Recently, Joao Lutz emailed me about a new app he wrote that helps media creators plan their next project. It’s called Beat and I found it so unique and interesting that I interviewed him to learn more.
Website: https://beatforfree.com/board.html
Bio: Joao Lutz, aka Lutz, is a director, creative and photographer based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and previously New York. He works across commercials, film and photography, and has worked on projects from Milan to Alaska. Alongside that, he has developed a few tools, despite not being a software developer, including Beat.
Larry: Joao, what is Beat?
Joao: Beat is a free Mac app where you write a story and then plan the shoot around it. It is a place to write and develop the story itself. It is where you plan the production, long form or short. And on the shoot day it comes to set with you, because the shot list is right there and it is live.
You build the story as connected cards, and everything else hangs off them. Your references, your characters, your locations. The shot list reads from those story beats rather than sitting in its own file, so the two can never drift apart. On the shoot day there is a full screen mode with a clock running against your call time.
It runs entirely on your own machine. No account, no cloud, no subscription, and it is free forever.
With version 2 it grew from being a node based space for writing stories into something that also covers the part most tools ignore, which is everything between having the idea and standing on the location with a crew waiting. Beat fills a gap that everyone in this industry knows. You end up working across five different apps that do not talk to each other, retyping the same information into each one. Beat puts it all in one place, working together.
Larry: Why did you write it?
Joao: I wrote it because I needed it and could not find a solution like it.
I direct commercials and films in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and before that in New York. Every job, I was doing the same thing. The story lived in one document. The shot list lived in a spreadsheet. The references lived in a folder. The set plan was drawn on paper, or in an app that knew nothing about the rest of it. All of them describing the same film, and all of them taking too much work and time to pull together.
The tools that solve this exist, and they are good, but they cost more than an independent filmmaker can reach.
I should say plainly that I am not a developer. I am a director who learned this along the way, mostly by getting it wrong. Beat started as a simple web app I made for myself, so I could write stories in a visual way that works for how I think, and stop retyping the same things into so many different places.
Over time I realised I had something worth sharing. So I decided to give it back and make it free. The community being built around it is honestly the biggest win. Incredible people are sending feedback, ideas and improvements, and that is gold to me.
Larry: Who do you see as a “typical” user?
Joao: Beat is a free tool built for a community of visually oriented storytellers. They are users, contributors, and anyone who finds it useful in the process of putting a story together.
If you want a picture of who actually shows up, it is more mixed than I expected. Directors and DPs planning a shoot. Documentary people organising material that has no script to start from. Editors who want to know what a shot was meant to do before they cut it. Writers who think in cards rather than pages. Teachers putting it in front of students, because there is nothing to license and nothing to buy.
Larry: I’m confused, do I write my scripts directly in Beat? Or does it import scripts? Or… ah, what?
Joao: Both, and neither is required. Let me untangle it.
You can write in it, two ways. There is the canvas, where you put down a beat, then another, and connect them. Each card holds what that moment is, and around it you hang what belongs to it. The reference image, the location, who is in it.
And there is Writing Mode, which is the answer to what I think you are really asking. It puts your board beside a normal written document. You write prose, in a document, the way you would anywhere else. The cards update as you type. Change a card on the canvas and the document follows. Add, reorder or delete a beat from either side and the other side keeps up. It is the same film in two shapes at once, and you work in whichever one suits the moment.
Or you can bring a script in. Drop a Fountain or Final Draft file onto the canvas and Beat builds the board for you. One group per act, one card per scene, every character as their own card. It takes a second.
Or you can have no script at all, which is the case for most of the work I do and probably a lot of your readers. Documentary, commercial, live. Nothing to import and nothing to write. You start with the locations, the people and the shots you know you need, and the board becomes the plan.
What Beat is not is a screenplay editor. It will not format a script to industry standard and it is not trying to replace what you write in. Bring the script here when you start working out how to shoot it.
The short version: write in cards, write in prose, or import what you already wrote. All three end up in the same place.
Larry: Where does this fit in the pre-production, production, post-production workflow?
Joao: Development and pre-production is where it lives. Production is where it comes with you. Post is where it hands over and stops.
But there is one thing it does for post, and it is the part I would argue for with your readers. When material arrives in a cutting room, the intent usually does not arrive with it. Beat exports a shot list where each shot still carries what it was for, the reference frame beside it, and the time of day it was meant to be. Editors are usually the first people to find out that nobody wrote that down. That is the whole of my claim on post, and I would rather state it small and true than large.
Larry: Describe a typical workflow, showcasing where Beat fits in best?
Joao: There are as many workflows as there are people using it, which is sort of the point. Let me give you two that are quite different from each other.
One: starting from nothing.
I open a blank board and put down beats as they come. Sometimes just empty cards in a row to get the shape, filling them in later. As it grows, things attach to it. I pull reference images in, stills, frames from films, whatever I have been collecting, and they sit on the beat they belong to rather than in a folder called REF nobody opens.
When I am not sure about a scene, I make an alternative version beside it and keep both. Nothing gets deleted to try an idea.
Then the production layer goes on top. Characters, props and locations become their own cards, linked to the beats they appear in. I pin the real locations on a map and check the sun, because that tells me whether the day I am imagining actually exists. I draw the set plan at real scale, so I find out in the app rather than on the day that the room is too small for the move. Shot lists come off the beats. A task list tracks what is still missing.
Two: a commercial, which is most of my work.
The brief arrives from the client. I give it to Claude, which is connected to Beat directly, and we talk it through. Then Claude builds the starting board for me. Beats, groups, the structure implied by the brief, characters and locations as cards. It takes a minute and I am looking at something instead of an empty screen.
That is a kickstart, not a result. From there it is the same work as the first scenario, except a lot of it is already decided by the brief. I move things, cut things, add the alternatives, pin the locations, build the set plan, and the shot list comes off the beats.
Then I export the treatment and a media export with every image at full resolution, and both go to the designer I have worked with for years. The document is not a summary. It carries all the information, the details, where each image belongs, so he can lay it out without coming back to me with questions. That is the handoff.
When it comes to other people working in it with you, here is the honest limit. Beat has no cloud, so there is no live shared document. Two people cannot type into the same board at once, yet. A project is a plain folder on disk, so it travels the way any folder travels, Dropbox, Drive, a drive in someone’s hand, and the person who has it is the person editing it.
That is a real cost and I am not going to dress it up. It is also a deliberate trade-off. No cloud means no account, no subscription, no service that can be shut down or sold, and nothing about a client’s unreleased project sitting on somebody else’s server. For the work I do, that trade is worth it. For a large team working simultaneously, it is not, and I would rather say so than pretend.
It is not only used for films.
People use it as a moodboard and nothing more than that. The board, the references, the palettes, the way things sit next to each other. That is a complete use on its own.
It gets used to plan photoshoots, where there is no story at all, just locations, looks and a shot list.
And it gets used for documentary, which surprised me most, because a documentary has no script to start from. The board becomes the place the material gets organised while it is still being found.
Larry: What features make this unique?
Joao: Two things and the second one matters more.
The first is that it is complete. The things you would normally buy separately are all here and they know about each other. A place to write and structure the story. Location scouting on a real map, with the sun’s true path over that spot on the day you are shooting. A set plan drawn at real world scale, every symbol true to the tape. A shot list that reads live from the story instead of being a separate document you maintain by hand. Reference and media organization. Exports that go to a designer or a client and actually carry the detail. On set mode for the day itself.
Any one of those exists elsewhere and is good. What does not exist elsewhere is all of them in one place, talking to each other, so a change in one is a change everywhere. And the software is free.
another thing I think is genuinely unique is that Beat connects to Claude directly. Not copy and paste into a chat window. Claude can open a real project, write the beats, place the images, build the shot list, dress the set plan and check its own work.
The second thing is the community, and that, to me, is the real answer.
It is growing quickly, but what is growing faster is how much people are willing to put in. The Location Scout exists because a user asked for it. The shot list works the way it does because someone sent me a written spec for how it should behave. In the last week alone, a developer who builds screenplay parsing tools ran my importer against his own test files and found real bugs, and a working cinematographer told me my lens coverage was wrong because I had assumed the wrong sensor size. Both were fixed and shipped within a day, and both people are credited inside the app.
No feature list competes with that. People are treating it like something they have a stake in, because they do. That is what makes it different, and it is the reason it is free.
Larry: So, is this simply a story-boarding app?
Joao: No, and it is a fair thing to ask.
Beat does not draw storyboards. There is no frame drawing tool in it, and I am not planning to add one, because people who storyboard already have very good tools they like, better than anything I could ever build.
A storyboard answers what each shot looks like. Beat answers what the shots are, why they exist, where they happen, when the light works and whether the day holds them. Beat is the plan the storyboard belongs to.
The one small overlap: you can put a rough sketch on a shot when you have no still and want a placeholder, so the shot list is not full of empty boxes. That is a convenience, not a proper storyboard drawing tool.
Larry: How is it priced?
Joao: It is not priced. There is no paid version, no trial, no tier, no account, and nothing to upgrade to later.
I know what that question usually means, which is: What is the catch, and will this be free until enough people have their projects inside it? So the honest answer to that is: Every Beat project is a plain folder on your own disk, a text file and your images. Not a database, not a proprietary format, not something on my server. You could delete Beat today and still open everything in it. Nothing of yours is ever held hostage, whatever I do.
That is deliberate. If the only thing keeping you in the app is that your work is trapped, then I have built the wrong thing.
Larry: Why make it free?
Joao: Because I built it for myself first, and then it turned into something I wanted to give back.
I know the struggle of looking for a tool that actually fits how you work and not finding it. And I have seen, because I have lived it, how inaccessible the good tools are to independent filmmakers. Not because they are bad tools, they are excellent. Because of what they cost. That price is a rounding error to a company and a real decision to a person working on their own film. I have been on the wrong side of that decision.
So the community gave me a lot, and this is me putting something back. The honest payoff for me is not money. It is the connection. People writing to tell me what is broken, what they need, what they made with it. That is worth more to me than a subscription would be, and I am not saying that as a nice line. It is the actual reason I keep going.
Also, Beat has put me in touch with people I would never have met otherwise, and some of those are professional connections that matter to my own work. That is a real return, it just is not a directly financial one.
That said, I am not naive about it. There are ways this can bring in income, and I am working on them. Integrations and partnerships with reference and image libraries. Education institutions. Production companies that want a private version with cloud storage so a whole team can share files. People or companies who simply want to support the project and be credited for it.
But every one of those has the same rule. The money never comes from the user. Not now, not later, not through a tier, not through a feature held back. That is one of the core values of the app and honestly one of mine.
Larry: Is Beat an app that runs locally, or a web service?
Joao: It runs locally. It is a real Mac application, universal for Apple Silicon and Intel, and it is not a web service. There is no server, no account and nothing of yours in a cloud.
Larry: What user data do you collect, and is your processing local or in the cloud?
Joao: No account, no sign up, no telemetry. I do not collect anything about you and there are no analytics in the app. I could not tell you who uses Beat or what they make with it, and I like it that way.
Processing is local. Your project is a folder on your own disk, a text file and your images. Nothing is uploaded, nothing syncs, and there is no server holding your work.
Beat does reach the internet for four things:
Larry: Write a one-paragraph commercial on why editors should consider using Beat?
Joao: If you cut, you already know the problem: the footage arrives but the intent does not. You get rushes, a folder of references nobody labelled, and a shot list that stopped matching the film three revisions ago, and you spend the first day working out what the director actually meant. Beat is where that intent gets written down while it still exists, and its exports carry it through to you. Each shot arrives still attached to the story beat it was serving, with the reference frame next to it and the time of day it was meant to be. You cannot fix that in post. You can only be handed it. And if you are one of the many editors who also directs or shoots your own work, it is the whole thing end to end, from the first idea to the shoot day itself.
Larry: Joao, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions.
3 Responses to Beat: A Free Mac Tool to Plan Videos, Films, Commercials and Docs
Sounds very interesting. Great interview. You asked all the important questions.
Paul:
Thanks!
Larry
What an interesting and cool idea! I can’t wait to try it.