twirl

For the moment the floor gives way. The dream sequence that won’t hold still. The frame caught in the drain as the scene goes under.

Open the editor Download .cinerune project

twirl sample frame rendered from the bundled demo project — A real frame exported from the bundled `demo.cinerune` — twirl applied to Cinerune’s code-assembly plate.

What it’s for

The vertigo shot. A vortex set down on the image that spins the pixels hardest at its centre and lets the rotation bleed out into stillness at the edges. twirl isn’t a whole-frame spin — it’s a localised pull, the way water drags toward a drain or a hypnotist’s spiral folds the eye inward. Crank angle past 360 and the centre wraps over itself into a sugar-twist of smeared light.

This is the language of dissolves and descents — going under anaesthetic, falling asleep mid-sentence, the transition from the real scene into the memory of it. Reach for this when: you need a cut to feel like a collapse rather than an edit. A short burst at high angle over a few frames reads as a dimensional rip; a slow creep with a wide radius and gentle falloff is the whole world quietly starting to tilt.

Hitchcock built a whole grammar of unease out of one spiral. Move focusX and focusY off-centre and the vortex sits behind a character’s eye instead of the middle of the frame — the distortion becomes theirs, not the camera’s.

Where it lives in the app

Effects tray, group Distortion. Add it to any layer; it warps the cells beneath it in place. Gate it with a mask layer when you want the swirl confined to one region and the rest of the frame to stay rigid.

Parameters

Key	Range	Default	Effect
`angle`	-540–540°	180	Maximum rotation at the centre
`radius`	0.1–1.5	0.7	Reach of the vortex
`falloff`	0.5–4	1.5	How fast the swirl fades outward
`focusX`	0–100%	50	Vortex centre X
`focusY`	0–100%	50	Vortex centre Y

Pairs well with

camera-zoom — push in while the swirl tightens and the shot stops being a spin and becomes a fall. Pure descent.
phosphor — the smear of the rotation leaves an afterglow behind it, so the vortex trails light like a long-exposure of a fairground ride.
palette quantize (Game Boy) — flatten the warped image to four sickly greens and the dream sequence reads as something half-remembered, low-fidelity, wrong.
radial mask — keep the dead centre sharp and let only the ring around it twist. A clear thought surrounded by a mind coming apart.

Demo project

The downloadable demo.cinerune is this single effect applied to Cinerune’s bundled code-assembly plate — an amber procedural portrait — so the vortex has real structure to bend. Drop it into the editor (File → Open from disk…) to tweak parameters live. The frame shown above is exported from the same project.