Innovative Storyboarding Software for Professionals

THE ONLY SOFTWARE DESIGNED TO FIX IT IN PREP™

What Fix it in Prep™ Means...

The biggest avoidable expense (and wasted opportunity!) on any film or video project is having your cast and crew stand around while you figure out your next shot... or when you have the worst kind of surprise, when you need to scramble to come up with replacements for shots you'd already planned but which turn out to be impossible to shoot.

This might be because your boards used forced perspective that looked good, but which wasn't actually accurate; it could be because the shot would require a lens you don't have, or you'd have to put the camera through a wall in order to get the shot you wanted or any of a myriad other reasons.

When you prep with FrameForge's virtual film studio, however, all of these kinds of problems instantly become self-evident. Try to set up a shot that isn't possible, and you'll find out as you're doing it, inspiring you to find solutions while prepping the shoot, not during it.

All of this means that unlike all of the other pre-production methods out there, FrameForge's optical accuracy will guarantee that the shots you've prepped are absolutely possible to shoot, while also giving your crew the data needed to get them.

Another small surprise: this isn't the original poster, but was recreated in FrameForge!

In fact, the ability to Fix it in Prep was what drove Academy Award-Winning Director, Mike van Diem to prep his film The Surprise in FrameForge.

On my film, The Surprise, I used FrameForge to extensively pre-visualize scenes that looked like technical challenges, and thus keep ‘surprises’ on the set to a minimum.

One of the most complex, challenging and certainly the most expensive sequence in the film involved a fast runaway truck coming down a steep city hill, dodging traffic while passing eleven street crossings. The sequence needed to be shot in just two days on a hill in Wuppertal, Germany that presented the desired architecture and steepness but offered only two crossings.

This meant we had to extend the hill with a serious amount of CGI. In order to be able to responsibly budget the great number of VFX shots looking up or down the hill, I decided to build the entire city set with 11 crossings, including a huge building pit at the bottom of the hill in SketchUp Pro. I broke up the set in four segments, imported them in FrameForge where I ‘glued’ them back together again as one big set.

It all worked like a charm, we wrapped the sequence on time, and you can see how exact the previs was in this comparison between the FrameForge boards and actual frames.

In addition, the software did more than just solving a huge number of potential technical problems for us, FrameForge also allowed me to really explore every scene I used it on in ways I never could have without it.

By being able to move the camera around on my virtual “locations,” it always inspired me to push past my initial ideas for shots to find even more effective ones.

Thanks for a great program,

Mike van Diem
Academy Award® winning director