{"id":101,"date":"2026-09-16T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/every-loop-needs-a-hidden-cut\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T10:59:48","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T10:59:48","slug":"every-loop-needs-a-hidden-cut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/every-loop-needs-a-hidden-cut\/","title":{"rendered":"Every loop needs a hidden cut"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Clients ask for seamless loops more than anything else. Ten seconds that can play for an hour behind a band, on a shop screen, or at the top of a website. The first loops I made were long camera moves that came back to the start. They all had the same problem: you could feel the moment the move turned around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hide the cut in the busiest frame<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The trick is to stop thinking of a loop as one move. Think of it as two halves with a cut between them, and put the cut where the eye is busy. A collision, a flash of light, a turn that fills the frame. Nobody looks for a seam in the middle of an event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Soft
Ident 03 for Slowlight Records. The loop point sits on the crest of the second dune.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Match the motion, not just the pixels<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Matching the first and last frame is the easy part. Matching the speed is what sells it. If a form is still turning at the last frame, it has to be turning at the same speed in the first frame. I check every loop by playing it three times in a row with the sound off, and I watch the edges of the frame, not the middle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

If you can see where it starts, it is not a loop. It is a video that repeats.<\/p>\nA note pinned above my desk<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For the Slowlight idents, each loop turns a form a quarter turn at the tempo of the record. The cut sits on the beat. You can hear it if you know where it is. You cannot see it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A seamless loop is not one long move that happens to end where it began. It is a cut you hide so well that nobody looks for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kurato_page_runtime":0,"kurato_hide_header":false,"kurato_hide_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[46,45],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-process","tag-craft","tag-loops"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156,"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurato.jawad.work\/motion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}