Previs for AI-native filmmaking. Stage a scene, choreograph the camera and cast against marks — the way real sets work — and export a motion-reference package a video generator can't misread.
Video generators produce dramatically better results when you hand them an unambiguous motion reference: a rough 3D render showing exactly the camera move and character blocking you want. Blockout is the fastest path from "I can see the shot" to "the generator can't get it wrong." It exports video + depth pass + stills + a tailored prompt that Seedance 2.0, Veo 3.1, Kling, LTX 2.3, and Wan 2.2 can follow precisely.
It is deliberately not a 3D art tool. Grey-box mannequins and vehicles at real-world scale, real lens math, and choreography tools are the whole product. The fidelity target is unambiguous, not beautiful.
- 🎬 Real camera optics — Super 16 / 35 / Full Frame / 65mm sensors, real focal lengths, keyframable zoom, rack focus, aspect masks.
- 🚶 Marks-based choreography — one mental model for camera and actors; editable paths, per-mark easing, gaits, and speed sanity warnings.
- 🎥 Coverage model — a scene owns the blocking; shots own cameras. Shoot the same action from five angles without re-blocking.
- 👥 One-click crowds — dance numbers, brawls, foot and car chases: pick a size and style, click the floor, and the whole choreographed cast stages exactly there. Restyle the entire group later in one click.
- 💃 A choreographer — build real staged routines: timed dance phrases with formations, canon and mirroring; paired fight exchanges where reactions land on the attack; and chases along a serpentine path. Spawn a fresh cast or apply it to people you already placed.
- ✨ An Animate tab — 194 character motions (fights, weapons, dances, sports, everyday actions, stunts) and 33 action paths (plane landings, helicopter orbits, car chases, motorcycle weaves, galloping horses, collapsing debris) always one click away.
- 🎛️ 39 classic camera moves — orbits, cranes, drone follows, spirals, crash-zooms, the vertigo dolly-zoom — built around your subject and riding along if it moves.
- 🌍 Block inside real places — import a Gaussian-splat / photogrammetry scan of a location (shot on your phone or any video-to-3D tool) and stage the action inside it. Scans are an editor aid — they never touch the export.
- 📦 Deterministic exports — the same project renders byte-identical frames on every run. Playback performance never touches the output.
- 🤖 Agent-drivable — a bundled MCP server lets Claude Code, Codex, or any MCP client stage and shoot the scene for you.
- STAGE — drop in one of 50+ environment kits (downtown, residential street, supermarket, movie theater, train car, backyard with pool, sky for aerials…), place people / animals / vehicles / furniture / props from the library, and label your subjects ("THIEF", red).
- SHOOT — select an actor, press
M, click the floor to drop numbered marks; the actor walks them on your timeline. Frame the camera (or click MS to auto-frame a medium shot at your lens), drop camera marks, pick a rig — dolly, steadicam, handheld, crane, drone, car-mount. Scrub, retime, play. - DELIVER — pick your generator, click Export shot package:
Shot-1A/export-…/
├── 1A_reference.mp4 # the motion reference (deterministic render)
├── 1A_depth.mp4 # depth pass for ComfyUI control workflows
├── 1A_normal.mp4 # optional normal pass
├── stills/ # frame at every camera mark + first/last + top-down blocking diagram
├── prompt.txt # generated from your actual blocking, tailored per generator
├── comfyui-workflow.json # pre-wired depth-conditioning workflow (Wan/LTX profiles)
├── metadata.json # machine-readable marks/lenses/timings
└── README.txt
Plus per-scene tools: animatic export (all shots stitched), contact sheet, and Blender handoff (.glb with the animated camera + a one-click import script).
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| Stage — one click spawns a whole choreographed crowd. Twenty dancers, mixed styles, every performer individually editable. | Shoot — look through the shot camera as a Follow Behind drone move rides a climbing plane, aim-locked to the aircraft. |
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| Choreograph — a paired brawl laid out as timeline lanes of mark pills; select a fighter to edit its path in the inspector. | Light — a backyard with pool, trampoline, grill, kid and dog, dressed in golden-hour light. Nine lighting presets — including physical-sky domes lit by the sun — one click each. |
Pick a target generator and Blockout writes the prompt from your actual blocking — lens, sensor, rig, and every subject's move — then bundles the reference video, depth pass, stills, and a pre-wired ComfyUI workflow.
Fifty-plus grey-box environment kits and a full library of people, animals, vehicles, furniture, and props — all at real-world scale, all procedurally generated in code. Label subjects with colored callouts, snap things to the ground, and save any staging as a reusable global preset (a dinner scene, a driving setup) to start from in any project.
Coverage the way a real set works: the scene owns the blocking, each shot owns a camera. Drop camera and actor marks on a shared timeline, choose a rig (dolly / steadicam / handheld / crane / drone / car-mount), and get speed sanity warnings when a walk implies 6 m/s. Auto-framing presets (two-shot, OTS, reverse, top, low, dutch) place the camera relative to your labelled subjects. Ghost an existing video — including depth maps — over the viewport as a timeline-synced reference underlay to match blocking by eye.
Data-driven generator profiles define durations, resolutions, reference modes, and prompt templates per model; adding a new generator is a config edit. Exports are deterministic — the timeline is stepped at exact fps and rendered offline, so the same project exports byte-identical frames on every run. Projects are a folder of pretty-printed, stable-key-order JSON: diff it, branch it, review it.
Stage a whole choreographed crowd in one action — pick Dance number / Fight / Foot chase / Car chase, set the head-count (2–60) and style, then click the floor exactly where you want them: performers and their choreography appear there, facing the camera. For a fully staged routine, the Choreographer builds timed dance phrases (with formations, canon and mirroring), paired fight exchanges where each reaction lands on the attack, and chases along a serpentine path — spawn a new cast or apply it to people already on set. A staged sequence is a starting point: shift-click the group (their choreography moves with them when you drag) and the ✨ Animate tab swaps everyone's dance style or path in one click. Non-character performers get motion-path presets too: plane takeoff / landing / flyby, helicopter orbit, bird swoop, motorcycle weave, galloping horse, falling debris, thrown objects. For the camera, apply one of 39 classic moves — orbits, cranes, drone follows, whip pans, spirals, crash-zooms, the vertigo dolly-zoom — each built around your subject and riding along if it moves.
Run the take the way a set does: the Take bar in Shoot walks Rehearse → Record → Review — rehearse plays the blocking with path ribbons on, record wraps the camera or performer capture in a 3-2-1 countdown, and review plays back through the shot camera exactly as it will export. Spike-tape floor marks and path ribbons (with direction chevrons and time labels) are toggleable editor chrome, and a Set your marks coach walks a first-timer through the whole loop.
Blockout ships an MCP server so an AI agent can drive the running app — stage entities, choreograph marks, reframe, scrub, and grab a viewport screenshot — the same moves you'd make by hand. See mcp/README.md for the full agent-integration guide.
Blockout is one of three standalone filmmaking apps that fit together. Each works on its own, and they chain: measure a reference in Motion Previs Studio, block and export the shot here, then split the finished mix in Stem Studio once the edit is done.
- Motion Previs Studio — turns a reference video into pose, depth, and camera data. Send its reference into a Blockout shot to animate against.
- Stem Studio — splits a finished mix back into dialogue, music, and SFX stems.
macOS — paste one line into Terminal (⌘-Space, type "Terminal") and it downloads the latest build, installs it to Applications, and opens it — no security warnings:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wassermanproductions/blockout/main/install.sh | bashWindows — download the Windows 11 x64 installer from GitHub Releases. You can also grab the macOS DMG there, or build from source — see the note about unsigned builds below.
Now on Windows 11 — native controls, bundled export tooling, per-user install (no admin needed).
git clone <this repo>
cd blockout
npm install
npm run dev # development, hot reload
# or
npm run build && npm start # production buildRequirements for source builds: Node 22+. Development builds resolve a
checksum-pinned FFmpeg executable and also support the BLOCKOUT_FFMPEG
override. Windows packaging downloads, verifies, and audits the exact BtbN GPL
pair before building. The rejected nonfree static package is not a dependency.
macOS packaging downloads and verifies the same pinned, audited FFmpeg pair
automatically. To rebuild it from verified sources and the audited patch
instead, run npm run prepare:ffmpeg:mac -- --build-from-source.
Current release artifacts are unsigned. A macOS DMG downloaded in a browser is
quarantined, so macOS falsely claims the app "is damaged" — either use the
one-line installer above (terminal downloads aren't quarantined, so no warning
appears), or after dragging Blockout to Applications run
xattr -cr /Applications/Blockout.app once in Terminal. On Windows,
SmartScreen will warn on first run — verify the installer's SHA-256 checksum
from the release page, then use More info → Run anyway. Code
signing/notarization is planned for a stable distribution.
| Symptom | Fix |
|---|---|
| Project opens with missing reference media | Reattach the approved source and allow Blockout to copy it into refs; save and reopen. |
| Subject jumps or action starts from an old position | Inspect time zero, remove stale marks, and rebuild the opening state deliberately. |
| Export has the wrong shot | Stop, refresh current state, select the intended scene and shot, and export with an exact expected base name. |
| Export cancellation leaves a partial file | Wait for cancellation to complete, confirm the encoder has closed, then remove the partial output. |
| Filename is rejected | Use a short descriptive name without reserved device words or trailing spaces and dots. |
| Agent action targets a stale entity | Refresh state, confirm the current ID, and retry once with the new ID. |
| Shoot reports invalid action or gait data | Preserve a copy, remove or rebuild the malformed mark, save, and reopen. Do not keep replaying an invalid action payload. Current builds reject it before the timeline can fail. |
Point Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, or any MCP client at the bundled MCP server and it can stage the scene, choreograph marks, reframe the camera, scrub the timeline, and pull a viewport screenshot. Register it with Claude Code in one line:
claude mcp add blockout -- node /ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/blockout/mcp/blockout-mcp.mjsPackaged bridge locations are
/Applications/Blockout.app/Contents/Resources/mcp/blockout-mcp.mjs on macOS
and %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Blockout\resources\mcp\blockout-mcp.mjs for the
default per-user Windows install.
Discovery and auth are automatic — the app writes a versioned localhost-only
control descriptor to ~/.config/blockout/control.json on macOS/Linux or
%APPDATA%\blockout\control.json on Windows. The zero-dependency bridge reads
both versioned and legacy descriptors. There are 33 tools (from get_state
and add_entity through spawn_choreography, import_scan, apply_camera_move,
and screenshot).
Stashed changes
👉 Full setup, the complete tool table, and a worked session: mcp/README.md.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
npm run dev |
Run with hot reload |
npm run typecheck / npm run lint |
Strict TS + ESLint |
npm test |
Engine unit tests (Vitest) |
npm run smoke |
Build + full end-to-end smoke: boots the app, stages a scene, exports a real package, verifies it with ffprobe, checks byte-determinism |
npm run package:mac |
Download and audit the pinned macOS FFmpeg pair, then build the current-architecture DMG |
npm run package:win |
Build a Windows 11 x64 per-user NSIS installer (release/; run on Windows) |
npm run verify:assets / npm run sbom |
Verify pinned runtime assets / generate SPDX and CycloneDX SBOMs |
See docs/DESIGN.md (product + architecture), docs/ROADMAP.md (build plan + QA program), and AGENTS.md (how AI agents should build / run / modify this app). The deterministic core lives in src/engine/ — pure TypeScript, no DOM, fully unit-tested; state(t) is a pure function shared by playback, video export, stills, and glTF baking.
A few people asked if they could send tips to support my work developing open source tools. So I set up an optional way in case anyone wants to.
No pressure at all. Using the apps, sharing them, starring the repositories, and contributing code all help too. Thank you.
Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE. Free to use, modify, fork, and build on, commercially or otherwise.
Attribution required: per the NOTICE file (Apache 2.0 §4(d)), any use, fork, or redistribution must retain the NOTICE file and credit Sam Wasserman (wassermanproductions.com) in its documentation and about/credits surface.
All 3D assets are procedurally generated in code — no external asset licenses are involved. The Windows FFmpeg/FFprobe pair remains a separate GPL-3.0-or-later component; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and its exact source/build provenance.
The Windows/macOS ports are prerelease engineering outputs. Stable or commercial distribution additionally requires upstream/trademark permission, platform signing/notarization, final FFmpeg/H.264 review, and the normal full third-party compliance review.
Created by Sam Wasserman — wassermanproductions.com · wasserman.ai.
Windows support contributed and maintained by Gumbii Digital (github.com/GumbiiDigital) — see MODIFICATIONS.md.