What's new in Frameboard

Fixed · Account & plans

Starting the free Pro trial works again

Start free trial, on the screen after signing up, stopped with an error instead of opening the payment page. It opens it again, and nothing is charged until the 30 days are up.

• That screen is also clearer: Free and Pro side by side, what each includes, and under Pro exactly when the trial ends and what it costs after, monthly or yearly.

Fixed · Board & shots

Pasted image links are safer to import

Fixed: Frameboard now reads a picture pasted from the web as the site sent it, instead of letting a malformed compressed response reach the server's image-link reader. Redirects, unexpected compressed responses and oversized pictures are refused before they are read.

• If a site will only send its picture in a format Frameboard cannot accept from a link, it now explains that you can save the picture and drop the file in instead.

New · On set · Exports

Take the shoot day away from On Set

The wrap screen in On Set now exports the day. The day report is a PDF of every shot in running order, with what happened to it, every take with its rating, roll, time and note, the circled takes ringed, the day's notes and the frames that came back.

• The take log is a CSV with one row per take and the circled ones marked, for the edit or a logging spreadsheet. Shots that were never rolled still get a row, so a pickup or a dropped shot is in the log too.
• From the editor: Day report PDF on each day in Days, and Take log, every day (CSV) in the Export menu.

New · Days, gear & call sheets · Exports

A breakdown your AD can schedule from, and bring back

Export menu, Breakdown for scheduling (CSV): one row per scene with INT/EXT, set, day or night, pages, shots, how long it should take to shoot, screen time, cast and cast numbers. It opens in any spreadsheet, and a scheduling tool that imports a CSV can map its columns.

• Its columns are the ones Import schedule in Days reads, so a schedule saved back as CSV comes onto your shoot days with nothing to map by hand, including CSVs from Excel set up for Dutch, German or French, which use semicolons.
• The shot list CSV now ends with each scene's and shot's Frameboard ID, which stay the same however scenes and shots are renumbered, so a row worked on elsewhere can always be traced back.

New · Lighting

Draw the lighting plan over the recce's own floor plan

Lay a recce photo or the location's floor plan under a scene's lighting plan, faded, and trace the walls and windows where they really are. This scene's location is offered first. Size it, move it, fade it, or take it away; it never prints or shows on a share link.

• Lighting setups saved to your library now keep their room too: its size, walls, doors and windows. A studio, or a location you keep going back to, is measured once.
• The lighting panel now says plainly what the light preview shows and what it does not, such as light bouncing off walls, so nobody reads it as a light meter.

Improved · On set

On Set keeps your takes and notes when the signal drops

On Set now says when there is no signal, that what you log is kept on the phone, and how much is waiting. It says nothing while everything is saved.

• A shot note written with no signal is kept on the phone, shown as waiting, and sends itself when the signal is back. It used to fail without a word, and closing the panel lost it.
• A half-written note is kept on the phone too, so a locked screen or a reload does not lose it.
• Takes and statuses are written out the moment the screen goes off, and leaving the page with something still unsent asks first.

New · Board & shots

Turn a pile of references into a moodboard in one click

Select a few cards, right-click, and choose Arrange as a moodboard: equal columns, every picture at its own proportions, even gaps. Or Arrange in rows, which tidies them without resizing anything. One undo puts them back.

• Right-click a picture and Add its colours to the palette: Frameboard picks out the colours it is made of and adds the ones you do not have yet.
• Every colour on the palette now has a copy button, and Copy all gives you the whole palette, names and hex values, to paste into a grading note or a brief.

New · Board & shots · Exports

Animatic mode: watch the storyboard at its real pace

Play the animatic from the Export menu or the command palette: every shot in story order, each for its own duration, with the shot number and description under the frame.

• Change a shot's length right in the player. It is the shot's own duration, so the shot list, call sheet and editing-suite exports follow.
• Add a temp track, music or a read of the voiceover, and it plays along. It stays on your device.
• Export the whole thing as a video to send to a client or producer: MP4 where your browser can make one, WebM otherwise.
• Note cards on storyboards and in the animatic are drawn in proportion, so their first line is no longer cut off at the top.

Improved · Working together

Clients comment on the shot they are looking at

On a share link that takes comments, every shot now has its own comment button. It picks that shot, brings the comment box into view and puts the cursor in it, so a note lands on the right shot without hunting through a list at the foot of the page.

• The Approve and Request changes buttons now say what they are for ("Approve: Shot list"), which screen readers read out and which helps on a page with five of each.

New · Exports · Days, gear & call sheets · Lighting

See every document before you download it, on A4 or US Letter

Shot lists, storyboards, shooting scripts, call sheets and lighting plans now open as pages first. Check them, switch between A4 and US Letter (Frameboard remembers which), then download.

• Nothing runs off the page any more. Long production names, scene titles, sluglines, crew roles and fixture names wrap or end in an ellipsis you can see.
• A shot list row grows to fit the whole description and carries on to the next page under the same shot number, marked continued. It used to stop after five lines without saying so.
• Call sheet cast and crew are proper tables: a long role no longer prints over the name beside it, and every scene's slugline and cast print in full.
• A picture that will not load prints as "Picture unavailable" instead of a grey box, and the preview tells you how many. Letters the PDF fonts cannot print are counted too, so you know before the sheet goes out.

Improved · Account & plans · Exports

Back up a production, pictures and all, from its card

Every production card has Download backup in its menu, so you can keep a copy of anything you own, archived ones included, without opening it.

• Restoring a backup now brings back everything: the chosen cover, connector lines drawn to sections, and Insert shots, which used to come back blank.
• Very large productions get a clear message instead of a file that looked whole and was not. Help has a new Backups section on what a backup holds and how to restore one.

New · Account & plans · Working together

Choose how many Studio seats you pay for

Studio seats used to follow your team and nothing else, so the only way to change the number was to add or remove people. There is now a seat control on the Billing and Workspace pages and on your workspace: press + or − and it shows the bill before and after before anything changes.

• Buy seats ahead of inviting people, and an invitation into a spare seat goes straight through without asking again. Give spare seats back whenever you like; the difference is credited against your next invoice.
• It never goes below the people who hold a seat or the three-seat minimum, and says what to do instead: remove someone, or make them a viewer.
• The number of seats you choose at checkout, or in the billing portal, now sticks. Before, it was quietly put back to the size of your team.

See Studio pricing

Improved · Free tools & site · Account & plans

Easier to find your way, and to Pro

This page is sorted for the people reading it. Every release says whether it is new, an improvement or a fix, and which part of Frameboard it touches, and you can filter by either. The latest few lead the page, with somewhere to try each one, and there is an RSS feed for anyone who would rather be told.

• What's new is in the account menu inside the app, with a dot when something has landed since you last looked.
• Choosing Pro on the pricing page before you have an account now takes you through sign-up and straight on to checkout, with the plan and the monthly or yearly choice you picked. Before, signing up dropped you in the sample production and the choice was lost. It works through Google sign-in too.
• Your account page can buy yearly as well as monthly. Coming back from paying says the payment went through, and backing out of checkout from the pricing page returns you to the pricing page.
• Reaching the limit on editors or on uploads now says what would lift it, where you hit it, instead of only that you cannot.
• The home page answers the questions people ask before signing up, and lists the free tools that need no account.

See the plans

New · Board & shots

Choose your production's cover

Right-click a production on your dashboard, or use its new ⋯ button, for a menu with everything you can do to it from there: change its cover, rename it, copy its link, duplicate, star, archive or move it to the Trash.

• Change cover lets you pick one of the production's own pictures, one of Frameboard's painted frames, or upload an image from your computer. The cover shows on the dashboard card, at the top of the production's Overview and on its share page.
• Only the production's owner can change its cover, or a workspace admin on Studio. Editors keep the cover the owner chose, whatever they change in the production.

Improved · Account & plans · Working together

Studio gets cheaper per seat as your team grows

Studio still starts at €75 a month for 3 editors, and every seat past the fifth now costs less: €25 a seat for editors 1 to 5, €22 for 6 to 10, €19 for 11 to 20 and €16 for 21 to 50. Above 50 editors we agree a price with you.

• Each band prices only the seats inside it, so adding an editor never lowers your bill and never makes it jump. Yearly billing takes about 21% off every band.
• Before an invitation adds a seat, Frameboard now shows your whole bill before and after, monthly and yearly, rather than only the price of one seat.
• The workspace page has a "Who has a seat" list under the seat count: you as the owner, your workspace admins and editors, and anyone you made an editor of a single production, with how to free a seat.
• Existing Studio subscriptions keep the price they signed up at. Nothing changes on a current invoice.
• Handing a production to someone on Free who already has three productions is refused, with what they can do about it.

See the plans

New · Account & plans

Two ways to start: Free, or a 30-day Pro trial

New accounts start on Free with no card. Right after signing up you can choose to try Pro free for 30 days instead. The trial needs a card and nothing is charged during it. Unless you cancel, it becomes Pro at the price you picked when the 30 days end, and we email you 7 days and 1 day before.

• Cancel the trial any time from your account page and you are not charged. The account moves to Free when the trial ends, and nothing you made is deleted.
• Free now includes 3 productions in total. Archived productions and productions in the Trash count towards the 3, and deleting one permanently frees its slot. If you already have more, you keep every one of them. You can start a new production once you are under the limit, or on Pro.

Start free

Improved · Lighting · On set · Days, gear & call sheets

Lighting plans you can read on a phone

On a phone, a lighting plan's notes are numbered pins, with their words listed under the plan at a size you can read. Write, edit and delete them there, and tap a pin to jump to its words.

• A plan's words never land across a wall from their fixture, slide clear of side walls, door swings and arrows, and stay at 11px or larger at every width, in the editor, on the share page and in a PNG export.
• The scale bar finds the first free corner instead of sitting on top of your fixtures.
• Colour temperatures show as a warm-to-cool strip with a tick, and the lit preview is balanced for daylight: a 4000K tube looks warm, not orange, and skin rolls into shadow the way it does under real light.
• On Set: the shot fades into the action bar, headings like "BEDROOM - NIGHT" stay on one line, and the Up next line is easier to read.
• Days on a phone: every field is 16px, so your phone no longer zooms in when you type.

Improved · Lighting · On set · Days, gear & call sheets

Labels that make room, and On Set in one column

Each fixture's words on a lighting plan pick a side that is clear of walls, other fixtures and other words, in the editor and on the share page.

• The lighting editor opens framed on what you placed, and new items land where you can see them.
• On Set is one column, with larger action text, a note shot shown as a frame, and the next shot you still owe read ahead.
• Days on a phone has finger-sized controls.
• The editor header keeps the production's name in view on a 1024px screen.

Improved · Lighting · Working together · On set

Plans framed at every width, and screens that fit

Lighting plans are framed on what you placed at every width, doors, windows and notes included, with Whole room one click away. A desktop plan no longer spends a third of itself on empty floor.

• The lit preview exposes for the face, so a single soft source no longer reads as dusk and a hard sun no longer burns half the face flat.
• Sign off on a phone: Approve and Request changes are an even, touch-sized pair, and neither looks disabled.
• On Set on a desktop keeps a phone-like column instead of stretching across the screen.
• The share page's board sits in the middle of its frame, and its tabs only fade while there is more to scroll.

New · Free tools & site · Board & shots · Lighting

A new look, and pictures everywhere

Frameboard has a new look. The app and the site now share one typeface, surfaces have real depth, and the canvas is darker so your frames are the brightest thing on screen.

• Every production has a cover: its own first picture, or one of thirteen cinematic frames painted for Frameboard (a desert road at dusk, a neon street in the rain, a coast road, a misty lake and more). They are painted in code, never photographed or generated by AI.
• The dashboard shows your productions as covers, with the templates as a row of frames above them. The template picker shows each one's frame.
• The Overview is a production's home page: its cover with the name over it, four headline numbers, and the scenes as cards with their frames.
• The share page opens as a poster, and reads properly on a phone: the board is a column of cards and the lighting plan stays legible.
• A new sample production, Ringside, shows what a finished production looks like, lighting plans and a 3D lit preview of each scene included.
• The lit preview now shows the same figure as the 3D room, head and shoulders, under your plan's lights: a hard key throws the nose's shadow onto the cheek, and a bigger soft source is softer rather than brighter. The figure wears a crew-neck top, its edges are smooth, and a faint grain makes it read as a frame rather than plastic.
• Setting up a company on Studio starts from a painted frame instead of an empty page, and Enter creates the workspace.
• Gear and Days were rebuilt, and the editor header fits on screens from 1024 to 1600 wide, where the notifications and account menu used to fall off the edge.
• Fixed: Escape works again everywhere in the editor and On Set.
• Fixed: a comment's date was nearly invisible in the light theme, and a comment with no date showed 1 January.
• Fixed: the printed shot list on the home page was unreadable in the light theme.

See the lighting examples

New · Working together

See who changed what

Production history has an Activity tab: who changed what, newest first, with their name and picture. Each line says which part of the production it touched, a shot, a scene, the lighting plan or the gear list, and marks undo and redo as what they were.

• The shot details panel ends with who last edited the shot and when, taken from the same record, so the two always agree.
• Someone who has left the production shows as Unknown user rather than disappearing from the history.

Improved · Account & plans

An account page you can find things on

Your account is now a settings page with a sidebar: Overview, then Profile, Security and Connections; Workspace, Members and Billing; Appearance and Editor. Each section has its own link, and old links to the plan, usage and connected programs still land in the right place.

• Billing shows the plan you are on up front, with the others as short rows instead of a full price table. Theme and the mouse or trackpad choice live under Appearance and Editor, and deleting your account sits under Danger zone with the same confirmations as before.

New · Free tools & site

More to read

Five new articles: how many storyboard frames a commercial needs, the difference between a call sheet and a shooting schedule, which lens to use for an interview, how to light a green screen on a budget, and an honest comparison of StudioBinder and Frameboard.

• The writing page now lists the guides and the free tools under the articles, so everything worth reading before a shoot is in one place.

Read the articles

Improved · Working together

Two people on one card, and both keep their change

When two people edited the same card at once, whoever's change arrived second replaced the whole card, so marking a shot ready while someone else wrote its notes lost one of them. Changes now carry only what they changed: the status and the notes both stay. The same goes for two different lights in one scene, a light and a section, or two ticks on the gear list.

• When two people change the very same thing, everyone ends up with the same answer: the later change. Nobody's screen quietly disagrees with anyone else's.
• Undo takes back only what you did. If somebody has changed it since, their change is kept and you are told, and your undo reaches everyone else like any other edit.
• Fixed: an edit a collaborator made while yours was on its way could be missed on your screen, and in rare cases a save could write over a change only the other person had. Both directions now arrive, and a save that would lose work stops and asks.

Improved · Board & shots · Working together

Losing the connection loses nothing

A production opened without a connection opens the copy saved on this device, with the access you had: a viewer stays a viewer. The bar says Offline, and changes stay on the device until the server is back.

• When it is back, your changes are saved if nobody has saved since. If somebody has, their version opens and yours is kept aside, with a button to download it. Which copy wins is never decided by whose computer clock is ahead.
• A save that fails tries again by itself, sooner once the connection returns, instead of waiting for your next edit. The bar says Not saved · retrying until it lands.

New · Board & shots

Sections, titles and references that become shots

Sections: name a region of a board and everything inside it belongs to it. Move the section and its cards and marks come with it, in one undo. The name sits on a coloured tab across the border.

• A note can be a title: a block of solid colour with a few words on it, placed anywhere on the board. Notes can also carry a coloured label tab.
• Connectors can end on a section, pick the sides that face each other, spread out when several share a side, and curve round a frame that is in the way. Hand-drawn connector routes are retired; every connector, including ones drawn before, is routed.
• A reference can become a shot with its caption as the description, and a lens like 50mm in the caption fills in the lens. Move to scene sends cards to another scene, as references or as shots.
• Paste a YouTube or Vimeo link and it becomes a frame from the video, with a link back to it.

Fixed · Board & shots · Lighting · Exports

Fixes

A PDF exported while a field still had the cursor in it now includes what you just typed. On a phone or a tablet it could come out as the version before the edit.

• The 3D lighting room failed to open for some people. It opens again.
• The frame the home page follows glides between steps instead of jumping.
• A Studio subscription's seats can no longer be lowered below the size of the team.
• Links to Frameboard unfurl in the site's own type, with the home page's headline.
• The terms and privacy pages show our registered address, marked plainly as not a place to visit.

New · Account & plans

Signups are open

Anyone can make an account now, without an invite. The waitlist is gone and the buttons that said Join the waitlist say Start free.

• Every new account starts with 30 days of Pro and no card: the library, unlimited productions and exports with your own logo from the first day. Uploads stay at the free allowance until you subscribe. After 30 days the account becomes Free and nothing you made is touched.
• A trial can turn into a subscription before it ends. The pricing and account pages used to show a trialist Current plan, so the first moment they could pay for Pro was the day after it was taken away. They show Keep Pro now.

Start free

New · Account & plans

Pro and Studio can be bought

Checkout is open. Choose Pro or Studio on the pricing page, monthly or yearly, and pay through Stripe. The plan switches on as soon as the payment goes through.

• Changing plan, updating your card, downloading invoices and cancelling all happen from the Change plan section of your account. Cancelling keeps the plan until the end of the period you paid for.
• The terms now cover paid plans: renewal, cancelling, the 14-day right of withdrawal and failed payments. The privacy page lists Stripe.

See the plans

New · Free tools & site

Free tools that do the job instead of describing it

The pages people actually arrive on were articles about a template, with the template behind a signup. Each one is now the tool, free, with no account, saved in your browser.

• A pre-production checklist to tick: pick the shoot type, set the shoot day, and every phase gets a done-by date. Add your own items, take it away as a PDF with real boxes or as text.
• A storyboard template maker: the delivery ratio (16:9 through 9:16), two to twelve frames a page, A4 either way round, and a live preview drawn from the same millimetre layout as the PDF, so the screen is the printout.
• A shot list template that numbers itself within each scene. Type an insert as 12A and it keeps its number while the next automatic shot carries on from 12. PDF one scene to a page, CSV, and a text copy for the crew chat.
• A field of view calculator for focal length, sensor, frame shape and distance, and a page each for 14mm to 135mm with the angles on every format and where the camera stands for each shot size. The numbers come from the same optics code that draws the camera cone on a lighting plan.
• Shot sizes, drawn: eight sizes as frames around one standing figure, each with its other names and where a 35mm stands for it. The old articles redirect to the tools, and every tool is in a Free tools menu in the header.

Open the shot list template

Improved · Free tools & site

The demo production is retired

It showed a board that had not kept up with the product, down to a card type retired in August. /demo now goes to the home page, which follows one production from its first reference to the circled take, and its three lighting plans are still on the lighting plan examples page.

Improved · Lighting

The subject in the 3D room is a person

What stood in the 3D lighting plan was a generated mannequin, and it lit like one: limbs that rendered inside out, a hair shell over the face, and nothing for a key to find. It is now a sculpted model (Quaternius' Universal Base Characters, public domain) at about half a megabyte, posed with the arms down and the palms turned in, in the same matte maquette white.

• The nose casts a shadow and the eyes catch the light, which is most of what a lighting plan is for. The height the plan records for the subject is still the height standing in the room.

See the lighting examples

Improved · Lighting

The lit preview has a face

The subject beside the lighting plan was an egg with five bumps on it, and it lit like a spoon. It is a head now: brow, eye sockets with an eye in each, cheekbones and the hollow under them, a nose with the shelf that puts a shadow on the lip, a mouth, a jaw and ears.

• It has colour where a face does: dark hair, bright eye whites, nearly black pupils. A key from the side now models something instead of sliding round a smooth shape.

Improved · Board & shots

The draw tool is a pen

It always kept the path your hand drew, but every mark came out the same hairline in the same colour with an arrowhead guessed onto the end. It has five inks now, chosen to read over a dark board and over a photograph, a weight, and the arrowhead as a choice rather than an inference.

• A connector can follow the line you drew. Drag from one card to another in connect mode and the route your hand took is the connector, and it follows its cards when they move. Click one card and then another and you still get the straight line.
• Fixed: the connect tool could miss the press it started on, and the line was hard to see while you drew it.

Fixed · Board & shots · On set · Exports

A way back, everywhere it was missing

An export that fails says so. Every item in the Export menu used to fail in silence: the spinner came and went, no file arrived, and nothing was said. Same for syncing a connected script with no signal, and for a screenplay file that cannot be read.

• Naming a lighting setup, labelling a spike mark and renaming a place all happen in the app now rather than in a browser dialog, and Escape leaves them as they were.
• The scene minutes and pace fields on a shoot day can be cleared and retyped. Emptying one used to refill it instantly with the estimate, so the new number landed on the end of the old one.
• A note typed on set knows how much room is left on the shot instead of quietly losing the end of it, and it survives Escape, which puts a phone keyboard away and was taking the note with it.
• The fixture picker and the notes panel hold the keyboard inside them, so Tab no longer walks out into the board behind.
• On Set can be undone. Marking a shot in the can or as a pickup now says so and offers Undo, which puts the status back and returns to that shot. Before this the surface had no undo of any kind: a thumb landing on the wrong one of two big buttons could only be fixed by opening a laptop.
• Messages appear on set at all. Everything On Set had to say, including the well done at the end of a day, was being written and never drawn, so the last press of a shoot day looked like a dead button.
• Marking a shot and moving on now starts the next shot at the top instead of wherever you had scrolled to, and the strip of shot numbers scrolls to the one you are on rather than leaving you on the morning halfway through the afternoon.
• Deleting a shoot day offers Undo, the way deleting a scene does. A call sheet that fails to build says so instead of a spinner that comes and goes.
• Undo and redo are on the canvas on a phone and a tablet, where there was no undo button at all. Space presses the control you have tabbed to instead of being eaten by the canvas.
• Marks: the delete button sits beside an arrow rather than exactly where you click to select it, deleting one offers Undo, Escape keeps the label you just typed, and a stray click in draw mode no longer leaves a dot that cannot be selected or removed.
• Rename and remove on gear rows, and the schedule's break controls, are reachable on a touch screen and by keyboard instead of appearing only under a mouse.

Improved · Board & shots

The back of a card is a card again

Walk the scene with the details open. The panel has an arrow at each end and says which shot of how many you are on, and Alt with the left and right arrows does the same from the keyboard, from inside a field as well as outside one. Setting the camera body on nine shots is now nine numbers and eight keypresses. The tab stays where you left it, so a camera pass stays on the camera.

• Click another shot while the details are open and they move to it. Dragging a card still drags it: only a click that did not move anything counts as asking about that shot.
• Right-click a shot for its status, and right-click six of them to mark all six at once, which is how a day actually ends. In the shot list, the arrow at the end of a row opens that shot's details instead of being a decoration, and a double-click on the row does the same.
• Flip a fresh card and the cursor is already in the description, because that is the next thing that happens.
• Flip a shot and its details open in a panel beside it. The camera report, sound, continuity, takes and versions used to be squeezed onto the back of the card, five folded sections deep, in inputs that shrank with the zoom. They are full-size fields now, in four tabs: Shot, Camera, On set, Versions. A dot on a tab means there is something in it.
• The card back is a slate: the number, the size, the status, the description, and the lens, move, length and frame rate on one line, with a footer that says which departments have written something. Readable across the room, and it updates as you type in the panel.
• The panel slides the board over if it would cover the card it is describing, and closes with Escape, with the flip button, or by flipping the card back.

New · Lighting

Walk the room: the lighting plan in 3D

Press 3D under the lighting plan and the same document stands up: the room and its walls, doors and windows, every stand at its rigged height, softboxes, fresnels, tubes and flags as the shapes they are, the camera with its lens's real field of view, and your subject actually lit by the rig, shadows included. Move the key and the shadow moves.

• Orbit with the mouse, or jump straight to Top, Front and Side. Click a fixture to select it, then drag it across the floor and the plan follows, on the same half-metre snap. Heights and aim still live in the inspector, where the numbers are.
• It looks like a previz still, not a wireframe: soft shadows, haze in the beams, softboxes that emit from their whole face, light pooling where it lands, and a white figure the light is read on. Machines without a real graphics card get the same room with the expensive passes turned off.
• Nothing about the drawing changed to make this possible: the plan is still the document, the PDF is still the plan, and the 3D view is only ever another reading of it. It works in the free tool too, on every one of the six example diagrams.

Open the free lighting plan tool

New · Lighting · Days, gear & call sheets · Exports

A free lighting plan tool, and exports that name their draft

Six lighting diagrams for the setups people ask about every year: an interview, a two-person interview, a night exterior, a car scene, a green screen, a product shot. Each is a real plan drawn by the plan editor with the packing list it writes, and one click opens it in the free tool for changing.

• Import the schedule. A CSV from StudioBinder, Movie Magic or a spreadsheet becomes your shoot days: the import guesses which column is which, you correct it if it guessed wrong, and it tells you in numbers what it is about to do before it does it. Scenes match by number, the schedule decides the days and fills blanks, new scenes are created, and nothing here is ever deleted. One undo takes the whole import back.
• Draw a lighting plan with no account: the same editor the product uses, at /lighting-plan/tool. Rooms to scale, a hundred real fixtures, light that adds and stops at walls, the lit preview, and the PDF and PNG exports. The plan lives in your browser and survives the tab; an account is how it joins a production, its shots and its gear list.
• Every PDF footer now says which draft it froze, next to when it was made, and the CSV, Fountain and JSON files carry the date in their names. Which draft is this, answered without opening the app.

See the six diagrams

Improved · Board & shots

The editor is a workbench now

The scenes panel is a navigator now: every scene is a small picture of its board, the scene you are on opens to show its shots under it (click one to fly to it, drag to reorder, fold them away), and a scene's details are a tap away behind its ⓘ, with a back arrow, instead of a form under the list. Connecting a script, importing a screenplay, locking scene numbers and selecting scenes live behind the dots; search appears when you ask for it, or on its own once a production passes twelve scenes.

• The editor is laid out like a tool rather than a web page: the scenes and shots panel is a column beside the canvas instead of a card floating over it, the canvas tools are a strip on its left edge, and a status bar along the foot carries zoom, snap, the pointer mode and what is selected. Every section opens with the same flat tab strip, every panel with the same small header, and the lighting plan's zoom, export and hints sit in a readout strip under the plan, on the share page too.
• A new typeface inside the tool, IBM Plex Sans with its mono beside it, and smaller, tighter controls throughout. Menus and dialogs are solid panels instead of frosted glass, so nothing underneath shows through what you are reading. Your productions list is a list, with the counts in columns.
• Doors and windows stay in the wall: drag one and it seats itself in the nearest wall, centred on it and turned to run along it, at any angle a shaped room has. Before this, a window moved off the wall had no way back, because the grid and the wall did not agree on where the wall was.
• Aiming a lamp no longer lights up every label on the plan as selected text, which also meant the next drag moved the selection instead of the lamp.

New · Lighting · Exports

The lighting plan has a room, and the light behaves like light

A plan now has a room: width and depth in metres, walls you drag into place, doors with their swing, and windows. Click the outer wall to shape it, so an L-shaped kitchen is an L-shaped kitchen. Every plan drawn before this opens exactly as it was, and a room can never be made smaller than what is already standing in it.

• Light falls off with distance, adds where beams cross so a warm key over a cool fill stays warm and cool instead of going grey, and stops at walls, flags and backdrops. A flag on the plan finally flags. A window with a colour temperature is a source: north light through the big window is one thing on the drawing, not a wall plus a pretend lamp.
• Beside the plan, a preview of the subject lit by your rig, recomputed as you move a lamp. Direction from where the lamp stands, elevation from its height, colour from its kelvin, hard or soft from what is on it. Flag the key and the face goes dark. It is a preview, not a render, and it does not predict exposure; what it shows you is the shadow, before the day.
• The PDF is drawn, not photographed. Walls, doors, windows, fixtures, labels, arrows, notes and marks are line art and real text now, crisp at any size and searchable, with the rig list beside the plan instead of squeezed under it. The light itself is the one picture on the page, and the file is a tenth of the size it was.
• You can zoom out past the edge of the plan, and the room's size, walls and windows reach the gear list, so a window that needs diffusion is a grip item without anybody typing it.
• The crew's copy on a share link shows the lit preview beside each plan, and the plan itself is readable on a phone in the editor, where it used to be squeezed to a sliver.
• Fourteen strobes in the fixture catalogue, from a Godox AD200Pro to a Broncolor Scoro pack, quoted in watt-seconds the way a photographer says them. A beauty dish and a five-foot octabox join the grip list.
• "Saved" now says when, on hover: saved to the server at 14:32 and mirrored on this device, and how big the production is against the 30 MB it can be. Past 60% of that the size sits beside the tick so the cap is never met as a refused save with nowhere to go.

Draw a lighting plan

Improved · Days, gear & call sheets · Free tools & site

The call sheet, measured against a real one

The nearest hospital. It belongs to the location rather than to the day, because a unit that moves at lunch changes hospitals at lunch, and it prints twice: once with the place's other facts, once in the emergency box in bold, where somebody looks when it has already gone wrong.

• Tomorrow, at the bottom, derived and never typed. It is the next day in your schedule: its date, its call, how many scenes and where. Nothing to fill in, and nothing printed on the last day, because a shoot that has ended is not a day nobody has planned.
• Cast numbers. Your cast are numbered by first appearance across the whole production, the scene table prints the numbers instead of a wall of names, and the cast table is the key. Number 4 on Monday is still number 4 on Thursday.
• Three times per actor instead of one: pickup, makeup and hair, and on set. A sheet that prints only the on-set call has told somebody on a prosthetics day the wrong time by three hours.
• Crew grouped by department, which you can now set beside their role and which travels with them into your library, so a gaffer you have worked with before comes back already in Electrical. Anyone without one prints at the end under no heading at all.
• Background artists as a line on the day, and the meal promoted out of the timetable into the header, because nobody reads a schedule to find out when lunch is.
• And four guides to go with it: call sheets, shooting schedules, storyboards and lighting plans. What belongs on each, what goes wrong, and worked examples that are computed rather than written, so they cannot drift from what the product actually produces. The lighting one publishes the whole fixture catalogue.
• A free call sheet generator, with no account and no email. Fill in the day, take away the PDF or the text for the group chat, and the schedule works itself out from your setups. It runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is sent anywhere, and the draft is kept locally so a refresh does not lose it. Send it to anybody who has been threatening to build a spreadsheet.
• Fixed while building that: a scene nobody had timed printed 0:00 rather than nothing, on the sheet and in the PDF. Zero is a measurement and this was an absence, which is exactly the thing a call sheet must never blur.

Make a call sheet

Improved · Board & shots

A button that is working says so

Buttons that go and talk to the server now show it. Generate a new link, Stop sharing, Snapshot now, Invite, Move in and a dozen others used to go slightly dim and otherwise sit there, which looks the same as a button that ignored you. They spin while they work, and the spinner takes the icon's place so nothing shifts under your finger.

• A production reopens on the section you left it on. Spend a week in Days and it opens on Days; the one you are still boarding opens on the canvas. Remembered per production and only on your own machine, so nobody else's view moves.
• You can get the sample production back. It arrives with every new account and it was possible to delete it on day one and never see it again, which is a shame when it is the fastest explanation of how any of this works. There is a quiet link under the empty dashboard now.
• Opening a production shows the shape of the editor while it loads instead of a spinner in the middle of nothing, so the interface settles in rather than appearing all at once.

Improved · Resolve, Premiere & co

Frameboard is a menu item in Resolve now

Frameboard has moved into Resolve's own Workspace, Scripts menu. Install it once and you never touch a launcher again: open Resolve, pick Frameboard from the menu, choose a production, press Build. There is no terminal and no black window.

• It asks in a window now, not in a console. The code the first time, then a list of your productions, then a button.
• It runs inside Resolve rather than reaching in from outside, which is the part Blackmagic closed on the free edition. Worth trying whichever edition you have. If Resolve turns it down it says so, and Export, Animatic still gives you the same timeline as a file.
• If your account has more than one production and Resolve cannot open a window to ask which, it stops and lists them rather than guessing and building the wrong one.

New · Resolve, Premiere & co · Exports

The board, where the work happens

Export an animatic. Every shot becomes a clip, in shooting order, held for the length you planned it at, with the scene heading and the shot's own line as markers. It opens in Premiere, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut, and there is an OpenTimelineIO version for everything else. Shots you have not timed are laid at four seconds and marked as guesses rather than passed off as decisions.

• Cards that are not pictures come along too. A scene boarded in notes cuts as an animatic, because a note renders as its own text and a sketch as its strokes.
• DaVinci Resolve, in one command. It downloads the frames, builds the timeline and puts it in the open project in its own bin.
• A Premiere Pro panel. The shot list sits beside the timeline, grouped by scene, and one button imports the animatic.
• Capture One drives the shoot from the shot list: an album per shot, capture naming pointed at the shot you are on, and the storyboard frames downloaded for the Overlay tool.
• And it sends the frames back. Every capture lands on its shot in Frameboard as a take, keeping the camera's own file name, so the board becomes the record of what was actually shot beside what was intended.
• Connecting one is a code, not a password. Press Connect a program in your account, type the eight characters it shows into the program, and it is connected for good on that machine. Disconnect it there and it stops immediately, with nothing else about your account touched.
• The Capture One and Resolve helpers are one double click each, on Mac or Windows. They ask for the code the first time, then show a numbered list of your productions. There is no file to edit and no id to copy out of an address bar.
• Your files come out labelled. Every capture carries the production, the scene and the shot inside it, so importing anywhere gives you a keyword tree instead of a folder of numbers. Raw files get a sidecar, JPEGs get it written inside, because that is where each is read from. There is an option to label a job you already shot, too.
• Lightroom Classic. A plug-in that turns a production into a collection set with a collection per shot, files your photos into them, and sends your picks back onto the board as takes.
• Fixed on the first day anybody tried them: the Windows launchers opened a window that closed again, and connecting could fail with nothing but a number. Both are sorted, and the launchers now say what is wrong instead of vanishing.

Fixed · Board & shots · On set

Six cards stay six cards

Fixed: clicking a card that was already part of a selection threw the rest of the selection away. Select six shots, click one to grab it, drag, and only that one moved. A press with two pixels of trackpad drift counted as that click, so it happened to people who never clicked at all. Clicking a selected card now leaves the selection alone. To go back to working on one card, click the empty board first.

• Fixed: opening On Set from the editor sat on a spinner and never arrived. Leaving the editor saves the production first, and the save was finishing after On Set had already loaded, emptying the page it had just filled. Opening it by its own link always worked, which is why it looked like nothing was wrong with the page itself.
• Fixed: the last edit before you left the editor could come back as a conflict against your own save. Two saves were going out at once and the server was right to refuse the second one, which was the newer of the two. Saves now go one at a time.

Improved · Board & shots

Nothing to figure out

An empty scene now offers three buttons: add a picture, add a note, import a screenplay. It used to name four keyboard shortcuts and nothing was clickable.

• The button that turns a picture into a shot stays visible on the card you have selected, instead of appearing only when your mouse is over it. It also says what it does now: Make this a shot.
• Undo is a button. Delete something and the message that appears carries an Undo you can press, rather than telling you to press Ctrl Z.
• Deleting a scene, a document or a note no longer stops to ask. Those can all be undone, so they just happen and offer the way back. The three things that genuinely cannot be undone still ask, in a proper dialog that names what will go and starts with Cancel selected.
• One click makes a production. The button used to only open a menu; the menu is still there behind the arrow for templates.
• A new production opens with its name selected, so you can just type it.
• Press 1 to 7 to jump between Overview, Canvas, Documents, Lighting, Shots, Gear and Days. Each button in the rail shows its number.
• One word for one thing throughout: productions, scenes, shots. The share page says Scenes where it used to say Boards.

New · Days, gear & call sheets · Board & shots

Pages, pacing, and a canvas that knows what a trackpad is

The recce comes back with pictures. Photos and floor plans now sit on a location, under the scene's location details, with a caption each. They belong to the place rather than the scene, so every scene shooting there sees the same recce.

• Page counts, in eighths. A day is four and three eighths, which is the unit every schedule is actually argued in, and it now sits on the call sheet and beside the day. Measured from the script, so scenes you imported have it and scenes you typed by hand do not. The day total only appears when every scene on it could be measured: a page count that quietly covers four scenes out of six is how a unit runs late.
• A scene's shape in time. One bar above the shot list, one segment per shot, width by duration. Eight three-second shots and a forty-second master now look like what they are, instead of reading as nine shots and 1:02.
• Trackpad mode. Two-finger scroll pans the board and pinch zooms, which is what your hand already expects on a laptop. Off by default, so a mouse wheel still zooms the way it always has. The button is next to snap-to-grid.
• Drag a card's edge to change one dimension. Widening a note used to mean dragging a corner, which made it taller too, and then putting the height back from another corner.
• Everyone on a lighting plan gets their own colour, and keeps it in every scene. Two people used to be two identical green dots.
• Fixed: dragging a card's top edge past its minimum height made the card creep up the board instead of stopping.

Improved · Working together

Name somebody by picking them, and print the link

Type @ in a note and the people on the production appear. Arrows move, Enter picks. Before this you had to type the address exactly, and one wrong character meant the mention reached nobody while you got on with your day believing you had told them.

• Notes on a shoot day, not only on shots and scenes. The parking is wrong, the sun goes behind the block at four, lunch is moving: things about the day rather than any one shot now have somewhere to live. Anyone you have shared the production with can write one, including read-only viewers.
• A share link prints properly. It used to come out either as a solid block of ink or, with your browser's usual settings, as a blank sheet, because the page is dark and the text is nearly white. It now prints on white paper with the floating bar, the tabs and the sign-off buttons left off, and nothing clipped.
• Interior against exterior, day against night, at the top of the shooting script. Counted in shots as well as scenes, because one night exterior with eleven shots costs more than three interiors with two each, and a scene count would tell you the opposite.
• Fixed: the gear list on a share link showed Grip twice and never showed sound, so anything you typed under Grip printed twice and the radio mics were missing from the packing list your crew reads.

New · Working together

The client can say yes

Sign-off on a share link. Send a producer or a client the usual link and they can approve the storyboard, the script, the shot list, the lighting plans or the whole plan, or send any of them back with a note saying what needs another pass. They type their name once and the link remembers it.

• Their answer comes back to you in two places: the share panel, and the production overview under what needs attention, with the note they wrote. Three weeks later you can still say which version everyone agreed to.
• Not a signature and not pretending to be one. A link is the only credential involved, so a row means someone holding this link said yes on this date, which is what a production actually needs.
• Sound joins the packing list. Booms, radio mics and playback speakers now come off the shots that ask for them, the same way lenses come off the shot list and lamps off the lighting plans.

New · Board & shots

A shot remembers what it used to be

Keep a plan before you change it, and the shot carries its history: v1 a 35mm static, v2 a 50mm dolly, v3 an 85mm handheld. Restore any of them and the plan comes back. What you were about to lose gets kept first, so restore is never the button that costs you an afternoon.

• Only the plan versions. The shot number, its status and its takes stay exactly where they are, because going back to an older idea about a lens should never undo the record of what you actually shot.
• Deliberate, not automatic. Nothing is kept unless you keep it, so a shot nobody has rethought has no history to scroll past.

New · Days, gear & call sheets

A call sheet with the rest of the day on it

Weather, sunrise and sunset, transport, and a contacts and emergencies block: who to ring and where the nearest A&E is. Folded away until you want them, because a production planning next March needs none of it and the same production the night before needs all of it.

• Individual calls. The gaffer pre-rigs at six and the cast are in makeup at half seven; both print on the sheet, and everyone without their own time is on crew call without a word spent saying so.
• Nothing you have not filled in ever prints. An empty Weather line on a call sheet is a question wearing the clothes of an answer.

New · Days, gear & call sheets · Working together

Cast the film, and a bell for what concerns you

Characters can now be cast. ANNA is the script's invention; Sophie Janssen is a real person with a phone number and a call time. Fill in who plays whom under Days, and the call sheet says both: ANNA, Sophie Janssen, call 07:30. Actors with their own call print it; everyone else is crew call.

• A bell, beside your account in the editor and on your production list. Someone mentions you, replies to your thread, or resolves your note, and it is there when you are back, with a line of what they said. Click through and you land on the thing itself.

New · Days, gear & call sheets

The day writes its own timetable

A shoot day now lays itself out: crew call, setup, each scene at its estimated length, company moves, the meal, and the wrap the arithmetic lands on. 07:00 call, 07:30 scene 14, 10:30 company move, 12:00 lunch, 12:45 estimated wrap, computed from the scenes you already put on the day.

• Scene estimates come from the shot count at the day's pace, 15 minutes a shot unless you say otherwise. Set the pace per day, or type minutes straight onto a scene when you know it is a morning, and your number is kept.
• Insert a setup, move, meal or break after any scene with one click. Moves carry a note, so the sheet can say where the vans go. The wrap is always labelled an estimate, because it is one.
• The call sheet prints the timetable, in the PDF and in the copy-to-chat text.

New · Board & shots

The production's front page

A new Overview section: what is happening, how much is done, and what needs attention, on one screen. Shooting today with its call time, shots done against planned, gear packed, every pickup listed, open notes, and scenes the script changed under. Each number is a door to the thing it counts.

• Locations grew up. A place now holds what the scout learned: address, contact, access, parking, load-in, restrictions, power, noise, permits and notes. Fill it in once, in the scene sidebar, and every scene at that place shares it. The call sheet prints the four facts a unit acts on at six in the morning: address, access, parking, power.

New · On set

Run the shoot from the shot list

On Set. Open a production at /set, or from the clapperboard in the toolbar, and it becomes the day's running order: one shot at a time, its frame, its numbers, its notes, and a Shot button that marks it done and moves to the next one still owed. Built for a phone in a car park, so the buttons are big and nothing animates.

• Every shot now has a place in the production: planned, ready, shooting, shot, needs pickup, or scrapped. Set it from the card, the shot list or On Set, filter the list by it, and read the day at a glance: 1 / 5 shot, 1 pickup, 3 left. Shots you scrap stop counting against you.
• Takes. Log one with a tap as it happens, or type them in after. Each take carries its number, good, maybe or NG, a few words about why, and a circle for the one to print, which is the mark the edit starts from.
• A shot can carry its full camera setup when you want it to: body, frame rate, shutter, iris, ISO, ND, resolution, codec, aspect and focus. Every field optional, tucked away until used, so making a card is still two seconds. Sound needs and continuity notes too, and all of it is searchable, so the pickup three weeks later can find which hand the glass was in.
• The shot list CSV carries whatever production columns you actually used, and the printed PDF says where the day got to.

Improved · Account & plans

The company's work has its own list

Productions a workspace owns now sit under a Workspace tab on your production list, instead of being mixed in with your own and marked with a small badge. Your list is yours, the company's list is the company's, and archived still holds both.

New · Board & shots

Take cards from one scene to another

Copy and paste, the way it works everywhere else. Select cards, Ctrl+C, open another scene, Ctrl+V. Right-click a card for Copy and Cut, or right-click empty board to paste where you clicked.

• Whatever you copied keeps its arrangement and any connectors drawn between the cards. Shots renumber themselves for the scene they land in, so nothing arrives with two shot 4s.
• It carries between two tabs of the same production. Photos and clips stay with the production they were uploaded to, and a paste that leaves any behind says so.

New · Lighting · Exports

Hand the lighting plan to the gaffer

Download the plan as a PDF, with the rig list printed under the diagram: every lamp, its beam, its colour temperature, its height and what it is going through. On white paper, because that is what it gets printed on. There is a PNG button too.

• The fixture list went from a token gesture to 102 lamps, across every budget. Godox and Neewer and Amaran through Aputure and Nanlux and Kino Flo up to SkyPanels, M-series HMIs and 5K Seniors, plus tungsten fresnels, tubes, practicals, and the poly, flags and frames that fill the rest of the van.
• It is grouped by what it costs to get hold of rather than by manufacturer, because that is how people actually think about kit: what I own, what I own for work, what I hire. Search matches the name, the maker, the wattage or the type, so typing 600 or arri or tube all get you somewhere.

Improved · Lighting

Lighting plans that say what is actually rigged

Pick the lamp instead of typing it. A short list of the fixtures that turn up on real jobs, from a 600d to an M18 to a 4x8 poly. Choosing one names it properly, brings its wattage, and gives you a beam angle to start from. Anything not on the list still works exactly as it did.

• Height, as a field. A plan is drawn from above, so height is the one thing the drawing physically cannot show, and it used to live buried in the note where nothing could read it. It is on the plan under the lamp now.
• What the light goes through: softbox, diffusion, silk, bounce, book, grid, snoot, barn doors, cookie, gel. The grade still goes in the note. This says there is one, and puts the frame on the packing list, because three sources through silk need three silks.
• Backdrops. Put a wall, a cyc or a green screen behind the subject and drag it where it goes. The plan finally shows where the room ends instead of lamps floating in nothing, and the heaviest thing on the truck is on the list.
• New Grip section on the gear list, fed by all of the above. Heads in one place, frames and backdrops in another, which is how they are packed.

New · Working together

Notes on the shot itself

Right-click any card and leave a note on it. Somebody replies, you resolve it, and it stays with the shot instead of scrolling away in a group chat. A badge on the card counts what is still open.

• Name somebody with @ and their address and they get an email with what you actually wrote in it. Only people already on the production can be named.
• People you shared with read-only can leave notes too. That is the point of showing a producer or a client the board, and they still cannot change the film.
• Productions move in and out of a workspace now. Anything you made before setting the company up can be brought in, and taken back out again.

New · Account & plans · Working together

Workspaces, for companies

Name your company and everyone you add works inside it. Productions you start belong to the company rather than to you, so nobody takes four films with them when they leave.

• One kit list, one crew list, one set of locations, shared by everybody. Add a light once and it is there on the next production and the one after.
• Three roles. Admins run the workspace and have full rights on every production in it. Editors plan. Viewers read everything without a share link, and viewers are free, however many of them there are.
• Your seat count is on the account page, next to your plan, showing the number your invoice will carry. Admins and editors take a seat. Somebody you add to four productions is one seat, not four.

Improved · Free tools & site

Easier to get around

The demo production is in the top bar now, not just the footer. It is the fastest answer to what this is, and it was buried.

• Articles open with a way back to the writing and close with the other three, so finishing one no longer means reaching for the back button.
• On a phone, the way in follows you down the page instead of living at the top of it.

Fixed · Lighting · Board & shots

Three fixes

A light you let go of stays where you left it. If the mouse button came up somewhere the page could not hear it, off the edge of the window, during an alt-tab, behind a right-click menu, whatever you were dragging kept following the cursor around the plan afterwards. Every drag in Frameboard now notices that the button is no longer down and stops there.

• Select several marks at once. Drag a box around them, or click one and Shift click the rest, then Delete. Six arrows used to mean six hovers and six clicks on six little crosses.
• The shot list keeps its half of the panel. On a production with thirty scenes the scene list took the whole sidebar and the shot list was left with a header. Both lists now scroll inside their own share of it.

New · Board & shots

Draw on the board

Press A, or pick the arrow in the toolbar, and draw. Freehand, the way you would with a marker on a printed board: sweep an arrow from one shot to the next, curve it for a crane move, ring the corner of the frame you mean. Then type the words, because the words are the point: pan in, whip left, she exits right.

• An arrow head appears on the end of anything that went somewhere, and not on anything that came back to where it started. Sweeping a line between two shots is pointing; drawing a ring around a detail is not, and it would look daft with a head on it.
• Press without moving and you get a pinned note, for anything that is about a spot on the board rather than a card on it.
• Marks travel with the production. Anyone you share the link with sees what you drew and reads what you wrote, which is the entire reason to draw it.

Improved · Board & shots

Select several scenes at once

Ctrl click a scene in the sidebar to tick it, Shift click to take the whole run between. The usual keys, doing the usual thing. A plain click still just opens the scene.

• Then Delete, from the bar at the top of the list, the bin on any ticked row, or the Delete key. Cutting six scenes is one action and one Ctrl Z, not six of each.
• A production always keeps its last scene, so selecting everything and pressing Delete says so instead of leaving you with nothing.

New · Script · Board & shots

Scene numbers that follow the order, until you lock them

Move a scene and its number moves with it. While a film is still soft, numbering it by hand was busywork and getting it wrong made the plan contradict itself. Once the script has gone out, the opposite is true, so there is a lock in the scenes panel: numbers pin where they are, an inserted scene arrives as 12A instead of shoving everything down, and a deleted one leaves its gap. Productions you already have keep every number they were given.

• Ask what references what. Click a place, a person, a lens or a day and see every scene that mentions it, with the shot count, the running time and which days it shoots on. Then keep going: from a location to the people lit there, from a person to the places they work.
• Why a shot exists, in your words. A free-text line on the back of the card, carried onto the shot list, the CSV and the shooting script. It is never a dropdown and nothing here reads it, sorts by it or has an opinion about it.
• Import a screenplay and the production learns its cast from the script's own character cues, so the lighting plans suggest the right people from the first scene.
• The Script changed badge now shows you what changed, line by line, instead of sending you off to reread a draft. You decide when the new words become the record.
• A screenplay on your own disk is a connected script too, not a one-way import. Frameboard asks for the file again when you press Check, because a browser cannot reopen it on its own, and then runs exactly the same comparison a linked Google Doc gets.
• Arrow keys nudge whatever is selected, Shift moves it a full grid square, and Enter opens the one card you have selected. Every dialog now holds focus instead of letting Tab wander onto the canvas behind it.
• Table cards are retired. Everything they were used for has a better home now, so no new ones appear, and any you already have carry a Move to Documents button. Nothing moves unless you press it.

New · Days, gear & call sheets

Shoot days, the crew, and a call sheet that writes itself

A new Days tab. Frameboard already knew the order your scenes happen in and how long they run; now it knows the order you shoot them in, which is the only one the crew actually experiences. Make a day, put scenes on it, and it adds up the shots, the running time, the locations and the gear for that day alone.

• Which means the call sheet is mostly already written. Everything on it that the plan knows is read from the plan: the scenes in shooting order, the sluglines, shot counts, running times, locations, who is in each scene and what has to be in the van. The only things you type are the ones nobody could derive, and they live on the day itself: the date, the crew call, the unit base and any notes.
• Take it as a PDF, or copy it as plain text and paste it into the group chat, which is how half of all units are actually told the plan.
• A crew list, on the Days tab. These are the people making the film, not the characters in it, and the two were never the same thing. Roles are free text because a spark and an electrician are the same job and a DIT does not exist on a two-person shoot.
• Deleting a day never deletes its scenes. They go back to being unscheduled, and one undo puts the whole thing back.

New · Board & shots · Lighting

Frameboard remembers between productions

Your library: the kit you own, the lighting setups you reuse, the crew you work with and the places you keep going back to, remembered by your account instead of by one production. Until now every film started completely empty, so the same kit list got rebuilt and the same three-point setup was placed from scratch every time. Open it from the toolbar or with Ctrl K.

• Lighting setups are the useful half. Build a plan you like, press Save this setup on the lighting tab, name it, and it is yours for every job after this one. Drop it onto any scene and the fixtures arrive where you put them, with their angles, beam widths and colour temperatures intact. The subject comes across as a subject rather than as this film's character, because the next one is somebody else.
• It knows the same names you do. Save The Kitchen and it recognises kitchen and KITCHEN as the same place, exactly the way a production already does, so nothing arrives twice under a different spelling.
• Renaming something in the library changes it for the productions you start next. Films you have already planned keep what they were given, because a finished plan is a record of what you decided at the time.
• The library is part of Pro.

Improved · Exports · Account & plans

Every export, on every plan

The shot list, the storyboard and the shooting script now export as PDF whatever plan you are on. Holding those back never made sense: the PDF is the thing a crew actually holds, and a plan that hands them a spreadsheet instead is not a free plan, it is a broken one. A PDF made on the free plan carries one line in the page footer saying it was planned in Frameboard, next to the date it was generated. Paid plans remove it.

• Archiving a production now genuinely makes room for the next one. Two pages told you it would and the app counted archived productions anyway, so a free account that archived one and tried to start the next was refused by a product that had just suggested it. Archived work still opens, still exports and comes back whenever you want it, and nothing has to be deleted to start a new film.
• The number of people who can edit one production is now part of the plan: three on Free, ten on Pro, no limit on Studio. Anyone you send a read-only share link to is free and never counted, and so is anyone invited as a viewer, so the whole crew can still read the boards.
• Prices for launch have moved. Pro is 19 euro a month, or 15 a month billed yearly. Studio is now priced per editor rather than as one flat fee, from three editors up. Nothing is charged yet and the beta stays free.

Improved · Script · Lighting

People and places the production knows

The people on your lighting plans are now people your production has, not names retyped per scene. Anna on scene 4 and ANNA on scene 9 are one person: rename her once and every plan follows, and the name field suggests everyone the production already knows.

• Which means a question that had no answer now has one. Press Ctrl K and type a name to find every scene that person is lit in, or a place to find where it shoots.
• A location is now a thing your production has, not a word typed on each scene. Rename it once and every scene, slugline, shot list and export follows, because they were all reading the same place all along.
• Type a place you already have and Frameboard recognises it, however you spell it that day: the kitchen, The Kitchen and KITCHEN are one location, and the scene adopts the spelling you first chose. The field also suggests every place the production knows as you type.
• Existing productions get their locations the moment you open them, with differently-spelled duplicates folded together. Nothing to do, nothing lost.

Improved · Script

Acts, the way drafts actually write them

Scripts written in Google Docs or Word rarely speak Fountain: acts are plain lines like "Act 1: Prologue", and scene numbers sit at the right margin as "SCENE 12". The import and the connected script now read both. Acts become folders in the scene list, the numbers on the page become the scene numbers on the board, and the horizontal lines between acts stay out of your scenes.

• When a connected script grows a new scene inside an existing act, the scene files itself into that act's folder instead of arriving loose.
• Fixed: a long scene imported from a script was cut off inside its note card until you happened to edit it. Imported notes are now born as tall as their text.

New · Script

The connected script

Your screenplay can now live where you write it. Paste a Google Docs link in the scenes panel and the production connects to it: scenes arrive boarded, and the doc stays the one source of the writing. The document needs link sharing set to viewable, and that is the whole setup: no account connection, nothing installed.

• When the draft changes, press Check. Frameboard reads the doc again and tells you what moved: which scenes changed, what is new, what is no longer there. Changed scenes wear a small mark in the scene list until you have read the new draft and click it away. Nothing is ever re-boarded, rewritten or deleted for you. The board is yours, the script is the writer's, and the link keeps them honest with each other.
• New scenes in the draft arrive as new boards with the scene text attached, exactly like an import, but without the download-export-import lap.

New · Board & shots

The production remembers

Every production now keeps its own history. The first save of each day banks a snapshot automatically, and you can name a version yourself before trying something drastic: the history button in the toolbar, or just type snapshot into the palette.

• Restoring is never a one-way door. The moment before a restore is kept as its own snapshot, so going back can always be gone back on.
• Exported PDFs now say when they were generated, on every page. A printout in the truck can be days old; now it admits it.

New · Board & shots

Find anything

Press Ctrl K (⌘K on a Mac) anywhere in the editor and start typing. Scenes, shots, notes, captions, comments, documents and gear are all one search away: type a lens and find the shots that use it, type half a line you remember writing and land on the card that holds it.

• The same box runs the editor: new note, new sketch, zoom to fit, present, switch views, switch theme. Every action tells you its shortcut, so the palette teaches the keyboard as you use it.

Improved · Board & shots

Small things that were in the way

Reopening a production now lands on the scene you left, not scene one.

• Scene search understands sluglines: typing INT, night or a location finds the scene as surely as its title.
• Naming a new sequence happens in the panel itself instead of a browser popup.
• The shot header's metadata line is brighter and easier to read over busy images.
• The gear page now explains renaming and bunching where you would look for it.

New · Days, gear & call sheets

The gear checklist

A production that has been boarded already knows most of its equipment, so the new Gear section writes the packing list for you: every lens on the shot list and every instrument on the lighting plans appears automatically, with the scenes that need it. Change a shot's lens and the list follows.

• Add the rest by hand: grip, sound, filtration, expendables. Tick things off as they go in the van; the ticks are shared with everyone on the production, and the read-only crew link shows what is already packed.
• One button unchecks everything for the next job.
• Asked for in the beta portal, built the same week: image and text in one card. Select a reference, add a caption underneath, and annotating a moodboard stops taking a note card and a connector per image. The image is never cropped by its words, and captions travel onto the shared crew page.
• Gear items can be named for what is physically in the case: rename 50mm to Helios 44-2, or give 45, 50 and 70mm the same name and they fold into one 24-70mm zoom line. One case, one tick.
• The document editor also grew a real formatting kit yesterday evening: three heading sizes, underline, strikethrough, a highlighter, inline code and divider lines, all of which survive onto the shared page.
• Fixed: typing a caption under an image hid every line above the one being written, leaving an empty stretch below. The text box now grows with its text, and a saved caption opens fully visible.
• Fixed: the options inside dropdown menus, shot sizes among them, could be nearly unreadable on Windows when the browser theme and the app theme disagreed. They now follow the app theme everywhere.

New · Board & shots · Lighting · Free tools & site

Sequences, spike marks and a new face

Frameboard is now in private beta. Signup runs on invites; leave your email on the waitlist and invites go out in small batches. Beta users get their own portal with announcements, feature voting and a direct line for bug reports.

• Scenes can be grouped into sequences: acts, shoot days, montages. They behave like folders in the scene list, open and close with a click, and the grouping follows the production everywhere it goes, from the script view to the shot list PDF and CSV. Importing a screenplay turns its sections straight into sequences.
• Spike marks on lighting plans: the X of tape that says stand here or come in through there. Drag them into place, label them, and give them a colour. Subjects, notes and arrows can wear the same colours, so everything about one actor reads as one thread, on your screen and on the crew's shared plan.
• Headlines across the site are set in Clash Display now, and the small print grew up: every label and menu in the app is a size larger, because squinting at a shot list is not a feature.
• The scene and shot lists were resurfaced: softer rows, quieter fields, proper disclosure folders. Less Windows 95, more cutting room.
• Your account page gained a Change plan section, so switching plans has a home. Until checkout opens, choosing a paid plan records your interest and nothing is charged.
• Productions with collaborators now get a short Monday recap by email: which shared productions moved and by how much. Solo productions never send one, and it respects the unsubscribe like everything else.
• Fixed: sign-in could silently stall if the captcha token expired while the form sat open, or if the connection hung. Both now explain themselves and hand the button back.

New · Working together

Live collaboration, a warmer editor and a faster everything

Real-time editing is on, free for every plan while it is in beta. A collaborator's change lands in front of you in a fraction of a second, their cursor moves like a hand instead of a machine, and if the connection drops the app quietly falls back to the old sync so nothing is ever lost.

• The editor moved to European servers. For most of our users every action lost a round trip across the Atlantic; saves and updates are several times faster now.
• The editor chrome was rebuilt as floating smoked glass. Scenes and shots share one panel on the left that you can collapse, drag anywhere and park; the canvas runs edge to edge behind everything.
• Typing in notes, comments and tables is saved while you type. A closed tab mid-sentence no longer loses the sentence.
• Viewers are genuinely read-only now, on the canvas as well as in the documents, and say so in the toolbar.
• The dashboard loads far less code, images on distant zoom load their small versions instead of the originals, and exports fetch the PDF engine only when you export.
• Every page now shares a proper preview card, the icon matches the brand, and email support has a visible address in the footer and the Help Center.

Improved · Free tools & site · Board & shots

The redesign: Frameboard looks like Frameboard

The whole site and the app moved onto one design language: a warm near-black, the bracket wordmark, and an accent chosen for the job rather than inherited from an operating system. It is the red of a record lamp, and it only ever means live, active or locked.

• The editor became a canvas with glass floating on it. Your work runs edge to edge; the panels hover above it instead of boxing it in.
• Shot headers read like slates now: the number boxed, the metadata in mono. Cards became frames, with tighter corners and a calmer selection ring.
• The theme switch works for signed-out visitors too, and every screen finally has a route home, including the editor.
• The public demo and shared productions wear the same chrome as the app, so what you send a client looks like what you use.
• Fixed: notes grow with their text instead of clipping it, floating panels no longer overlap on the left, and a layout bug that could swallow the canvas and minimap entirely.

New · Board & shots

Templates, present mode and time budgets

Ten templates across six categories, and every one is a working board rather than a stub: music video, commercial, short, documentary, wedding, brand film.

• Present mode: press P and the scenes go full screen with no editor around them, for pitching a board across a table.
• Scene time budgets. Give a scene a target runtime and the shot list measures against it: 0:38 of 0:30, in red when you are over. The commercial template ships as a budgeted 30-second beat sheet.
• Every production can carry a colour palette now, and it is drawn on the wrap card.
• A Help Center at /help, written as answers rather than a manual.
• Gifting Pro to someone now actually tells them by email, and extends rather than resets if you do it twice.

Improved · Board & shots

Storage, speed and a production to start from

Reference images now live in their own storage rather than inside the production file. Boards are no longer capped at roughly sixty images, saving is much faster on a large moodboard, and exports use the full-resolution original.

• New accounts start with a sample production: one scene, two shots already boarded, and a shot list that exports.
• Boards now frame their contents when you open them, instead of dropping you at the origin.
• Dragging a card on a busy board is substantially faster. Every card on the scene was redrawing on every frame of a drag.
• Lighter pages. The marketing and dashboard animations no longer pull in an animation library, which took about 42 KB off every visit, and they now respect the reduced-motion setting.
• Text that sat below the accessible contrast minimum has been corrected throughout, in both light and dark themes.

Fixed · Account & plans

Security and correctness

Collaborator invites are rate limited per sender and per recipient, and a repeat invite to the same address no longer sends another email.

• Production saves are rate limited.
• Closed a gap in the image-import URL filter that could reach internal addresses.
• Undo history is capped, so a long session no longer grows without bound.
• Signed-out visitors no longer trigger a failed request on the marketing pages.

New · Account & plans · Board & shots

Email verification and media

Confirm your email address to share productions and invite collaborators.

• GIFs and short clips can be dropped onto a board as moving references.
• Deleting a clip now returns its space to your allowance.
• Branded email templates for password resets and confirmations.

New · Lighting · Account & plans

Light mode and lighting plans

A light theme, switchable from the account menu.

• Top-down lighting plans per scene, with key, fill, back, practicals, bounce and flags.
• Password reset by email.