Transformation

A subject changes into another material or another state. Skin becomes metal, a room becomes a memory of a room, a body becomes something the world does not have a name for.

The change travels, which is what makes it read as an event. Something starts it somewhere and it spreads, so the audience watches it arrive rather than finding it already finished.

Name the origin point. The change begins at a hand, at the hairline, at the floor, and moves outward at a speed the eye can follow. A change that happens everywhere at once reads as a filter dropped over the shot.

The boundary between the old state and the new one is the interesting part. A hard line reads as mechanical. A ragged, active edge with something happening at it reads as alive.

The new material has to behave. Metal catches a hard specular highlight and holds an edge. Water sags and finds a level. Stone kills reflection and takes the light flat. Saying the material without saying how it behaves gives you a paint job.

Use it for horror, for a reveal about what somebody is, and for a psychological beat where the room changes and the person does not.

Skip it when the audience needs to keep reading the subject. A full change of material takes the face with it.

Morphing changes the shape, bending one form into a different form. A transformation can hold the shape and change what it is made of, so a person stays person shaped while their surface turns to chrome.

The test is the silhouette. If the outline is bending into a new outline, it is a morph. If the outline holds and the material changes, it is a transformation.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) holds the shape of a man while the surface becomes liquid metal, and the change travels across the body rather than switching. Vertigo (1958) does the psychological version with light alone, turning a green neon wash over a woman until she reads as somebody else.

A flat filter comes back over the whole frame at once. Say where the change starts and that it travels, exactly as the note warns.

The second failure is a material that does not behave like itself. Name what the new surface does to the light: hard highlight, no reflection, running and pooling.