Whip pan

A whip pan is an extremely fast camera pan with motion blur at its peak, often used to hide a cut: the frame smears, and when it settles you are somewhere new. Borrowed from film, it gives interface motion a physical, hand-held energy and makes a scene change feel like one continuous move instead of an edit.

When to use it

Traveling between two parts of a product, changing scenes mid-energy, escalating pace before a climax. Keep it short — around a quarter second — spike the blur exactly at the midpoint, and land with a hard settle.

Common mistakes

Whipping without blur (it reads as a broken tween); overusing it until the film feels seasick; whipping to a destination that isn't visually distinct, which wastes the trick.

How Impractical uses it

Impractical's whip pan is a 0.28-second move with an animated blur spike that conceals the cut — one of its named camera moves alongside the zoom-through, the continuous push, and the match cut. The blur peaks precisely mid-move, every render, because the whole film is deterministic.