data-storm
A massive invisible information system malfunctioning in realtime. Not VHS glitch — computational overload: a rendering pipeline collapsing under infinite throughput.
What it’s for
data-storm is what a screen looks like when the
machine behind it is rendering everything at once and none of it
correctly. Thousands of broken UI layers stacking, GPU buffers
leaking into each other, overlapping operating systems, fake
windows that never finish drawing — digital noise becoming
architecture. It is the sibling of signal-collapse,
but where that effect is analog signal death, this one is
computational: the throughput, not the transmission, is what
broke.
Reach for it when the shot needs to feel like an AI datacenter
hallucinating its own interface rather than a tape going bad
— a system overwhelmed on screen, a heist seen through a
surveillance grid that’s drowning in feeds, a title card
for something synthetic and overloaded. The master
strength dials it from “dense background
telemetry” to “the render pipeline is gone”.
What it does to a frame
- Layered data fragments — many overlapping, mostly-horizontal neon shards with noise / colour-block / pseudo-text / terminal / graph fill that drift, flicker, duplicate and reappear elsewhere.
- Horizontal data streaks — fast bright transmission bars that fade along a tail, fragment into particles, burst in clusters and flash packet blips.
- Scan-grid structure — a faint background data raster plus per-column-triad subpixel shimmer and vertical light pillars — CRT/LCD hybrid geometry.
- RGB split — chromatic channel desync resampled from the source, intensifying on motion spikes and blooming on bright cells.
- Micro pixel debris — instant on/off glowing particles, dead pixels and decode residue clustered near the bright storm layer.
- UI ghosting — fake terminal/HUD windows that blink in for milliseconds, overlap improperly and drop interior rows. Never readable, only implied.
- Temporal overload — over-accumulating frame echoes that occasionally explode into luminous white-clipped trails.
- Glyph corruption — dropped scan rows and per-cell glyph mangling that holds at the flicker quantum.
Where it lives in the app
Effects tray, group Glitch & analog noise. Add it to any layer. It reads strongest on moving content because the temporal accumulation needs something to chase. Gate it with a mask layer so the overload eats just the diegetic screen or the lower third while a face stays clean — an interface coming apart that earns its place instead of being wallpaper.
Parameters
| Key | Range | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
strength | 0–1 | 0.9 | Master gate — overall severity of the overload |
density | 0–1 | 0.8 | Count and opacity of drifting UI fragments |
streaks | 0–1 | 0.75 | Rate, length and brightness of horizontal data streaks |
scanGrid | 0–1 | 0.5 | Background data-grid + subpixel shimmer and light pillars |
rgbSplit | 0–1 | 0.7 | Chromatic channel desync magnitude (motion-reactive) |
debris | 0–1 | 0.6 | Density of glowing micro pixel particles |
ghosting | 0–1 | 0.55 | Fake terminal/HUD window frequency and coverage |
accumulation | 0–1 | 0.5 | Temporal echo persistence (drives frame-history depth) |
corruption | 0–1 | 0.6 | Dropped-row and per-cell glyph-mangle amount |
flicker | 0–30 Hz | 14 | Instability re-roll rate — how fast structure lurches |
coreR/G/B | 0–255 | 0 / 229 / 255 | Dominant neon colour (single Core neon picker) |
Pairs well with
- signal-collapse — analog death under computational overload; the two failure modes layered read as hardware and software giving up at once.
- phosphor — the afterglow smears the over-accumulating echoes into a screen that’s been hallucinating for hours.
- palette quantize (Cyan) — lock the neon and the storm stops looking like an effect and starts looking like one specific dying system.
- mask layers — overload only the in-frame monitor or HUD while the room around it stays intact.