ShotPlots

About

Built to one rule, and judged against it every time.

The rule: from a blank app, draw a six-by-four-metre room, place one camera, three lights with fixture names and heights, and two actors, then export a PDF. Under five minutes. First time. No documentation.

Every feature was measured against that sentence. Anything that slowed it down was cut rather than added, which is why there is no login screen, no onboarding tour, no template gallery and no project dashboard. You land on a grid and you draw.

Why not just use CAD?

Because a floor plan for a shoot is not a construction drawing. It has to be right enough to rig from and quick enough to redraw when the location changes at nine o'clock the night before. Professional lighting CAD is superb, costs orders of magnitude more, and nobody learns it in an afternoon.

And because the alternative most people actually use is a printed template and a pencil. That works until the plan has to change.

Why no accounts and no cloud?

Because the plan is not the valuable thing, the PDF you hand over is. Once the shared artefact is a file, an account buys you nothing and costs you a login screen, a password reset, a privacy policy with teeth, and a service that can go down on a shoot day.

So nothing you draw ever leaves your machine. The app runs in your browser, your work is a file on your own disk, and no plan is transmitted anywhere. That also means it keeps working in a basement with no signal, which is where a surprising amount of prep happens.

Why one payment?

Prep is bursty. You draw plans hard for two weeks and then not at all for three months. A subscription would be charging you for the quiet months. Nineteen dollars, once, drops the export watermark and lets you send the whole project as one PDF. That is the end of the transaction.

Who made it

One person, not a company: someone who kept redrawing the same room on the back of a call sheet until it was quicker to build this. There is no team page because there is no team.

If something is wrong with it, you are writing to the person who wrote it: send a message.

See what it makes