Beat: free Mac app for shoot planning

Beat is a free, local-first Mac app that puts story beats, blocking diagrams, and Claude AI on one canvas. Built by a filmmaker, no account required, no strings.

Love this. Beat is a free Mac app for shoot planning built by João Lutz, a filmmaker and creative director based in São Paulo, Brazil. Here's Lutz's pitch which is a winner as far as we can see:

Completely free. Not for sale. No account, no tracking. Your files stay yours.

It's useful too. The app centers on a node-based visual canvas where story beats, character notes, locations, props, and references all live as moveable, connectable cards on a single infinite board. Beats can be linked into a narrative spine and branched to explore alternate versions side by side, each carrying tones, slug lines, shot type, duration, and a live runtime meter. Pre-built structure templates include three-act, Hero's Journey, Save the Cat, and the story circle.

References are pulled directly from links: Beat grabs video and images from most sites, and a built-in player with frame-by-frame control to lift stills or GIFs directly into the media pool.

Set planner

It gets better. The Set Plan is an overhead lighting and blocking planner attached to individual beats. Cameras carry a real field of view calculated by focal length, and actor blocking paths can carry directional facing at every point. Fixtures include softbox, fresnel, LED, kino, china ball, and practicals, each with beam falloff, color temperature, and intensity controls. The lighting model simulates bounce, blocking, and transmission through cards, flags, diffusion, walls, doors, and windows. Rooms are set to a real-world scale in meters or feet, and the finished plan exports as an image.

Beat connects to Claude via MCP with one click, allowing the AI to read and edit the actual project rather than receiving copy-pasted text. Export options include a .zip with all media in organized folders, a Markdown file of the full project, a Word document, and PDF overviews and storyboards.

Beat is free, local-first, requires no account, and collects no data. Projects are plain folders on your Mac. It downloads from Google Drive at beatforfree.com.