Previs from where the camera will stand.
Ariadne turns an iPhone into a location scout's whole kit: a colour-accurate director's viewfinder with a 3,000-lens catalogue, an AR blocking stage with photoreal stand-ins, a film exposure meter, and the sun exactly where it will be at 7am on shoot day. Built by cinematographers, for cinematographers, and the conventions run deep. Where a convention cannot be honoured, the tool says so rather than approximating.
Frame it on the real glass.
Pick a camera body, a sensor mode and a lens; the live picture is cropped to that measured field of view. Only focal length, sensor dimensions and squeeze drive the frame; catalogue figures never adjust the picture. When a lens is wider than the phone can capture, the missing field of view is drawn to scale, so the frame you judge is the frame the lens gives.
3,147 lenses · 641 series · framelines & hooks to any ratio
Judge it under your look.
The feed is encoded to the selected camera's log and gamut before a LUT touches it, so a show LUT grades here the way it grades on set. Camera look files import natively; no conversion round trip. Film stocks are emulated from the published sensitometric curves and shown as release prints, rendered uncorrected under the light in front of the lens. There are no filter approximations.
native look-file import · .cube · 8 film-print looks
Know where the light lands at 4pm.
Scrub the time of day and the sun's arc crosses the frame, hour by hour; in AR, the same solar position sets the direction, colour and shadows of the light. The meter states the T-stop the selected camera would need, at the set rating, shutter and frame rate, checked against an incident meter and good to about a third of a stop. Spot meter and false colour read the selected film stock at its rating: exposure monitoring for cameras that have none.
sun path · spot meter · false colour · working-to-a-stop ND readout
Block it where it happens.
Stand-ins and props place on the mapped floor at real-world scale, with LiDAR occlusion and shadows matched to the sun. A LiDAR scan turns a real actor into a reusable digital double with measured height. Plan View plots the setup from above, north up, with the camera's true field of view and lens-to-subject distances printed on the frame.
AR stand-ins · scanned doubles · top-down plan view
Leave with frames the crew can use.
Captures are cropped to the simulated frame, with the gear, framing guides, compass and sun burnt in; Scout Mode saves the graded picture alone. A JSON sidecar records the full setup with every frame. Stills and takes are kept in the app, saved to Photos, or both.
burnt-in gear & exposure data · scout mode · JSON sidecar
- Device
- iPhone Pro models (LiDAR and the three rear cameras)
- Orientation
- Landscape
- Log and Looks
- iPhone 15 Pro or later
- Look formats
- .cube and native camera look files, imported directly
Ariadne is in development. Beta testing via TestFlight is coming soon.
Beta and press enquiries: studio, at this domain
Camera, lens and film format simulations reference the manufacturers' published specifications. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Ariadne is an independent product and is not endorsed by any camera or film manufacturer.
Ariadne is built by Jake Scott Studio, the UX studio from cinematographer Jake Scott. Selected work at jakescottdop.com.