre as its other sides turn into view and the surroundings sweep past.
The camera stays put but swings to one side, so the whole scene glides sideways across the frame and new parts of it come into view.
The camera rises or sinks straight up and down while still looking level, so the scene slides down or up past a fixed horizon, nearby things fastest.
The camera sits where a character's eyes are and moves as their head does, so the audience sees the scene exactly as that character does.
The camera glides steadily forward toward the subject, which grows to fill more of the frame while the things around it, further back, swell less and slide outward.
The camera keeps its place but pivots to look higher or lower, so the still scene glides down or up through the frame.
The camera travels alongside a moving subject at its pace, keeping it fixed in frame while the scenery slides by behind it.
The camera glides sideways past the scene without turning, so close things sweep across the frame quickly while the background barely drifts.
Depth
A single still photo is cut into depth slices from a depth map, and as the camera drifts the near slices slide further than the far ones, so the flat picture seems to have depth.
Things farther from the camera are washed toward a single haze colour, so the distance goes pale and flat while the foreground keeps its contrast.
Tiny points of light melt out of focus into soft, see-through discs in the shape of the lens opening, the farther from focus the bigger and fainter each one grows.
Only things at one chosen distance from the camera stay crisp, while everything nearer or farther goes softer the further it is from that distance.
An object is shown as a stack of flat cross-sections that switch on one at a time at increasing depth while the camera glides forward into them, exposing what is inside.
Soft horizontal strips of mist sit between the near and far layers of a scene, each sliding sideways at its own speed, so the picture gains a sense of deep, hazy air.
Flat layers of artwork are stacked at different distances from the lens, so when the camera moves past or into them the near layers shift and grow more than the far ones.
A scene built from flat cut-out layers pans sideways, the distant layers creeping slowly and the close ones sweeping past quickly, so a flat picture feels deep.
With the frame held still, the sharp zone glides from one subject to another at a different distance, blurring the first as the second comes clear.
Only a thin level strip of the picture is in focus and everything above and below it melts into blur, so a real wide view looks like a tiny model town.
Lens
A picture squashed narrow, so round lights look like tall ovals, stretches out sideways into a wide letterboxed frame, often with long thin blue flares through the bright spots.
When the focus shifts between near and far subjects, the framing quietly swells or shrinks along with it, as if the lens nudged its zoom.
The whole picture bulges out from its centre or pinches in toward it, so straight lines curve more and more the nearer they sit to the edge of the frame.
The corners and edges of the frame fade softly into shadow while the centre stays bright, drawing the eye inward.
Lighting & surface
The brightest shapes in the frame spill a soft haze of their own colour into the dark around them, as though too much light reached the lens.
Light bent by a moving, uneven surface such as water gathers into a net of bright, wavering lines that crawl across whatever lies underneath.
The image breaks into rainbow fringes that are barely there at the centre and grow wider towards the edges of the frame, like light bent through a prism or a soft lens.
A mirror-polished object shows the scene around it painted onto its surface, bent by its shape, so things around it curve and squeeze toward its edges as they move.
A scene stays put while its sky, light colour and brightness slide from bright daylight through a warm sunset into a dark, starry night.
A clear glass shape passes over the picture and everything behind it looks bent, magnified and flipped through the glass, as if seen through a real lens.
A bright light hidden behind a solid shape throws visible beams out through every gap around it, like sunlight cutting through dusty air.
A bright light in the shot glows with a soft halo and a thin sideways streak, while a row of faint coloured circles mirrors it across the middle of the frame.
A glowing point of light sweeps across a dark frame and leaves an unbroken bright line everywhere it has been, the way a slow shutter records a moving torch.
A forked bolt cracks across a dark scene while the whole picture blinks bright white, flickers, and then sinks back into darkness with the bolt glowing a moment longer.
A dark subject is outlined by a thin bright edge on the side facing a light placed behind it, which lifts its shape clear of the background.
Shapes held between a lamp and a wall throw dark silhouettes onto it, and as they move, turn or near the light their shadows swell, slide and soften.
The scene is kept dark except for a soft circle of light that chases a moving subject, trailing slightly behind it and revealing whatever it sweeps across.
A light behind a semi-transparent object shines through its thinnest edge, which glows warmly and fades softly inward, as if the material held the light inside it.
A surface is washed with rainbow bands, like a soap bubble or a slick of oil, and the colours slide and swap as the viewing angle or the film beneath them shifts.
Shader looks
A form is shaded only with crossing sets of fine ink lines, sparse where light falls and packed into a dense, thick mesh in the shadows, like a pen or engraving drawing.
A frame shows a shrunken copy of itself set inside it, which holds a smaller copy again, and the view keeps pushing into that tunnel of pictures without end.
A round object stays dark where it faces you and lights up towards its outline, glowing brightest right at the edge as if light were grazing off its curved sides.
A 3D object is shaded by colour temperature rather than brightness, going warm yellow where it faces the light and cool blue where it turns away, with a dark outline round it.
A 3D object is drawn with a bold dark line tracing its outer edge and thinner lines along its sharp folds, so it reads like an inked cartoon as it turns.
A 3D form takes all its colour and shine from one painted image of a lit ball, picked by which way each bit of surface faces, so the highlights stay fixed to the camera as the form turns.
A flat textured surface looks deeply carved because each pixel traces the view ray down into a height map, so raised bits shift and hide what lies behind them as the camera moves.
Glossy 3D solids are drawn from distance formulas, pixel by pixel, so they can glide into each other and fuse like soft wax before pulling apart again.
Visual effects
Blend & composite
A layer is laid over another so that each pixel shows how far apart the two are, turning matching areas black and making only the mismatches shine.
The image becomes a flat grey surface where every outline is raised, lit bright on one side and shaded on the other, like a stamped metal plate.
A layer is laid over the picture so that its colours tint and deepen whatever sits underneath, with its white parts vanishing and overlaps getting darker.
A layer is combined with the picture beneath so that its black vanishes and its bright parts lighten what shows through, as if two projectors shone on the same wall.
A soft image is crisped up by taking away a blurred copy of itself, which brightens the light side of every edge and darkens the dark side, leaving glowing halos when pushed too far.
Blur & focus
Everything in the picture is softened evenly, each point smeared into a smooth haze around it, so detail and edges melt away as the blur radius grows.
Anything moving is smeared along its own path in proportion to its speed, so fast parts streak while slow or still parts stay crisp.
The picture is smeared along circles around a centre point, so it looks like it is whirling too fast to see, with crisp detail at the hub and streaky rings toward the edge.
Color & grading
The picture is graded so its colours go muted and steely while the contrast is pushed hard, with deep blacks and bright, harsh highlights.
A grade that makes a shot look like film run through the wrong developer: contrast cranked up, bright areas gone yellow-green, shadows tinted blue and colours oversaturated.
The colour slowly bleeds out of the picture while its shapes and shading stay put, until only greys (or a faint trace of colour) remain.
The image is reduced to its light and dark values and repainted in just two colours, one for the shadows and one for the highlights.
Footage is graded to resemble a weathered photo print, with muted colour, milky lifted shadows, creamy highlights, a warm yellow cast and a little grain.
Each colour in the shot is swapped for its entry in one fixed table, giving the whole picture a consistent styled look such as cool shadows and warm highlights.
Every tone in the picture is flipped to its opposite, so bright areas go dark, dark areas go bright and each colour turns into its complement.
A picture loses its colour and is redrawn in warm browns, dark umber in the shadows and pale cream in the highlights, so it looks like an aged photograph.
The brightest parts of the picture flip to their photographic negative while the darker parts stay as they are, giving a strange half-positive, half-negative image.
CRT & display
The picture bows outward like the rounded glass of an old television tube, its corners pulled in and rounded off and falling darker than the centre.
The image flattens into a thin glowing line across the middle of the screen, the line shrinks to a single bright point, and the point winks out.
Fine dark stripes sit across the whole picture at an even spacing, so it looks like it is being shown on an old tube television.
A bright moving spot leaves a soft glowing streak behind it that fades out within moments, like an old screen still glowing where the beam just passed.
A broad, blurry stripe of brighter or dimmer light drifts slowly down the image and loops back to the top, like a TV screen filmed out of sync.
A shadowy band with a bright lower edge keeps sliding down the picture while its brightness wobbles, like an old monitor caught on camera out of sync.
Dissolves
Two pictures are printed on top of each other, each partly see-through, so you read both at once as one layered image.
Distortion & displacement
The scene behind hot air wobbles in thin wavy bands that keep drifting upward, as if seen through the rising heat over a sunbaked road.
A round brush drags through the image and carries the pixels beneath it along its path, smudging shapes like a finger through wet paint.
A ring of waves spreads out from one point over a still picture, bending everything under it as if seen through rippling glass, and the picture lies flat again once it has passed.
Dithering & quantization
A picture is reduced to just two colours by scattering black and white dots whose density follows its tones, with bright areas washing out clean and dark ones going solid.
The image is redrawn in just two colours, its shades of grey turned into a regular grid of dots and crosshatch checks that get denser where the picture is brighter.
An image is reduced to a few flat colours, and the tones it loses come back as a fine scatter of pixels, each pixel passing its colour error on to its neighbours.
The image turns into a grid of ink dots that swell in the dark areas and shrink to specks in the light ones, like a photo printed in a newspaper.
The picture is limited to a handful of tones per colour, so smooth shading turns into flat bands of colour with hard steps between them.
Editing & frame
Black bands slide in over the top and bottom of the shot so the picture that remains looks like a wide cinema frame.
A second, smaller video sits in its own framed, shadowed box in a corner while the main shot keeps playing behind it.
Film & analog
Flecks of dirt, stray hairs and thin vertical lines flicker over the picture from frame to frame, as if it were projected from a worn, much-handled film reel.
The shot is framed by a band of dark film stock, punched with rounded sprocket holes and printed with tiny frame numbers, so it looks like one cell of a strip of 35mm film.
A fine speckle that shimmers over the whole picture and changes every frame, showing most in the mid-tones, so clean digital images look shot on film.
The whole picture never quite sits still, drifting a little sideways and nudging up and down every frame as if run off an old film projector.
Glitch
The red, green and blue parts of a picture swap places with one another, so familiar colours flip into strange false-colour versions of the same image.
The picture looks like a damaged file read back anyway: stretches of it slide sideways with their colours swapped, and rows repeat or turn into flat bars of colour.
Bright stretches of an image are reordered by brightness along each row or column, melting the picture into straight, smeared streaks while its darker shapes hold.
Each thin row of the picture keeps twitching a little to the left or right on its own, so straight upright edges turn ragged and wavy like a shaky old video signal.
A hard horizontal seam slices the picture so the part below it lags a moment behind the part above, and anything moving sideways is broken into offset halves along the line.
Thin horizontal streaks of the picture flick to solid white or black for a frame or two, like a worn tape skipping a few lines, and then the image is whole again.
The frame fills with flickering grey speckles that change every frame, like an old television picking up no signal.
Glow & light
Bright lights and white shapes pick up a soft red-orange glow that bleeds past their edges into the dark around them, like highlights on real film stock.
Keying & mattes
Everything in a shot that matches one solid backdrop colour is cut away, leaving the subject free to be placed on top of a different background.
Every part of a layer lighter (or darker) than a chosen brightness turns see-through, so the layer underneath shows through only those tones.
Lens effects
A bright point of light shoots thin straight rays out from its centre at even angles, turning it into a sharp star shape that grows and shrinks with its brightness.
Specks and smudges stuck to the camera lens stay hidden until a bright light comes near, then glow up as soft blurry patches that fade again as the light moves away.
Motion & shutter
Each frame blends many renders of the scene taken a sliver of time apart, so moving things smear into soft trails along the exact path they travelled.
Painterly & sketch
The picture is turned into a stark black-and-paper print whose shapes look gouged out by hand, with rough carved strokes standing in for the in-between tones.
A picture is redrawn as soft, flat dabs of colour with sharp borders between them, as though painted with a thick brush, and the dabs grow larger as the effect strengthens.
A picture is turned into a grey pencil drawing on paper, its shadows built from fine hatched strokes and its edges traced in soft lines.
Crisp areas of colour turn wet and run into each other, their borders softening into ragged, blotchy fringes with darker pigment gathering where they meet.
Particle & weather overlays
A strip of licking flames burns along one edge of the shot, layered on top of the picture, with their flickering orange light washing over everything nearby.
A translucent layer of soft, wispy smoke slides across the whole picture, thickening and thinning so the shot behind it is half hidden and half seen.
Pixel & mosaic
An image is rebuilt from rows of typed characters, with heavy symbols standing in for its bright areas and light dots or blanks for its dark ones.
A picture is rebuilt out of small, slightly uneven square tiles, each a single colour taken from the patch beneath it, set in dark grout like stone or glass.
A tiny image is blown up large by copying each of its pixels into a solid square, so it stays sharp and blocky instead of going soft.
The frame is chopped into big square tiles and each tile shows just the average colour underneath it, so the picture turns into a coarse, blocky version of itself.
Recursion & feedback
Fainter copies of the picture from a few frames back are stacked under the live one, so a moving subject drags a fading replay of its recent path.
The picture holds a smaller, slightly rotated copy of itself, again and again, so the frame spirals into an endless tunnel where every moving thing leaves a delayed, colour-shifting trail.
Retro digital
Shiny horizontal stripes, each shaded like a lit tube, stretch across the whole screen and swing up and down on rippling sine paths, crossing over and under one another.
Vertical streams of green computer characters slide down a dark screen at different speeds, each led by a glowing white glyph and trailing a tail that dims to nothing.
A huge yellow-to-pink sun half sunk behind the horizon, its lower part cut into horizontal bars that thicken and slide downward, glowing over a neon 80s sky.
Type and shapes become glossy, cool-blue liquid metal, with a pale sky and a dark rippling horizon reflected in the face, a lit bevel, a dark extruded edge and winking star sparkles.
Rotoscope & outline
Moving pictures are flattened into a few solid colour areas with a dark hand-traced line around each one, so real footage looks like it was drawn over frame by frame.
Symmetry & geometry
The picture contains a smaller framed copy of itself, which contains another, and the camera pushes in without end as each inner copy swells to fill the screen.
A single small design is copied over and over in a grid, each copy shifted, flipped or turned, until the frame is covered by one continuous repeating pattern.
A wide flat picture curls round until its two ends join, becoming a round disc with its bottom edge pinched into the middle and its top edge spread round the outside.
Thermal & sensor
The picture becomes a security camera recording: choppy grey footage with grain, a bulging wide lens and dark corners, stamped with a camera name and a running clock.
A colour remap that imitates infrared film, turning leaves and grass red or magenta while blue sky and water sink to near black.
A dark picture is brightened into speckled, glowing green monochrome and shown inside a round eyepiece that fades to black at its rim.
Each part of the picture is recoloured by how bright it is, from black and violet in the dark areas through red and orange to yellow-white in the brightest, like a heat camera.
The image turns into a dark-blue radiograph where the surroundings go black, flesh fades to a dim glow and the bones or dense parts inside shine pale white.
Time displacement
The motion keeps catching on single frames for uneven little beats and then skipping ahead, as if the playback were lagging.
A steady move hitches along in a repeating long-short rhythm because some of its frames are shown twice to fit a different frame rate.
When the camera jerks sideways, upright shapes lean and wiggle like jelly, because the top of the picture is caught a split second before the bottom.
VHS & tape
Pale, slightly shifted duplicates of the picture trail just beside every edge, like a weak TV signal bouncing off something before it reaches the set.
A home video camera's display sits over the shot: a blinking red REC light, a battery icon, a date and time stamp and a tape counter ticking off frames in chunky white digits.
The colours of a shot slide and smudge sideways beyond the shapes they belong to, while the outlines and light-and-dark detail stay sharp, like an old videotape.
Alternate horizontal lines of the frame lag a split second behind the others, so the edges of anything moving fast break into thin jagged teeth like the tines of a comb.
The picture sways left and right in a slow wave that rolls down the screen, bending straight upright edges into soft curves like an old tape playing unevenly.
A wide strip of white static with frayed edges creeps up the picture, tearing the image inside it sideways like an old videotape that has slipped out of alignment.
Water & atmosphere
Branching white ice fronds spread inward from the borders of the picture over a misty haze, gradually veiling the scene behind them.
The scene is seen through a misted window dotted with water drops, each a tiny lens holding a sharp upside-down view, while heavy drops run down, gulp smaller ones and leave clear streaks.
Broadcast graphics
Annotation
A curved arrow draws itself across the frame toward one detail, its pointed head snapping on at the end of the stroke to show exactly where to look.
A caption appears beside the picture and a thin line then draws out from it to one exact spot, ending in a small dot that marks what the caption names.
A thin measuring line with arrowheads and end ticks stretches along one side of an object, and the size it measures pops up in a gap at its middle.
The rest of the picture goes soft and a little darker while one chosen area stays sharp, pulling the eye onto it.
A loose, slightly lopsided loop is sketched around a word or object in one quick pen stroke, its end running past where it began.
Small round badges numbered in order pop onto chosen points of a picture one at a time, each throbbing with a soft ring so the viewer knows where to look next.
The whole frame darkens except for one area, which stays bright as if a spotlight were on it, pulling attention there.
A pen line is drawn across a word or number from one end to the other, crossing it out to show it no longer stands.
A wavy, brush-like line with thin pointed ends sweeps in under a word from left to right, as if someone underlined it by hand.
A round lens slides across a picture and, inside its rim, shows the area under it enlarged so small detail becomes readable.
Bumpers & idents
A glowing beam of light glides across a dark screen, and the logo is lit up and left behind wherever the beam has already passed.
A logo appears as a single thin line tracing round its outlines, and once every shape has closed the mark fills in solid.
A small, faint channel logo stays parked in one corner over the footage, briefly brightening and swelling on a cue before settling back.
A quick, punchy burst of motion such as a whip of colour bars and a white flash that slams a logo into place and leaves it holding on screen.
A single solid shape keeps changing into one form after another, pausing briefly on each, until it settles as the brand mark and the name appears beside it.
Charts
An area chart builds from left to right, its line and the shading beneath it appearing together behind a moving vertical edge.
A chart's value axis glides to a new range, its gridlines and labels sliding into place while the bars or lines already drawn shrink or stretch to stay true to it.
Horizontal bars for several items grow with their changing values over time and slide past one another, so the chart stays sorted with the biggest always on top.
The bars of a chart shoot up from a common baseline to their values, each starting a beat after the one to its left.
A box-and-whisker chart assembles on screen: each median line appears, the box opens out to the quartiles, and the whiskers stretch to the extremes before outliers pop in.
A slim bar grows across stepped shaded bands toward its value, while a vertical tick shows the goal it is measured against.
A stock-style price chart fills in left to right, each candle growing its body from open to close and then stretching its thin wick out to the high and low.
Each mark of a chart reshapes in place into the matching mark of a different chart type, so bars bend into pie slices while the data stays traceable.
Coloured arcs sweep on around a ring, then curved bands grow through the middle linking pairs of arcs, each band as thick as the amount flowing between them.
A network of dots and connecting lines starts bunched up and tangled, then drifts apart and untangles as the dots push each other away and the lines tug linked dots together, easing to rest in a tidy layout.
A funnel chart builds band by band from the top, each band narrower than the one above, with its count inside and the percentage lost since the previous step beside it.
A project schedule draws itself one row at a time, each task bar stretching sideways across a time scale from the day it begins to the day it ends.
A pointer swings round a marked dial to land on a value, carrying a little past it before it settles back.
The squares of a data grid start out blank grey and one after another warm into the colour their number calls for, so the pattern spreads across the matrix in a wave.
Dots pour onto a chart and are tallied into a honeycomb of hexagon cells that glow hotter the more dots fall into them, until the dense areas stand out.
A data line sweeps across a chart from left to right, plotting each value in turn so the trend unfolds as you watch.
Several upright value axes stand side by side and each data record strokes on as a line zig-zagging across them, one record after another.
Each quantity is shown as a row of identical small icons, one per unit, that drop in one after another while a number beside the row ticks up with them.
A pie or donut chart that fills in with a single clockwise sweep from the top, revealing each slice in turn as the edge passes over it.
A circle split into equal slices that each swell outward from the middle by a different amount, so the size of every slice shows how big its number is.
A shaded polygon swells out from the middle of a web of spokes until each corner stops at its score on its own axis, sketching a profile of several measures at once.
A chart of distribution curves stacked in rows, each peak overlapping the row above, that swell up from flat lines one row after another so the reveal rolls down the stack.
A chart whose curved bands stream from one column of categories into the next, each band as thick as the amount it carries, so you see where everything ends up.
On an empty pair of axes, the dots of a scatter plot pop into view one after another until the full cloud of data is showing.
Bubbles on a scatter chart drift to new spots and grow or shrink as the years tick by, each leaving a fading tail of the path it took.
In a chart with several lines, the other lines drain to a faint grey so that one chosen line is left standing out in bold colour.
Items listed down two facing columns, one per point in time, are joined by straight lines that draw across one by one, so each rise or drop shows as a slope.
A grid of matching little charts, one per category and all on the same scale, fills in panel by panel, each chart building its data as its panel lands.
Horizontal bars grow as their numbers climb, and the chart keeps itself ranked by sliding any bar that overtakes another up past it into its new place.
A small line chart with no axes traces itself from left to right next to a key figure, showing at a glance which way the number has been heading.
A chart column builds up from its baseline in coloured pieces, each new piece rising on top of the last until the bar reaches its full total.
Several data series stacked as smooth coloured ribbons around a wavy centre line, swelling and thinning over time so the whole chart looks like a flowing river.
A layered ring chart grows outward from its centre, each ring of arc segments sweeping round in turn so the sub-categories fan out beneath the category that holds them.
A dated line slides sideways beneath a fixed marker, pausing on each milestone so its date and label light up before the line travels on to the next one.
A treemap takes on new numbers and every tile resizes and slides at the same time, so the panel repacks into the new proportions without ever breaking apart.
A ten-by-ten grid of small squares colours in one square at a time, each worth an equal slice, until the lit squares add up to the figure being shown.
A chart whose bars appear one after another, each gain or loss hanging off the level the previous bar left, so a starting figure visibly steps up and down to a final total.
Comparisons
A single bar shared by two colours, one per side, whose dividing line gets yanked back and forth and settles as the balance between the two sides shifts.
Two versions of a picture sit together and each spot that changed between them gets a tinted box, one after another, on both versions at once.
Two halves of the picture slide in from either side and meet in the middle, putting two things next to each other so they can be compared.
Two rivals slide in on panels facing each other across a VS badge, then matching stat bars and numbers fill in on both sides for a side-by-side comparison.
End cards
The last screen of a video settles into a tidy grid of panels, one for the next video to watch, one with a subscribe button and one for a link, each fading in after the last.
A tall list of roles and names glides steadily up the screen from bottom to top, the way the closing credits of a film run.
Explainers
The pieces of an object drawn at a flat isometric angle drift in from around it, one after another, and snap together until the whole thing stands complete.
A hand holding a marker draws a diagram on a white board line by line, the ink appearing right behind the pen tip.
Lower thirds
A name caption near the bottom of the frame made of bars with slanted ends, which sweep open one after another, hold for a read, then sweep away.
A solid strip with a name and a short title on it glides in from the left near the bottom of the picture, stays a moment, then glides back off.
A short line of small capitals shows up first as a label, and a much larger title then rises into place directly underneath it.
Maps
Blank regions on a map fill in one after another, each taking a shade from a colour scale that stands for its number, until the whole map reads as data.
A map where each small dot stands for a fixed number of things and is dropped at random inside its region, so crowded areas fill up thickly while empty ones stay sparse.
A bowed line climbs out of one point on a map and draws itself over to another, tracing a flight path or long-distance link between the two places.
Curved lines grow across a map from a starting place to several others, each one drawn thicker or thinner according to how much travels along it.
A shaded ball printed with a world map turns at a steady pace about its north-south axis, so continents keep rolling into view on one side and away on the other.
A lopsided outline swells across a map from a starting pin as a minutes counter rises, swallowing nearby places and leaving shaded bands behind at each round travel time.
A dot marking a place on a map beats in a steady rhythm, sending out a ring with each beat that spreads across the map and fades away.
A globe flattens out into a rectangular world map, its continents and grid lines gliding continuously from their places on the sphere to their places on the flat projection.
A map seen from far away glides and magnifies in one smooth move until a single place fills the frame, where a marker then lands on it.
Process diagrams
Labelled steps appear one after another around a ring, joined by curved arrows that draw themselves, then a marker circles the finished loop and lights each step it reaches.
A flowchart-style tree builds downward from its top question, each connecting line drawing out to the next level and the answer box popping in where it ends.
A process diagram assembles step by step, each box popping in and an arrow then drawing from it to the next, with decisions splitting into branches.
A central circle appears and a ring of smaller circles shoots out of it in turn, each trailing a line back to the middle, until they sit evenly around it.
Dots spring up one at a time along a timeline axis, each lifting a little stem that shows a date and a short name for that step.
A chart of labelled boxes builds from the top down, connector lines branching out from each level before the boxes of the next level appear beneath them.
A triangle split into labelled horizontal layers assembles from the wide base upward, each layer dropping onto the one below until the point on top completes it.
Two labelled axes draw on and split the frame into four quadrants, then labelled cards drop into the quadrants one at a time.
Numbered stages of a process appear one after another down the screen, each with a heading and a short note, and the newest stage is highlighted while earlier ones quieten.
Social media
A back-and-forth conversation builds up line by line, each message bubble springing into view from its speaker's side of the screen a beat after the previous one.
Viewer comments, each a little card with an avatar, a name and a line of text, fade and float up into place one below another until they fill a column.
A steady stream of small faces and hearts pops out of one spot, weaves upward along loose wandering paths and fades away as it climbs.
Each answer in a poll gets a bar that fills to its share of the votes while its percentage counts up, and the most popular answer is highlighted when they settle.
A card eases in, a large opening quote mark draws itself on, then the quoted words rise into place and the speaker's name follows underneath.
A pointer clicks a bright red subscribe button, which squashes and springs back as a dark subscribed button with a small bell that pops in and rings.
Sports graphics
A scoreboard clock ticks a period down to zero, flags the end of the period, then resets to full time as the period badge steps to the next one.
When a score changes in a ranked table, the affected rows glide up or down past each other into their new order while the place numbers stay fixed.
A tracked player is followed by a line marking only their last moments of movement, bright at their position and thinning away to nothing behind them.
A card with a player's name and shirt number builds on screen, then their key numbers drop in underneath one row at a time, each figure ticking up as it arrives.
A small scoreboard tucked into a corner of the picture keeps the teams, score, period and clock on screen, sliding in at the start and flashing when a score changes.
A wide slanted band in a team's colours, edged with a contrasting stripe, races across the screen and leaves that team's player or line-up card behind it.
A bright line drawn across a sports field in true perspective that holds its yard line as the camera moves, with players standing in front of it as if it were painted on the grass.
Stats
A little coloured tag with an up or down arrow and the signed difference pops in next to a number, showing at once how far it rose or fell since last time.
A flat bar grows from the left across its track to a set share, with the percentage figure travelling at the tip and counting up as it fills.
Ranked blocks grow up from a shared floor one after another, starting with the lowest place, so the tallest first-place block lands last.
Tickers & banners
A bold red-and-white news bar shoots in from the side, overshoots, snaps back into place with a jolt, and then sits fixed across the lower part of the picture.
A banner keeps one headline slot and swaps its text in turn, each headline sliding out of the slot while the next slides in behind it.
A strip across the foot of the frame carries a line of headlines that slides steadily from right to left past a fixed tag, story after story with bullets between.
Timers & indicators
A little red dot next to a LIVE tag beats on and off at an even tempo, a faint ring rippling out from it, to signal that the broadcast is happening now.
A time readout starts at zero and climbs steadily in minutes, seconds and hundredths, showing how long has passed since the clock was started.
An hours, minutes, seconds and frames readout in fixed-width digits that steps forward one frame at a time, the frame digits racing and rolling over into the seconds.
Title sequences
A bold panel sweeps across the whole screen to present the show title, then shrinks with it into a small tag that stays in the corner.
A title card arrives piece by piece as a grid of tiles, each flipping, growing or fading into place at its own moment until the whole card is assembled.
UI walkthroughs
Each time the pointer clicks in a screen recording, a ring bursts out from the click point and fades, marking where the input landed.
A mouse pointer sweeps along smooth curves from one on-screen control to the next, stopping on each to click before moving on.
A screen capture pushes in close around the mouse pointer as it clicks, drifts along after it while it moves, then eases back out to show the whole screen.
A drawn laptop or phone with the product on its screen glides in from off frame, straightening from a slight tilt as it settles into place.
Keyboard shortcuts pressed during a screen recording appear as little keycaps on a dark pill near the bottom of the frame, each one tapping down before the combo fades away.
Starting on a whole app screen, the camera glides in and across until one part of the interface fills the frame.
Sound
Mixing & editing
A soft, steady layer of the sound a location would have, like wind, traffic or a murmuring room, running underneath a scene so it feels like a real place.
The background music drops to a lower level whenever a voice or other foreground sound plays, then swells back up as soon as it stops.
The same sound or phrase of music keeps playing straight through a cut, so the picture changes while the audio carries the viewer smoothly into the next shot.
A sound drifts from one speaker to the other in step with the thing on screen making it, so you hear it travel left or right as you watch it go.
A speaker who is never seen talks over the footage, telling the story while the picture plays and the music sinks underneath the words.
Music
The music finishes on one short, punchy final hit exactly on a beat and then cuts to silence instead of fading away.
Each change of shot, and each big move, is placed on a beat of the music so the edit pulses in time with the track.
A soft, continuous piece of music plays beneath the entire film, setting its mood while the effects and any voice stay clearly louder on top.
A tiny burst of music, often a couple of quick notes landing on one chord, timed to hit exactly as something is revealed or a joke lands.
The soundtrack cuts out completely for a brief moment so that the sound which follows, often a hit on a reveal, lands with extra force.
A brand mark is paired with a short, recognisable run of notes that plays as the logo appears, each note landing as part of the mark falls into place.
The music climbs from soft and sparse to loud and full, more notes stacking up as it rises into a single peak.
Sound effects
Everyday sounds of the action on screen, such as footsteps or a cup touching a table, are added afterwards and lined up with the exact frames where things make contact.
A quick burst of crackling, stuttering digital noise that plays while the picture tears and jitters, then cuts out the moment the image snaps back.
A short, heavy thump of sound lands on the exact frame something strikes or slams down, giving the moment of contact physical weight.
Music that mimics the motion on screen, landing a note on every step, hop or tumble so each movement has its own musical beat.
A cymbal crash run backwards, so a bright hiss grows out of silence and cuts off abruptly right on the beat, cut or hit it is leading into.
A sound that keeps getting higher and louder for a couple of seconds and cuts off at its top on the exact frame something big appears.
A deep bass boom that slides down in pitch and dies away under a big moment, giving it a weight you feel in your chest.
A quick, bright pair of rising tones that plays on the moment an action completes, telling the viewer it worked.
Text typing itself on screen with a keyboard click landing on each letter as it appears, so the words sound typed as well as look it.
Small, quiet sounds placed on interface actions, such as a tick on hover, a click on a press, a snap on a toggle and a ding on a notification, each landing on the frame of its action.
A short rush of air on the soundtrack, loudest at the instant something on screen moves fastest, so a quick move feels like it cut through the air.