Past frames stay behind a moving subject as semi-transparent copies, so its path looks like a tail.
Emphasizing choreography in dance and K-pop music videos. A hazy flashback or a drunk point of view. Fast movements in sports highlights.
Use a scene where the camera is locked and only the subject moves a lot, or where the background is dark and the subject is bright. If the background moves too, the whole picture smears. In the edit, use the Echo effect in Premiere Pro or After Effects. You can make a ghost trail in CapCut too. In ffmpeg, mix the latest five frames with tmix=frames=5 for a short afterimage, and use lagfun=decay=0.95 to leave only the bright parts trailing longer. Apply it briefly, only to the section you want to emphasize, so faces don't get mushy.
Single shot, locked camera, dark empty stage: a dancer in a white suit spins slowly, leaving translucent ghost copies that trail half a second behind her like an echo, each copy fading to nothing, soft cyan edge light, 5 seconds. Add a reverberating echo on her footsteps that matches the visual trail.
Chungking Express (1994) — Step printing, which duplicates frames, made a picture where movement smears and stutters
Not verified