How to Make a Shake Effect in Toji Motion

Plan the Hit Before the Shake

A shake is not decoration; it is punctuation. Decide which beat it underlines before touching the timeline, because a shake with no target moment reads as noise. In the Toji Motion app, the audio layer is your map: zoom the waveform, find the hit, and mark the frame where the picture must move hardest.

Keep the shake short. Two to six frames of movement either side of the hit covers most fan edits, and restraint is what separates a sharp shake from a seasick one.

Build It With Keyframes

Select the clip layer and set a keyframe at its resting position a few frames before the hit. On the hit frame, offset the position hard in one direction and set the second keyframe. A frame or two later, offset it back past centre, then return it to rest and hold. The pattern is rest, hit, recoil, rest, and the guide to placing those points precisely is the keyframes guide.

Scale the layer up slightly before you start. A shaken layer at 100 percent shows its edges on every offset, and a small zoom hides the frame lines without changing the look.

Shape the Feel

Direction sells the shake. Vertical hits feel like impact, horizontal hits feel like speed, and a slight rotation added to either feels like a hand-held camera. Shape the recovery with easing so the layer settles instead of stopping dead; the graph editor guide covers the snap curve that suits most hits.

Save the finished pattern as a preset once it works. Shake timing is reusable across a whole edit, and rebuilding it per hit wastes the session.

Use It Across an Edit

Stamp the preset on the major hits only, then hand-tune one smaller shake for a minor beat so the edit has dynamics instead of one repeated trick. Export a test of the busiest ten seconds and watch it at full size before rendering the whole project; the workflow in the export settings guide keeps that test honest. The app itself is on the download page.