What is blockout?

Blockout is a desktop app for planning film shots before you actually film them or generate them with AI video tools. It lets you build a rough grey box version of a scene, using simple mannequin style people, vehicles, and props placed at real world scale, then move the camera and cast through the shot exactly the way a real film crew blocks out a scene on set. The point is not to make something pretty, it is to make a reference so clear that an AI video generator cannot misinterpret what you want. You work in three stages. In the Stage step, you drop in one of more than fifty ready made environments, such as a downtown street, supermarket, or backyard, and place people, animals, vehicles, and props from a built in library, labeling each subject so it stays easy to track. In the Shoot step, you select an actor, click the floor to drop numbered marks showing where they walk, and do the same for the camera, choosing a rig style such as dolly, steadicam, handheld, crane, or drone, with real lens and sensor settings modeled on actual film cameras. In the Deliver step, you pick which AI video generator you plan to use, among supported options like Seedance, Veo, Kling, LTX, and Wan, and export a full package: a reference video, a depth map video, still frames, a text prompt written from your actual blocking, and a ready to use ComfyUI workflow file. Beyond single shots, Blockout can stage whole choreographed crowds, such as a dance number, a fight, or a chase, by picking a size and style and clicking where you want the group to appear, and it includes a library of premade character motions and camera moves you can apply with one click. You can also import a 3D scan of a real location, made from your phone or another photo to 3D tool, and stage action inside it, though the scan itself is only used inside the editor and never appears in the final export. Every export is deterministic, meaning the same project always renders identical frames. A bundled MCP server also lets AI coding agents like Claude Code stage and shoot a scene automatically. The app runs on macOS and Windows and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.