Cat 015
Foundation
the grammar before the sentence
NotSoStill · Filmmaking coach
It judges thetake,not the plan.
A real-time filmmaking coach that watches you shoot through your phone and grades the shot during the take. Not after, not before. Declare intent. The reticle answers in haptics.
“The take is sacred.”
REC
31STAB
The curriculum
Thirty-seven beats.
Graded story-first.
The practice unit isn’t a clip. It’s a beat: a three-to-five-shot narrative fragment. Seven categories build from grammar to the invisible cut. Technique is scored, but story leads.
Cat 028
Character
who we’re asked to watch
Cat 036
Conflict
two forces, one frame
Cat 045
Place
geography the cut must keep
Cat 056
Tension
withholding, then release
Cat 064
Closing
how a fragment lands
Cat 073
Match-Action
the cut that disappears
Drill mode survives as Free Study.
scroll · the strip advances
Before
Lecture.
The market is bookended: passive lessons on one side, pre-viz planning on the other. You watch a chapter. You plan a shot list. Then you put the phone down and shoot, alone, ungraded.
After
Mirror.
NotSoStill is the middle nobody built: the coach that watches the take itself. Declare a slow pan; it tells you that you peaked at 31°/sec around 1.4s. Story first. Technique second.
The category, reframed
Practice isn’t a quiz and it isn’t a storyboard. It’s a beat: a three-to-five-shot narrative fragment, graded story-first, technical second.
The vocabulary
Thirteen moves,
each one measured.
Every preset carries its own scoring criteria: a per-take gyro and gravity baseline, a noise-floor clamp, weighted per drill. Not “was it shaky.” Did it serve the move you declared.
02 / 13
Slow pan
smooth yaw, capped peak rate
Real calibrated scoring
A number you can
actually trust.
The score is not a vibe. Every take is calibrated against your own hand, clamped above the sensor's noise, weighted to the move you declared, then smoothed so the readout holds. Hold the phone still and it reads 92 or better.
gyro + gravity : live
rawsmoothed
noise floor : clamped
steady read31EMA smoothed
01
Baseline
A one-second gyro and gravity read taken at the top of every take. Your hand, your phone, this moment, the zero we score against.
02
Noise floor
Micro-jitter below the floor is clamped out, so a perfectly held frame is not punished for the sensor's own hum.
03
Weighting
Each preset weights what matters to its move. A whip pan forgives speed; a locked-off does not. The criteria are the drill.
04
Smoothing
An exponential moving average rides the signal so the readout is steady, not twitchy. The number you see is a judgement, not a spike.
Read the craft
Theory you can feel in the frame.
The rule
The 180° line
Keep your two subjects on the same side of the line and the geography holds; cross it and the audience is lost. Cited to Mascelli, Katz, Bordwell, and watched live, not just taught.
line crossed
Active-Watch · Predict
6 exercises
Study the sequence, then pick the next cut.
→
During the take
Haptic + reticle only
No words. No chimes. The take is sacred.
ASL Coach
Your pace, against
seventy-five years.
Average shot length is the quiet fingerprint of an edit. The app measures yours and places it among five bands drawn from a study of 150 films, 1935 to 2010. Choose a band to feel its tempo.
Cutting et al. 2010 : 150 films
Felt tempo~5s / cut
Room to read a face. The shot holds long enough to trust a performance.
fasterslower
Story Study
Nine chapters of
craft, written down.
About 5,300 words of original prose on the grammar of moving pictures, cited where the research earns it: Loschky 2015, Mital 2011, Smith and Mital 2013. Not transcribed lectures, written for the moment you raise the phone.
Chapter 01 / 09cites Loschky 2015
The cut
A cut is a claim that no time passed, or that all of it did. The eye forgives the join when motion, gaze and intent carry across it. Study what the viewer is already looking at, and cut to where the look was going.
Cut on the look, not the clock.
Read
1/9
Demonstration library
Sixteen moves,
modelled in 3D.
Thirteen camera moves plus the 180° axis, three-point lighting and the shot-size ladder: animated demonstrations rendered on Google Filament, right inside the app.
16 glTF demos · Google FilamentThe library, in motion, coming to the showcase
REC
Locked-offSlow panSlow tiltWhip panPush-inPull-outLateral trackArcPedestalHandheld walkCrane simDutch rollRack focus180° axisThree-point lightShot-size ladder
By the numbers
0
story-first beats across 7 categories
v0.0.1 pre-alpha · package app.notsostill.coach
0
camera-move presets, measurably scored
0
animated 3D demonstrations
0
study chapters · ~5,300 words
0ms
gyro horizon latency on the reticle
Pre-alpha · Android firstStop reviewing
Stop reviewing
the footage.
Coach the take.
Director’s note · today
“The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”
attrib. Jean-Luc Godard
the take is sacred