I supervise and produce visual effects, and I write the tooling that makes one person able to do a department's job. Breakdown Studio is the first thing I have shipped in the open. A course on the method is next.
On an independent feature film in production, I carried the VFX department alone: bidding, scheduling, vendor management, the shot breakdown, and delivery. No coordinator, no second supervisor. The pipeline had to hold, cut after cut, or the schedule slipped.
The shot-breakdown pipeline I built to survive that job now ships free, MIT licensed. Detects every shot from the edit, reads the burned-in slates and notes, and builds a live, re-matchable breakdown. Validated on a real production, not a toy demo.
The mechanical half automates. The judgment half, matching, merging, deciding what counts as VFX, is a skill. A course on doing this solo, with an AI pair carrying the mechanical work, is coming. The waitlist is open now.
Breakdown Studio is open source and live now. The course is next, waitlist only, no pricing yet. One note when either moves.