With the help of these free and paid filmmaking apps, you are ought to make cinematic, professional films no matter where you are on your filmmaking journey.
Film Production can be a little complex for young and independent filmmakers, especially for the self-learned ones. However, with the help of smartphones, filmmaking has gotten smarter.
There are a number of apps as aids for filmmakers for every stage of production – apps for organization, for technical aid, for collaboration, and the list goes on. These apps make filmmakers’ jobs easy by providing them with solutions to many of their problems in one single pocket.
One of the most intricate parts of filmmaking, in our opinion, lies in its technical aspects. Given that most new and independent filmmakers start with making films on DSLRs, and even on their phones, they particularly have to deal with a lot of technical details with a ‘hit and trial' approach. This is an especially hands-on approach when it comes to cinematography.
To help them make better filmmaking choices, today we are mentioning some great smartphone apps that will make the filmmaking process much easier for them.
1. Shot Lister
Creators of this extremely helpful app know that shooting a film never goes to plan. In addition, they realize that there ought to be last-minute revisions in the script and how important shot listing is. Shot Lister allows to easily organize & store hundreds of scenes & thousands of shots with the flick of a finger. This is also the only software available to easily create a shooting schedule on a shot-by-shot & minute by minute basis. These are just a few of the many features the app offers that make your production seamlessly easy.
Available on: App Store (iOS), Play Store (Android)
Price: Free
Scriptation is a script reading and annotating app. It can be really annoying to make last-minute changes or notes to the script, yet it is inevitable. Scriptation helps you make this otherwise tiresome process very smooth. This widely popular among Oscar and Emmy-winning film professionals app comes with a broad set of features. Its simple-to-use annotation tools, ability to transfer notes in seconds, make separate layers for separate meeting notes, among many others, make it a very lovable software by the industry professionals as well as young and indie filmmakers.
Available on: App Store (iOS)
Price: Free
This time-tested, industry-standard tool helps in calculating the depth-of-field during the shoots. That’s not it. Designed by a working camera technician who understands that photography calculations must be done quickly, simply, and on the run, pCam helps in calculating the focal length, calculate aperture required to keep two objects in focus, pick camera lenses based on your still shots, and offers up to 26 core functions to make cinematography and photography a delightful experience for you.
Available on: App Store (iOS)
Price: $29.99
This Emmy Award-winning software, which also happens to be the first digital viewfinder for smartphones, comes with a plethora of features that make it Academy Award-winning directors’ and cinematographers’ favorite. This is a great tool for location scouting as it allows to record videos, trim the ends, and add custom title cards. It helps people line up shots that become the world’s favorite moments in film and television with many more fabulous features.
Available on: App Store (iOS)
Price: $29.99
A sibling of Artemis Pro, Helios Pro is a light-tracking app designed for photographers, cinematographers, and designers. The app allows you to pinpoint the position of the sun, moon, and the stars and its AR (Augmented Reality) and light simulation magic helps visualize exactly what shots will look like at any location, at any time of the year or day, and You can see precisely how light will illuminate and the shadows will fall.
Available on: App Store (iOS)
Price: $29.99
Green-screen shoots can be tricky, majorly in terms of lighting. With the Green Screener app in your phone, you don’t need light-meters and waveform monitors anymore as this app shows you exactly how your green screen is, giving you the power to do literally perfect green screen using just your phone or tablet.
Available on: App Store (iOS), Play Store (Android)
Price: $9.99
This comprehensive solar tracking and compass app helps cinematographers and photographers to find the sun exposure, directions, sun shadow & sunrise sunset times for any location. It allows them to plan according to the golden hour or blue hour & optimal sunlight conditions, sunrise & sunset times & directions by showing the sun’s hourly direction intervals, its equinox, winter & summer solstice paths, sunrise-sunset times, twilight times, sun shadow, the golden hour & more.
Available on: App Store (iOS), Play Store (Android)
Price: $9.99
This one-of-a-kind app lets lighting production personnel browse, search, and compare more than 1,700 gel color filters made by the most popular manufacturers. It helps filmmakers search for gels by name or number, sort gels by number or how they're arranged in the physical swatchbook, compare similar and complementary colors, among many other useful features.
Available on: App Store (iOS)
Price: $9.99
Clinometer is the most precise slope measurement tool that can be used for simple applications like aligning a frame and for more sophisticated fields of applications where an arbitrary slope needs to be measured exactly. Most filmmakers use it to determine at which times the sun will be at a certain elevation, which is a great aid on recce as well on shoot days.
Available on: App Store (iOS)
Price: $1.99
The FLICKERfree Calculator is a handy tool to calculate the proper camera speed and shutter angle combinations for flicker-free film or digital cinematography. It is especially useful when using HMI or fluorescent lighting. With an attractive interface, this app is very easy to use.
Available on: App Store (iOS)
Price: Free
FiLMiC Pro is the most advanced cinema video camera for mobile, making it a great app for mobile filmmakers. Don’t have a camera, or can’t rent one? That shouldn’t stop you from telling great stories with stunning visuals. FiLMiC Pro provides filmmakers, newscasters, teachers, vloggers, and artists with the capability to shoot in a true LOG gamma curve which allows for greater tonal range and flexibility in post-production by expanding the dynamic range by up to 2.5 extra stops and setting your phone’s capabilities on par with traditional camera systems costing thousands more.
Available on: App Store (iOS), PlayStore (Android)
Price: $14.99
Shot Designer makes it ridiculously easy to block complex scenes, complete with Camera Diagram, Animation, Shot List, Storyboards, Director's Viewfinder, and Sync & Team Sharing. The app knows how Directing works and does most of the work for you -- like automatically moving cameras when you move characters.
Available on: App Store (iOS), Play Store (Android)
Price: $19.99
Essentially a weather forecast app, Dark Sky is a great tool for on-location filmmaking. This app specializes in delivering forecasts for your precise locations giving you minute-by-minute predictions for the next hour and hour-by-hour forecasts for the next week. Its accurate forecast allows filmmakers to plan accordingly during recce and even on shoot days. With this app handy, you won’t be able to say, “We didn’t see it coming!”.
Available on: App Store (iOS)
Price: $3.99
These are some of our favorite apps for filmmaking that are extremely helpful for all kinds of big, small, and medium filmmakers.
Do you know of any other great apps that we didn’t cover in this list? Let us know and we’ll be happy to share them with our community.
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