Hi! I am currently working on a project and using Shot Designer (I've been using it since its release, love it!). I was wondering if there's a simple way to export pages, based on timeline numbers?
I feel maybe I've missed something, but just having the possibility of showing passage of time using several created pages, would be super useful for what I am doing. As well as of course having the option of showing an animated version at any point on set to back up printed pages.
Best,
Nils
It's difficult for people to correlate a top-down diagram with what the framing looks like. We as directors bring a huge bias to the table that what's obvious to us is obvious to others.
I believe that producers and actors don't care about the diagram at all, they would only care about a 3D render. The crew cares about the diagram in terms of where to put the equipment, but they don't understand it unless they have a 3D render or are walked through each shot one at a time. The only people on the set who can read a diagram and imagine the shots are the Director and DP.
Definitely - I think the possibility of somehow automatically "decluttering" specific shots would help a lot. Most of the feedback I get on floor plans are mainly related to it being overbearing for Directors / Producers. But maybe that has to do more with their way of visualising, than a fault of the software itself.
Regardless, cheers for your reply, and looking forward to follow the future development of this app.
Best,
Nils Croné
To be clear, it's not settled what's the ideal way to present a blocking diagram, and how to remove things that don't matter.
One thing I'm toying with for the 3D version is that we know a lot more about what the camera is looking at or what the action is, so there is a possibility of some very interesting filtering methods, like only showing a few extras or only showing people you interact with or are in frame during the shot.
It does sound like it's exactly that kind of feature set you're after. It is possible even in the current version to disable/enable which objects appear on which pages, but it's hyper-manual. It would be nice if the app could just guess what to include on each page based on what's happening. So I take that as confirmation that this is a good direction to go in.
Thanks for the quick reply, Per. I get what you mean - I think sometimes my pages just get too cluttered when featuring a bunch of actors / secondary actors / extras, all moving about, which led me to my question above.
I suppose it's more a question of how I colour code my shotlists (more gear-based, honestly), rather than it being setup/side-based. Something I am anyway considering to change.
Looking forward to see what you're coming up with for the long-awaited next big version of Shot Designer!
Best,
Nils Croné, FSF
Hi,
Thanks for your very first post in the new forum!
I decided against this because I realized this idea doesn't work in practice. I felt that mentally it's easy to partition a scene in layers, e.g. some of the cameras on one page and others on another page. I also found that multicam is easy to understand if each run is on a separate page. And it's acceptably easy to understand if the beginning of the scene is on one page and the ending is on another page.
But breaking a scene up by time steps is actually a major curveball. It becomes one of those newspaper drawings where you have to spot 5 differences. You go back and forth ad nauseum, and since you're flipping pages, you also have no continuity. You really struggle to understand that "this thing on this page is that thing on that page". So I decided not to support it. Just so it doesn't sound like I'm shooting your idea arbitrarily, I had the idea myself, took the time to build it enough to try it, and hated it. Your blocking becomes at least 10 times harder to understand, and it's not hyperbole.
The current branch of Shot Designer is technologically limited from being able to output video. I also felt again that a diagram with every moving quickly has no educational value for the crew. They'll watch it, not get anything from it except that you seem have put a lot of work into it, and then they'll wait for you to just tell them the next shot.
What's needed is for Shot Designer to become the proper previz program it was always meant to. The Shot Designer everybody has is really the tiny prototype for a much bigger program, which we're building full time.
Then animation makes sense, and you can watch the shots in 2D and 3D as well. Now the explanatory value is sky high. So that's where all the energy is going.