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.

My love for cinema started as a child, watching VHS tapes with my family. Growing up I also fell for computers, and taught myself to code. I graduated in computer science in 2021 at the University of Udine; alongside the degree I was teaching myself film language and dramatic structure, and taking specialist courses. Cinema had never left me, and during university I realised the urge to share my own stories was getting stronger: so I decided to try to get into that world. I moved to Rome in 2022 to finish my studies at a film academy, where I graduated as a director and screenwriter.

After the academy I felt lost, the way most people do when studies end and work begins. I knew straight away that I wanted to work freelance, for as much freedom as possible. I started at the bottom, writing for documentary films broadcast in prime time on Rai, the Italian public network. My break came in 2024, when I was brought in as a screenwriter on the documentary “Juventus — Primo Amore”, produced by Lux Vide. In the meantime I was developing and running my own projects, and made two short films.

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 on my own projects, short films and documentaries. I broke down scripts by hand, copying every element into a table, and made a sheet for each head of department. I would share the props list with the production designer, he would send it back with the costs, I would edit it and send it over again. The same “send, correct, return” went for every other department. The costume designer and the location manager flooded the group chat with hundreds of photos, which I moved to Drive, matching each costume to the right actor and sorting the images by location. I tried to be as organised as I could, but something always got lost along the way.

At the same time I had to organise the shoots and check the costs of the equipment list and the catering: luckily I had colleagues working in production who gave me a hand. For a single project I used about ten tools and often lost time copying the same things for different departments. I had dozens of folders on Drive and could no longer remember which one held a given document. If a scene changed I had to edit every production sheet one by one: the shooting schedule, the budget, the department breakdowns. 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. It took me almost a year to build the app, with help from my old colleagues and from AI. I wanted a design that was simple and intuitive but still held everything a filmmaker or a production might need to run an audiovisual project, and I am convinced it can keep getting better.

I built it in modules: each module is a stage or a department, and above all I wanted to be able to share a single module, or the whole project, with a collaborator, to make communication between departments and colleagues simpler.

After hundreds of attempts and failures, 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.

If you want to see my own work, have a look at my portfolio and my Instagram.