Shot Designer is intended to plan your movie scenes in advance. The program integrates camera diagrams, shot lists and storyboards instead of supporting just one of the components of camera blocking. The tool is quite easy to use, even if it is your first time; besides, it comes with a sample project to give you an idea of what working with it should be like. Moreover, you can teach yourself to use it via some video tutorials.
Shot Designer has a rather intuitive interface. Most of its space is a blank canvas to which you can add the different elements, such as characters, cameras, lighting, props, sets and annotations. Fortunately, it is possible to animate moving elements, like characters and cameras. Finally, you can also attach shot lists to camera diagrams. In this regard, your list can contain such data as shot number, version, nickname, description, shot type, lens, gear and crew.
When designing a storyboard, it is allowed to set accurate camera angles, thanks to the possibility of importing data from Director’s Viewfinder or Storyboard. You can also import different background images and blueprints, which you can use as a basis for your set plans. Similarly, the tool supports attaching stills to cameras to have a more vivid idea of the resulting shots. Regrettably, you cannot plan switches between sensor sizes, so you will not be able to take advantage of this feature present in modern cameras.
Luckily, Shot Designer is cross-platform, and there are versions for portable devices. This facilitates sharing your project with other participants irrespective of the type of device they use. Finally, when working in teams, it is possible to decide who owns each scene.
In general, Shot Designer is highly recommended to plan movie scenes. Fortunately, there is a free version that you can use on a single scene at a time. Thus, by upgrading the product to the Pro version, you can benefit from unlimited scenes, file management, synchronizing across devices, team sharing and document export; which I recommend as the Pro version is quite affordable.
