Shot Designer Pro

Co-Developed by our sister company, Hollywood Camerawork

 

Can you block a scene in 30 seconds?

Shot Designer makes it ridiculously easy to block complex scenes, complete with Camera Diagram, Animation, Shot List, Storyboards, Director’s Viewfinder, and Sync & Team Sharing.

Neither Camera Diagrams, Shot Lists, Storyboards, or Animation by themselves give you a satisfying understanding of camera-blocking — you have to use them together. Shot Designer gives you a superior understanding of your scene, and is the ultimate Director’s creativity tool.

A Shot List That Writes Itself

The integrated Shot List is tied into the diagram and writes itself while you work. Edit shots intuitively in the diagram, not in a spreadsheet.

Everything in the app is connected. Any changes you make in the diagram update the shot list, and any changes you make in the shot list change the diagram.

Animate Action in Real-Time

Animate your characters and cameras to move around your diagram in real-time. Pre-visualize the rhythm of a scene by seeing it play out.

Animating takes literally seconds, and your scene stays flexible, so you can keep changing it.

Use Storyboards In Your Blocking

Storyboards are great for action-sequences, but blocking drama is about coverage, and that’s easier to do in a diagram.

With Shot Designer, you can bring one of the main benefits of storyboards back into your camera diagram, which is seeing what camera-angles look like.

Tip: Instead of drawing whole storyboard-sequences, just draw the keyframes that tell the story, then put it all together in the diagram. It’s freer and funner.

Integrated Director’s Viewfinder

Use the integrated Professional Director’s Viewfinder as both a storyboard replacement, and the ultimate location-scouting tool for Directors. Build your scene blocking and try out scenes while you’re on location!

The Director’s Viewfinder supports all major camera formats, so you get a perfect record of the exact lens used for a shot.

Other Features

• Integrated Set Designer for building floor plans.
• Integrated Lighting Designer for DPs, with lighting symbols provided by
  Ari Golan of Atomic Imaging Studios Chicago.
• Import production drawings as backgrounds and block on top of them.
• Factory Templates of pre-made camera setups for any situation.
• Make your own templates as starting points for new scenes.
• Large and growing prop/furniture library. Email us requests, we’ll build them.
• Scene Freeze: Experiment easily by taking snapshots you can return to (Pro).
• PDF/JPG/Excel export and emailing of Camera Diagrams and Shot Lists (Pro).
• Unlimited Folder Structure for organizing scenes (Pro).

Roadmap

We have lots of things planned for Shot Designer. It is in active development, and since we’re actually building this tool because we’re sick and tired of not having it, you can be sure that Shot Designer will have a long life.

Here are a few of the things we’re planning. There are many small things we’re not mentioning, and some major things are also not mentioned because they’re quite simply really good ideas.

• 3D Animation. A 3D layer for Shot Designer is in development, but Directing Actors is our #1 priority until it’s out. After that, Shot Designer will get new development resources, and we’ll implement our dream features — remember that we use Shot Designer ourselves, and we’re just as eager to get the features as you are. The 3D layer will render your blocking in 3D in real-time. We kind of want that feature too!
• Script Integration / Voice Recording / Speech Synthesis. While Shot Designer is a night-and-day improvement to playing around with scenes, it’s logical that you need to be able to bring in your script and time camera and character action to the script. That requires the ability to not just bring in the script, but actually edit it there, because it’s Shot Designer’s fundamental philosophy that the scene must stay flexible. You also need to be able to record the lines with actors, and you need to speech synthesize if you don’t have actors. And then you need a deeper timeline so you can get to time action to the script with more granularity. Big project, but very cool indeed. Some of the code is already in there, just hidden for now.