Short answer: Most effects are one-shot moments - a shake or a flash fires, plays out, and the stage returns to normal on its own. Style effects are different: a blur or a color grade stays applied until you turn it off. The Style event's editor has an Apply / Clear switch - Apply sets the look, Clear removes it - and a cleared Style event shows a muted "off" tell in the timeline so you can see where a look ends. Any persistent style also ends automatically when the scene changes.
One-shot vs persistent
Animate effects (shake, flash, punch, and the character gestures) are moments: they fire, return to rest, and leave nothing behind. Style effects are states: they change how the stage looks and keep looking that way across as many lines and events as you like. A dream sequence can stay soft-focused for a whole conversation from a single event.
The Style looks
- Blur (
@blur) - soften the whole frame or the background: dreams, memories, a moment out of focus. - Color grading (
@color-matrixfor the frame,@sprite-color-matrixfor one character) - brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue. Wash the stage cold blue, or tint a single sprite sickly green. - Sprite opacity (
@sprite-opacity) - hold a character at a chosen transparency, for ghosts and fading presences.
Turning a style off
Open the Style event's editor and flip the Apply / Clear switch. Clear resets the look to neutral and swaps the tuning controls for a plain statement of what the event stops. A Style event left at neutral values always reopens in Clear, because that is what it does.
The insert palette's Style section also ends each of its Background, Sprite and Global groups with a Clear style event. It turns off the look that is on for that target at the point you insert it - the background's color grade, say, or a character's opacity - and you can still switch which look or target it clears. In the timeline, a cleared Style event renders with a muted "off" tell, so scanning a scene shows at a glance where a look begins and where it ends.
Fade is not a Style. To fade to black and stay there, use a fade transition over a solid color background: see What is a transition?.
Styles end at a scene change
A persistent style lasts through the rest of its scene at most. When the scene changes, the look resets - and if the change uses a crossfade, the outgoing look fades away with the outgoing scene rather than snapping off mid-transition. If you want the same atmosphere in the next scene, apply it again at the top of that scene.