FramePath 1.1 — Your lenses, your location, your loop
I've found that there's a particular kind of gap in solo filmmaking that no tool ever quite fixes, at least not for me. You're at a location, the light is doing something right, and you've found the perfect angle for a scene. You take a phone photo. Days later, when you're back at your desk building the shot list, the image may be in your photo library but the feeling is mostly gone. Worse, you don't even remember why you took that particular photo.
I built FramePath to close gaps like that. Not in an abstract "AI will solve everything" way but in a specific and practical way that makes pre-production feel less like reconstructing your own memory and more like executing a plan you actually made. FramePath 1.1 is the release where I feel like that gap is genuinely getting smaller at least for a solo-creator like myself.
Lenses are part of the plan now
The most substantial addition in 1.1 is Lens Kits. Every project in FramePath can now have its own lens collection: the specific focal lengths you're actually planning to use. Three preset lens kits ship with the app — Vintage Primes, Cinema Zoom, and a Wide + Standard kit that covers most of what a documentary bag looks like. If you're on Pro, you can build a custom package from whatever's actually in your case.
Once a lens kit is active on a project, it shows up everywhere. The per-shot lens field pulls from it. The shot card displays it as a compact token alongside shot size and angle. And, this is the part I'm most pleased with, the AI now knows your glass and makes use of what you have in your own kit.
A more useful AI conversation
AI shot generation in 1.0.2 gave you a basic shot list. That was useful as an initial guess, but it was a one-shot interaction. You got what you got, and editing meant either accepting it or starting over.
In 1.1 it's a loop. Before you generate your initial shot list, you first pick a coverage density, i.e. Minimal (3–4 shots), Standard (6–8), or Full (10–12). Then, adjust your setup budget, which tells the AI how many distinct camera positions you want to plan for. The AI uses both to shape the list. If you're shooting a two-character scene in a single location on a tight schedule, you probably don't want twelve setups. Now you can say so before you hit Generate.
After generation, a second mode unlocks: Refine. Now you have three options to refine the initial shot list: re-run the whole thing, add coverage on top of what's already there, or refine the existing shots without losing your manual edits. That last one is the one I use most now that I've got it built. The AI updates its own suggestions but my own overrides stay intact. That has made working with the AI more like a collaboration rather than a batch job with little control over the results.
When a lens kit is active, the AI assigns focal lengths from the kit directly onto the shots it returns. In Refine mode, there's a toggle to re-suggest lenses. That can be useful after you've swapped kits partway through planning, for instance to reduce the number of lenses you need to carry in your bag.
The photo you took at the location
The other big change is the scouting pipeline. That phone photo you took at the location? In FramePath 1.1, you can take it directly inside the app or pull one from your library. Set it as the reference backdrop for a storyboard frame and you have a canvas to draw on. The photo persists. It syncs to your iPad and Mac via iCloud. When you open the project at your desk, the angle is still there.
You sketch over it (genuinely best on the iPad with the Apple Pencil), adjust the opacity, swap a filter, and you have a storyboard frame that starts from reality. On iPhone, there's now a dedicated storyboard sheet in portrait orientation so the whole scouting-to-sketch workflow fits in your pocket at the location itself.
Everything else in 1.1
The storyboard rendering engine had to be rebuilt from the ground up to fix a series of bugs that caused ink strokes to look different in dark mode, and thumbnails to land at wrong coordinates after a cross-device sync.
Shot size and camera angle menus now show full names (CU — Close-Up, HS — High Shot) so the shot card is readable without a reference sheet even by someone (like myself) who does not necessarily remember all those abbreviations.
In the Shoot Mode, you now show the clapperboard by tapping the storyboard thumbnail area of a shot rather than the state button (that original approach was a bad idea anyway).
Last, the app now ships an offline user guide even on the iPad/iPhone just in case something isn't self-explanatory. Just in case, a feedback form is also built right into the app, so if something's wrong (or missing!) you can report it without leaving the app.
What's next
The 1.2 roadmap is already taking shape: I know that at least renaming scenes from within the detail editor, improvements of the project list, and a proper multi-select workflow across the app need to be worked on. And I'm also thinking about building on the foundation I created for the lens kits to have a genuinely useful workflow for keeping track of other gear needed while shooting.
If any of those matter to you, or if you find that something in 1.1 is broken or missing, I'd genuinely like to hear from you. The feedback form is in the Help & Info sheet. Help me make the app work for you, not just for me!
— Miikka