FilmBase is now on the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store

FilmBase is available today on the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store.

It plans productions: script breakdown, stripboard and shooting schedule, budget, cast and crew, call sheets, and the reports you send to people who are paying for it. Features, television, commercials, music videos and shorts.

Here is the problem it was built for.

The schedule and the budget are the same facts, written down twice

On a production, the schedule and the budget describe one set of decisions. How many shoot days, who is on which of them, where you are shooting, what has to be there when you arrive.

Almost everyone keeps those in two applications. A scheduling tool holds the days, a spreadsheet holds the money, and two people maintain them separately. They agree on the morning they are created and never again. A revised script arrives, someone rebuilds the day out of days by hand, and three days later someone else discovers the budget was costing a cast member for days they are no longer on.

FilmBase treats them as one object. Cast and crew are paid for the days they work, and those days come from the schedule. Move a shoot day and your budget updates while you watch. Drop a scene and the people who were only there for that scene stop being paid for it.

That is the center of the product. Everything else is built around it.

Image: moving a shoot day, with the budget total updating

It works where you shoot

FilmBase is a desktop application. The work happens on your computer, not on a server.

This matters more than it sounds. Productions happen in places with no signal: a farm two hours out, a basement location, a stage with concrete walls, a country where your data plan does not work. The moment your planning tool needs a connection to open the schedule, it is unavailable exactly when the day is going wrong and you need to move three scenes before lunch.

Your projects are files on your own computer. The script breakdown and the schedule optimizer run on your own computer rather than on someone’s server, so your unreleased script is not uploaded anywhere to be read. For productions under an NDA, that is not a preference, it is the requirement.

One click plans the shoot, including the drive

Give FilmBase your scenes, your locations and your constraints, and it builds the shooting schedule: which scenes go on which day, grouped so you are not paying to light the same location twice, with the driving between locations accounted for.

Cast availability, location availability, day and night, how long the company can reasonably work. It solves around all of it and shows you what it did, so you can override any of it. It is a starting board built in seconds instead of an afternoon, and you stay in charge of the result.

Your team, over your own network

Invite your team and everyone works on the same project at once. The producer adjusts the budget while the 1st AD reworks the board and the script supervisor tags the breakdown, and each change lands on the others’ computers as it happens.

It runs directly between your computers over the network you are already on. Nothing is stored on a server, there is no account to create, and the project never leaves the computers in the room. On a closed set that is usually the only arrangement anyone will agree to.

Image: two computers editing one project on set

What else is in it

• Script breakdown from an imported script, tagging what each scene needs, with element sheets you can hand to each department.
• Call sheets that assemble from the schedule, with the weather and your saved hospital details already filled in.
• Storyboards and shot lists attached to the scenes they belong to.
• Transport and locations, including who is being picked up and from where.
• Actuals and cashflow, tracking what you have committed and spent against every line, and when the money leaves.
• Rate cards for the people you work with repeatedly, so the next production starts with its rates already in place.

Getting it

FilmBase is on the Mac App Store for macOS 13 Ventura or later, and the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 or later. You subscribe inside the app with your Apple Account or Microsoft account. There is no license key and no FilmBase account to create.

$39 a month, or $349 a year. Both plans are the entire application, and both start with a seven day free trial.

Tell us what it gets wrong

We build this for people who plan productions for a living, and the fastest way it improves is you telling us where it does not match how you actually work. If something is missing, awkward, or wrong for the kind of production you run, get in touch. We read all of it.