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. The insert palette also offers a Clear Style event that starts in Clear mode - drop it where a look should end and pick which look, and which target, it turns off. 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.
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.