The app for filmmakers, made by a filmmaker.

My name is Samuel and I've been working as a freelance director and screenwriter since 2023.

Besides working with larger production companies, I have often collaborated with independent outfits where a project was organised by a small core team. To handle pre-production they used a mix of tools, digital and not: Excel, Drive, group chats, email, hundreds of sheets of paper highlighted in different colours. And every production company had its own way of organising things: for a freelance filmmaker that means adapting every time, losing time working out how each stage is handled, downloading and learning new software.

I also had first-hand experience with my own projects, short films and documentaries. I broke down scripts by hand, copying every element into a table and making a sheet for each head of department, while organising the shoots at the same time. For a single project I used about ten tools and often lost time copying the same things for different departments. I had found software for the pre-production workflow, but it was out of my reach and above all designed for the English-speaking market. I had all my collaborators download Notion: a really useful app, but I spent a lot of time teaching people how to use it.

I felt the need for a single tool, made specifically for audiovisual projects, to handle every stage of pre-production; above all, software that sped up the process and stopped me copying the same things ten times. Director and producer friends felt the same need. We realised that independent projects, on top of the usual difficulties we all know, also run into these small obstacles. For the big industry, dedicated workflow software is the standard; for independents it is not: they always have to look for alternatives, and often give up for lack of money or time.

So I decided to dust off my old computer science degree and try to build my own platform, to manage my projects more comfortably and faster. After almost a year, Riprea was born: the app for filmmakers, made by a filmmaker.

Now I want to share it with others, hoping to offer something useful to the independent world.