Occlusion + tracking
For the shot whose attention can’t be allowed to wander — the interview cut where the eyes are the whole story, the action beat where the body moves but the camera refuses to lose it.
What this group is for
These effects know which cell is in front of which. They read a depth pass — the same one your layer order implies — and they let the near things act on the far things the way a body acts on the light behind it.
The tracking half is about discipline. A lock zone follows the subject; everything inside it stays calm while the world outside is allowed to come apart. The frame keeps looking where you want it to look.
The effects
- occlusion-echo — When a layer slides off and uncovers what was behind it, the reveal arrives late and trailing an afterimage. It feels haunted, like the depth is remembering the thing that just moved away.
- occlusion-light-leak — Cells freshly exposed by a depth change catch an additive warm or green glow, driven by the frame-to-frame history diff. Newly bared edges seem to breathe heat for a beat — good for a subject stepping out of cover.
- slice-occlusion — A short, localised glitch burst — tear, slices, char-cycle — fires exactly along the depth boundary. The seam between near and far stutters, as if the two planes don’t quite agree on reality.
- depth-shadow-cast — Near layers darken the far ones, a pseudo-shadow projected along a chosen light angle. It grounds a floating subject and gives a flat composite the weight of a real lamp in the room.
- depth-rim-separation — An edge rim whose colour reads the depth: white up close, cyan in the mid-ground, amber or green far back. The frame sorts itself into planes the eye can instantly parse — an aerial-perspective trick for ASCII.
- subject-lock-tremor — Jitter is amplified everywhere outside a radial lock zone, so the subject sits pinned and steady while the world around it shakes loose. Pure tension — the calm centre of a panic.
How to reach for it
Add these from the effects rail on the active segment. Every one of them is maskable, so the depth interaction or the lock zone can be confined to part of the frame. Because they reason about who is in front of whom, they want a depth pass — set your layers’ depth or supply a depth source before you expect the near/far behaviour to land.