Sep 17, 2026 · Pitch

Unreel Studio
The transition library

Everything Unreel does today lives in one corner: glitch, scan and signal. This is the rest of the map — 91 moves in 12 buckets, from smooth and wispy to hard and chaotic, mask reveals, X-ray and vision, and a new bucket that only exists because your Mac can cut the athlete out of a photo by itself. Every card is tagged as a cut (how one shot hands off to the next) or a reveal (what happens inside one shot), with an energy level and how hard it is to build. Mark each one Build / Maybe / Cut — your picks stay in this browser — then hit Copy my picks and paste them back to me.

12 buckets · 91 moves25 builtTop 14 shipped Sep 18No AI credits — all of it runs on the Mac

Two things before the list

1 · One engine, before we build 80 of these

Right now every effect is written twice — once in Python for the render, once as a GPU shader for the live preview — and they have to be kept in step by hand. That's fine for 12 moves; it breaks at 80. The fix is to have the render use the same GPU shaders as the preview, running off-screen at 1080×1920.

What that buys: each new transition is written once, the preview becomes exactly the render instead of a close sketch, and renders get several times faster because the graphics chip does the work instead of the processor. I'd do this first — it's a few hours — and every transition after it costs half as much.

2 · New: your Mac can cut the athlete out

macOS has Apple's subject cut-out built in (it's what "Lift subject from background" uses in Photos). I tested it on two of our frames: clean athlete masks in about 3 seconds, on the Mac, free. That opens the Athlete Cut-out bucket below — the athlete stays while the world swaps, pops out over the logo, gets a teal halo, turns into a sticker.

Two wrestlers cut out of their photos by Apple's subject cut-out and placed on brand teal

JT Smith and the Diamond Fish back, cut out automatically and dropped on brand teal. Note the opponent's legs came along on the right — we'd keep only the biggest subject.

CUT — the hand-off from one shot to the next REVEAL — what happens inside one shot (mono → color and friends) Energy — 1 calm · 5 chaos Build — ① pure math · ② needs a generated texture (smoke, ink, fire) · ③ needs the athlete cut-out · ④ needs motion analysis
0 build0 maybe0 cut

How I'd run it

  1. One engine first — renders run on the same GPU shaders as the live preview, so the preview becomes exact and each move is written once.
  2. The studio gets two libraries — Reveals and Cuts — each grouped by these buckets with filters, and a profile can mix from both. The eight you have become the Glitch & Signal and Print buckets.
  3. Round 1 = my top 14 — now built into Unreel Studio (Sep 18) — one or two from every bucket so you can feel the whole range before we go deep: Luma Fade, Ink Bloom, Film Burn, Light Leak Wash, Crown-C Iris, Split Doors, Feed Swipe, Shatter, Impact Punch, X-Ray Scan, Thermal, Cut-out Pop, Silhouette Wipe, Heat Press.
  4. You vet in the studio, not on a page — each one lands as a profile with a preview loop, you try it on real reels, and Cut ones get deleted.
  5. Then we go deep on whichever buckets you keep reaching for.