text-glitch
For the moment the signal almost dies. The headline that’s already been a ghost for a while. Type that doesn’t quite trust itself to stay on screen.
demo.cinerune — exported from the Glitch & analog noise demo project.
What it’s for
The look of a frame that’s about to lose itself. A VHS
tape played one too many times. A CRT pulling the wrong
signal. An opening title that comes in haunted instead of
clean — the audience already knows something’s off
before the first cut. text-glitch is a
four-layer collapse baked into a single pass: red and blue
ghosts split off the letters, the whole line jitters like a
tracking error, scanlines drop a held-down EQ across the
frame, and every once in a while a white tear rips the row
apart and snaps back.
Falls naturally onto: cold opens, error screens with attitude,
last-frame stingers, music-video lyric cards, dystopian UI
chrome, anything where the type has to feel like it was
recovered rather than typed. Push tearProbability
and the screen starts to actively misbehave — drop it, take
the ghosts down, and you get a quieter “degraded
archive” rather than a full breakdown.
Where it lives in the app
Effect group Glitch & analog noise. Add
it to any text-render layer from the effects
tray; runs before rasterization so the glitch is
applied per-letter and the result still rounds to ASCII cells.
Parameters
| Key | Range | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
shiftAmp | 0–14 px | 6 | Peak offset of the R/B ghost copies |
shiftBase | 0–6 px | 2 | Minimum ghost offset (the “always-on” floor) |
shiftSpeed | 0–0.3 | 0.08 | Ghost animation rate |
jitterAmp | 0–10 px | 4 | Vertical wobble amplitude |
jitterSpeed | 0–0.2 | 0.03 | Vertical wobble frequency |
scanDarken | 0–0.8 | 0.35 | How dark scanlines get |
scanPeriod | 1–8 px | 3 | Row spacing of scanlines |
tearProbability | 0–0.4 | 0.07 | Chance of a block-tear per frame |
ghostAlpha | 0–1 | 0.8 | Opacity of the R/B ghost copies |
Pairs well with
- phosphor CRT glow — the after-image a real arcade monitor leaves on the eye. Together they read like a screen you stared at for hours.
- radial mask — keep one word (or one face) intact, glitch everything around it. The reader’s eye locks onto the calm middle while the edges fray.
- palette quantize (Amber) — Bloomberg-terminal yellow on black. With the glitch on top it goes from “market data” to “market data from a backup tape someone found in a basement.”
- text-scramble — let the headline decode itself first, then have
text-glitchkick in. The audience sees it arrive, then watches it start to fall apart.
Demo project
The downloadable demo.cinerune
is a single text layer with text-glitch applied — no imported
media, no source attribution needed. Drop it into the editor
(File → Open from disk…) to tweak parameters live.
The frame shown above is exported from the same project.