code-rain-mask

For the shot where the machine is awake and you are not invited. Green falling on black, and somewhere behind it a face that hasn’t noticed yet.

Open the editor Download .cinerune project

code-rain-mask sample frame rendered from the bundled demo project — A real frame exported from the bundled `demo.cinerune` — code-rain-mask over Cinerune’s code-assembly plate.

What it’s for

The oldest trick in the cyber-thriller and still the one that works. Columns of glyphs falling out of the top of the frame, each with a bright head punching down and a tail that decays behind it like phosphor that hasn’t let go. Underneath, the scene is still there — it just has to survive the rain. code-rain-mask doesn’t paint a separate curtain of characters; it reads your plate and stylises the cells it falls across into a green ramp, so the image and the code are the same surface.

This is the look of a console nobody’s supposed to be reading, a server room at 3am, the inside of a system as a place rather than a screen. Reach for this when: you want the audience to feel watched by the medium itself rather than by a character in the frame. Lift preserveHighlights and the face behind the rain stays legible — a person trapped in the machine. Drop it toward zero and the scene dissolves into pure signal, the image gone, only the alphabet falling.

The 1999 reference is unavoidable and that’s fine — but push charset to Binary for something colder and older, mainframe-era, or Syntax when you want it to feel like a build log rather than an oracle.

Where it lives in the app

Effects tray, group Terminal & code. Add it to any layer and it composites over everything beneath it; gate it with a mask layer when you want the rain to fall only across part of the frame and leave the rest clean.

Parameters

Key	Range	Default	Effect
`speed`	0–4	1	Fall rate of the columns
`tailLength`	2–30	10	Trail length behind each head
`density`	0–1	0.7	How many columns are raining
`charset`	Katakana / Binary / Syntax	Katakana	Glyph set
`preserveHighlights`	0–1	0.5	How much of the underlying image survives
`greenBias`	0–1	0.75	Push toward Matrix green
`headGlow`	0–1	0.8	Brightness of the leading cell

Pairs well with

phosphor — the afterglow of a monitor someone has been staring at far too long. The rain stops being clean and starts feeling tired, lived-in.
palette quantize (Green) — lock the whole frame to a single phosphor green so the image and the code can’t be told apart. Total commitment to the bit.
radial mask — keep one face untouched in the centre while the rain consumes the edges. The reader inside the machine, not yet dissolved.
camera-zoom — push slowly into the rain over the segment and the wall of code becomes a tunnel you’re falling down.

Demo project

The downloadable demo.cinerune is this single effect applied to Cinerune’s bundled code-assembly plate — an amber procedural portrait — so you can see exactly how the rain reads against a real image. Drop it into the editor (File → Open from disk…) to tweak parameters live. The frame shown above is exported from the same project.