Start here
- Point the camera at something moving. A still scene gives the effect nothing to work with — wave a hand in front of it and you will see it immediately.
- Pick a look from the row just above the shutter. They run mild to extreme: Trace, Smear, Melt, Bloom, Collapse. Off gives you the plain picture back.
- Tap Freeze on the right. The picture stops refreshing but the motion keeps dragging it. Tap again to release.
- PHOTO or VIDEO, above the shutter, decides what the big button does. In VIDEO, tap once to start and again to stop.
- When a clip or a still is ready it appears as a bar at the top of the screen. On iPhone, use Save or share.
The three buttons on the right
Freeze holds the current picture as the reference, and everything after it is painted with that frozen frame, dragged by live motion. It is the strongest single control in the app.
Burst throws two seconds of violent breakage and releases on its own. Good on a beat.
Clear wipes the mess that has built up and starts again from the live picture.
What is actually happening
Compressed video stores a few whole pictures and describes everything between them as motion. Damage the whole pictures and the motion keeps playing over a frame it was never meant for — that is a datamosh.
This app estimates the motion itself, then withholds the refresh. Pixels stay where they are while the motion drags them around, which is the melting you see.
If something looks wrong
Nothing is smearing. The look may be set to Off, or the scene is too static. Wave your hand at the camera.
It stutters. Lower Detail under Input, or set Motion to the fast setting.
No camera at all. The page has to be on an https address. Opened from a file on disk, the camera stays blocked.
The flashlight button is missing. It only appears once a camera with a lamp is running — front cameras usually have none.
Keeping a look
Under Looks you can name and save whatever you have dialled in, and Copy as a link packs every setting into a URL you can send to someone or keep as a bookmark.
On a keyboard: space play or pause, F freeze, B burst, C clear, R record, P photo, L flashlight, O this panel, Esc close.