Stop-Motion Lighting

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Lightning flashes and a scene is illuminated, it flashes again, and again, each moment a new frame in a story played out in silhouette. It may be a gristly murder, it may be a fight scene, but whatever it is we only see it in stills as a light flicks on and off.

Usually involves strobes or lightning but can be slower. Can be an artistic form of censorship, for example if a murder is taking place we might only see tiny fragments of it.

Related to Lightning Reveal, Dramatic Thunder, and possibly Thunder Shock.

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Examples of Stop-Motion Lighting include:

Comics

• Done beautifully in book three of Bone when Fone Bone, Thorn and Gran'ma Ben are on the run from the rat creatures in the middle of a storm. Lighting flashes light up the otherwise pitch black backgrounds, giving brief glimpses of the rat creature horde closing in, as well as when the Red Dragon appears and chases them away.

Film

• The Revenge Of The Pink Panther has an attempted murder in a night club while the strobe light is on.
• In An Extremely Goofy Movie, Silvia has a dance solo in front of a strobe light.
• Equilibrium. First fight scene is illuminated entirely by muzzle flashes from the protagonist's pistols.

Tabletop RPG

• Dungeons & Dragons module I10 Ravenloft II The House on Gryphon Hill. At the conclusion of the adventure the PCs are desperately trying to stop the Creature from achieving his goal. They are forced to follow it through a thunderstorm, where the only illumination is from strokes of lightning. Each flash reveals a specific scene.

Theater/Dance

• Caught, by David Parson's Dance Company. This one counts as a crowning moment of awesome for this trope.

Television

• In the Family Guy eposode "Ready, Willing And Disabled": while fighting during the night over the money, Meg, Chris and Stewie are occasionally seen only while there's lightning.
  • And while most of the flashes show them fighting one reveals them dressed and posing for an "old timey" photo
• At least one scene in the Doctor Who episode "Blink" - we never see the Weeping angels actually move.
  • The Doctor Who episode "Flesh and Stone", again featuring the Weeping Angels, had the gunshots-in-a-dark-room version.
• Due South featured a gunfight in a dark hallway during the series finale. The only time the characters could be seen was when they were illuminated by one of the (many) gunshots.

Video Games

• Inverted with the "Flash Black Galaxy" level from Super Mario Galaxy 2 where all of the enemies are completely visible, but the backgrounds constantly flash for a few seconds to the music.
• Double-subverted in the NES version of Ninja Gaiden 2 in stage 3-1; you can see the characters, and some of the background, continuously, but the level itself and the enemies are only visible during lightning strikes.
• In Rise From the Ashes, the fifth case in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Ema Skye witnesses a fight scene between Prosecutor Neil Marshall and serial killer Joe Darke during the SL-9 Incident. With the power out and the room pitch black, a particular flash of lightning illuminates a scene that is burned into Ema's mind. After the fight (and the prosecutor's subsequent murder), she draws a picture of the scene, which turns out to be instrumental in finding the true culprit two years later.

Western Animation

• On one Looney Tunes short, Sylvester makes a formula for making a Personal Raincloud to use on the dog guarding Tweety. But then he spills it and the room is darkened by the resulting cloud. Outside, the windows are dark, but the flashes of lightning occasionally show a fleeing Sylvester.
• Several episodes of The Simpsons, including one where (in a flashback) we see teenagers installing a strobe into the back of their car. They turn it on and dance to music - the rest of the scene is shown as a series of stills as the light comes on and off.
• One episode of The Tick (animation) had The Deadly Bulb attack in darkness, where we only saw several freeze-framed images when his lightbulb-head flashed in the darkness.

Real Life

• Fireflies.