technique · 2 recipes
Step Printing
Repeated low-rate source frames create visible temporal steps, often with long-exposure smear inside each held image.
Selected recipe
Stutter / Stop-Stutter
Stutter / Stop-Stutter is a variant of Temporal Frame Holds. It retains its own complete execution recipe.
Free short AI video prompt
A starter line you can copy. The full timed recipe, still-image and production prompts are on the shot card.
Prompt rule: Use explicit source-index holds and advances without optical-flow smoothing; keep the declared total duration and variant-specific cadence.
Step Printing: Repeated low-rate source frames create visible temporal steps, often with long-exposure smear inside each held image. Keep the subject readable; motivate camera and light.
Technique guide
- When to use
- Reach for Step Printing when you need this effect: Repeated low-rate source frames create visible temporal steps, often with long-exposure smear inside each held image.
- How it works
- Use explicit source-index holds and advances without optical-flow smoothing; keep the declared total duration and variant-specific cadence.
- Common mistakes
- If the result does not follow this rule, it is not this technique: Use explicit source-index holds and advances without optical-flow smoothing; keep the declared total duration and variant-specific cadence. Do not change multiple variables at once so the effect becomes unreadable.
How to read this page
Step Printing is one technique in Time & Tempo. The definition states the single mechanism the frame has to show. The technique guide covers when to use it, the steps, the usual mistakes, how it differs from the neighbors, and what a successful take looks like.
The clip above is one reading, made with a third-party video model. Another model, or the same model on another day, can land on a different frame. It is an example, not a promise that a prompt will match it.
The free short prompt is a starter sentence. The shot card is the timed recipe: scene, start and end frames, action, light, and color. Three sample cards are free on the site. The rest are part of GrokCine Pro. A second name for the same shot keeps its own URL and points back at this definition.
When you write a prompt, keep the one mechanism in the definition, then name the subject, the motion, and why the light is there. Do not stack a neighboring technique into the same sentence. If the name or the example is wrong, send this page's URL from the contact page.
Recipe
8 seconds · single take
In a shuddering 1950s airliner cockpit during a storm, a young flight engineer lunges for a ringing fuel-transfer timer on the instrument panel.
Shot cards
The full recipe for Stutter / Stop-Stutter is a shot card
The full recipe for Stutter / Stop-Stutter is a shot card. The start and end frames, timed action, lighting and color specs, a camera parameter table, copy-ready still-image and video prompts and negatives are open to GrokCine Pro members on the web.
Seen in these film styles
More in Time & Tempo
References
Sources we studied for this technique. External links; we don't embed them.
Articles & definitions
- Wikipedia: Chungking Express
Wikipedia · Web
Chungking Express uses step-printed smeared motion in its chase scenes.
Videos
- TV series imitating Wong Kar-wai step printing
@denielemein · 2023-02-23 · X
A TV series imitating Wong Kar-wai step printing: couple sharp, crowd smeared.
Images & stills
- Wong Kar-wai's signature step-printing effect
@taesdawn26 · 2024-05-28 · X
Wong Kar-wai's signature step-printing effect (stills).
- Wong Kar-wai: step printing as answer to John Woo
@janusfilms · 2019-04-22 · X
Wong Kar-wai: step printing was his answer to John Woo's slow motion.
- Chungking Express: two cinematographers, many effects
@LostInFilm · 2021-04-24 · X
Chungking Express, shot by Andrew Lau and Christopher Doyle.