Quick and Efficient Shotlisting with ShotKraft – A Review of the AI-Enhanced Software

AI

by Mascha DeikovaApril 17^th, 2026

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Storyboards and shotlists are an essential part of the pre-production process. No arguing there! Yet not every project and not every creator has the time or the budget for them. At least, not always. And what about those who perform “one-man shows” on a daily basis? With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, different workflows have become easier, quicker, and more accessible. That’s what ShotKraft is also about. Developed by filmmakers, for filmmakers, the browser-based software promises to transform your script into a baseline shotlist that is “70-90% ready to shoot.” Below, we’ll take a look at how shotlisting with ShotKraft works and review its features.

ShotKraft is not the first company to address pre-production workflows by incorporating rapidly evolving AI tools. (We’re continuously writing about these kinds of tools in this section, so follow along!) Yet they have found a narrow niche where supporting tools can become a game-changer. Their product is targeted at every filmmaker who needs a shotlist (and/or a storyboard) for a shoot: from film students and small video productions to those who work on big feature films.

The team behind the ShotKraft software consists of active filmmakers (including Leland Krane, a New York-based cinematographer with numerous TV and feature film credits), entrepreneurs, and data scientists. Thus, they do not rely solely on large language models but customarily train them based on their own filmmaking experience and expertise.

Shotlisting with ShotKraft: how does it work?

The software itself is pretty user-friendly and self-explanatory. You create an account, choose a subscription plan (there is a free Basic option if you want to try the tool out), log in directly in the browser, and off you go! Click on the big “plus” button under “Your Next Project,” and ShotKraft will offer to upload your script.

The script must follow a standard North American screenplay format, including proper scene slug lines, and be uploaded as a PDF under 5MB. If it does not meet these requirements, there is a second option available, shown in the screenshot above, which we’ll address later.

After you upload your script, the program will take a moment to break it down into scenes. Once the processing is done, you will see your complete scene list on the left. Now you can choose the scene and click the “Generate” button.

After a few seconds, the pre-trained AI will generate a list of shots for this scene (which can also be viewed as typical shot “cards”) and display it on the right half of the screen. This way, you can work on your shotlist, scene by scene. Alternatively, if you scroll up to the beginning of your scene breakdown, there is a button “Generate All Scenes.” A useful feature, but only available to Pro plan subscribers.

Shotlisting with ShotKraft for a short film

For this review, I played around with different film projects. The first script I uploaded to ShotKraft is from my latest fantasy short, which is finished and now on the festival tour. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to show you the final film yet, but I do have access to my storyboards. Therefore, I decided to have ShotKraft create a shotlist and storyboard images, and then compare the results with the ones we created with my cinematographer back then.

Here’s a short scene without dialogue for the test:

EXT. IN THE BUSHES – NIGHT The sorceress’s cry pierces through the woods. She doesn’t know that dense fog in the nearby trees conceals an intruder. Hidden behind the bushes, JONET watches her from a distance. His head wrapped in a dark scarf, only his wide-open eyes reveal his presence. They remain fixated on the sorceress.

Per one click, ShotKraft AI generated a list of four different shots for this scene (two of which were quite similar, though). It included a short description for each, defined the subject, and the shot type (from a wide atmospheric establisher to CU’s on the character’s eyes). If we toggle on the “View images” option in the top bar, the program allows us to upload storyboard pictures or scribbles to each of the shots we create. If you don’t have any yet, one of ShotKraft’s features (still in Beta and freely available across all plans) lets users generate them.

I went for a classic black-and-white sketch style, landscape image orientation, and typed “medieval” into the “Time period of the action” field. Here’s how my shotlist with generated images for this scene turned out:

Comparing results

Okay, that’s already not bad. However, it’s not how I personally would shotlist this scene. In fact, in the short film, we went for a single shot, letting the camera linger on the intruder’s emotions a bit longer and raising the suspense. Here’s what my hand-drawn storyboard looked like for this scene before the shoot:

After a bunch of tests, I noticed that ShotKraft generally tends to generate many more shots than you would need to film a scene and tell the story. Mostly, the AI follows a very basic visual structure: starting with a wide shot, then getting closer for action parts, and always including some inserts and close-ups here and there. That’s not bad per se. First, as in the sculpting process, it’s always easier to refine and remove parts than to add something new. And second, the creators of ShotKraft do not promise a polished, well-thought-out shotlist ready for a complicated shoot. They offer a tool that serves as a decent starting point, covering simple shots in seconds, “so you can spend more time on the complex ones,” as stated on their website.

In my opinion, it’s an important idea to keep in mind whenever you work with the ShotKraft application. Yes, generating the shots will save you a lot of time in prep. Yet it does need refining by you afterwards: with your voice, your artistic style, and your visual language. Otherwise, our industry will end up in an endless ocean of generic scenes and generic films.

Breaking down a feature film script

While I do believe this tool can be of the greatest use to solo-shooters, who often just don’t have a team and/or budget to prep their videos in detail, ShotKraft also showcases feature films that have been made with its help.

So, let’s try it on a longer script. For this experiment, I used the shooting script of the Oscar-winning  “Everything Everywhere All at Once” by Daniels. 126 pages and 182 scenes – isn’t that a crazy workload? Yet ShotKraft broke them down easily. The first scene of the film is fairly straightforward:

ShotKraft’s AI generated two shots for it. Yet after asking it to create scribbles for them as well, I was a bit confused. The angles seem much too similar to me – it could have been a simple dolly-in, to be honest.

However, that’s not a problem. Another great feature of ShotKraft is that you can expand each shot’s card and fill it with all the necessary details (art of camera movement, director’s notes, lens focal length, etc.).

For a fair comparison, here is the opening scene from the finished film:

Not that far off, is it?

In case your script has a different format

Let’s say you want to shotlist a music video, a commercial spot, or a documentary scene – and you don’t have a traditionally formatted script for it. Sometimes, creators use a document with plain text instead, a visual treatment, or just conceptual scene notes in keywords. That’s what the second option, “Copy/Paste Script” in ShotKraft, is for. When you click on it and title your next project, you will land in a similar interface to the one we observed above. The only difference is that you can now enter the scene header and description by hand and let the AI analyze them afterwards. This way, you will create a breakdown, card-by-card, and a shotlist, scene-by-scene. The rest of the process remains the same as previously outlined. I tried it for one scene from a documentary treatment, and got the subsequent result:

It’s helpful to have the option to work with blank cards. Still, the initial step could benefit from further refinement.

I guess one of the upgrades that would be great to see in future versions of ShotKraft is an AI-based workflow that turns your non-standard document into a kind of script breakdown. After all, the LLMs are already advanced enough to analyze humans’ descriptions (and language, in general) and follow the prompts on what to do with them. Imagine that you upload a doc with plain treatment text, and the application breaks it down into raw scene cards, using logic and other parameters (where the action happens, who is involved, etc.). Of course, AI can make mistakes, so there should be an option to edit the scene cards afterwards. Yet, I believe such a workflow would be much faster than creating the cards manually, one by one (as it is now).  

Benefits of shotlisting with ShotKraft

Actually, one of the advantages of working with ShotKraft is that the software is rapidly evolving, and you can give feedback, suggest improvements, and report mistakes and bugs. There is a whole dedicated section on the website for it, and the team responds to the users very quickly. The further benefits include:

• Collaborative mode. You can invite members of your production team to collaborate on projects directly in the browser-based interface (as viewers or editors). Say, if you are a director, you can let your cinematographer flick through the shot cards and add camera details. Or send it to your AD so they can start planning while you’re working, say, on the storyboard pictures.
• You can export the final shotlist as PDF or CSV (the latter is available only for Pro users).
• ShotKraft is simple, intuitive, and doesn’t need any complicated training. If you’ve worked with standard shotlists before, you will feel like a fish in the water. If you haven’t, you’ll understand the templates and principles pretty quickly.

And yes, as we already discussed above, it’s not a one-click solution that delivers a top-notch shotlist upon uploading a script. Still, it is a solid starting point, something you can customize and refine, and one that saves time in the early stages.

Pricing and safety questions

ShotKraft offers users three subscription plans: Basic (free), Pro ($19.95/month), or Enterprise (by request). Each includes different features that you can look up in detail here. Students get 1 month of the Pro plan for free, and 50% discount after that.

One of the biggest questions that may come to mind while reading this is safety. Reviewing the tool using older, already produced scripts is one thing. Uploading sensitive material, such as original ideas or newly written scripts, is another thing and may give users pause. ShotKraft’s team addresses this point directly:

Your script is safely stored on our AWS cloud server. We are committed to industry-standard security protocols and only leverage partnerships with trusted services such as Google and Auth0.

A quote from ShotKraft’s website

Apart from that, they state they are currently using an OpenAI LLM via a secure API for shot generation. But according to the developers, their OpenAI user agreement ensures that the scripts are not used to train their models. To read more on ShotKraf’s safety, head over here.

Shot Listing Essentials on MZed with ShotKraft’s Leland Krane

If you’d like to take a closer look at ShotKraft before testing it yourself, there’s now a dedicated course on our educational platform, MZed, titled “Before You Roll – Shot Listing Essentials,” that breaks down the tool in detail. Led by cinematographer and ShotKraft CEO Leland Crane, it not only shows the software’s full potential and workflow but also dives into the fundamentals of building a shot list, understanding coverage, and translating creative ideas into something your entire crew can actually work with. If you have MZed Pro, the course is already included in your membership, so you can jump straight in at no additional cost. On top of that, MZed Pro subscribers can enjoy a 20% discount on ShotKraft, along with the first month of the Pro plan for free. The discount code is available in the “Member Discounts” section.

What about you? How do you develop shotlists and storyboards? Does the shot-listing phase belong to every project, in your opinion? If so, would you try to optimize and accelerate it with specialized software? What functions does this kind of software need to have for sure? Let’s talk a bit more in the comments below!

Feature image source: screenshots from ShotKraft’s interface, stitched together.

Full disclosure: MZed is owned by CineD.