Backlot and Dumptruck

Free Mac apps for making films

Backlot runs the production office: budget, breakdown, schedule, call sheets and daily reports. Dumptruck offloads camera cards and checks every copy. Both are free and open source, and both are signed and notarized by Apple, so they open like any other Mac app.

Icon App What it does Version macOS License Download
Backlot Budget, breakdown, stripboard, call sheets, daily reports 0.7.0 beta 1 13 or later GPL-3.0 Download 135 MB
Dumptruck Copies camera cards to backup drives and checks every copy 0.5.6 beta 14 or later Apache-2.0 Download 94 MB
Apple Silicon Macs only. There are no Intel builds. Both apps are betas.

Backlot

A production office that lives on your Mac

Backlot keeps the budget, script breakdown, stripboard, day out of days, call sheets and daily reports in one project file on your own disk, and prints them the way a production office expects to see them.

  • Budgets that track the money. Fringes, globals and budget alternatives, plus purchase orders, invoices and petty cash posted against each line, so every account shows committed, spent and variance.
  • Breakdowns from your script. Import a Final Draft or Fountain draft. When a revised draft comes in, Backlot shows what changed before it touches anything and marks the pages in the standard revision colors.
  • A real stripboard. Drag strips, sort by location or time of day, keep named board alternatives, pin shoot days to a calendar, and get a cast and element day out of days from the same board.
  • Call sheets you can send. Issue a call sheet as a PDF, send it by email or text, and see who confirmed. Daily reports, a take log and a one-click production book come from the same project.
  • Works with Claude. A built-in MCP server lets Claude and other MCP clients read and edit the same project, with the same validation and undo history as the app.

Optional extras

Backlot checks for these at startup and tells you what's missing.

  • PDF printing and issuing call sheets need Google Chrome.
  • Reading FDX and Fountain scripts and printing sides need a separately installed screenwriting engine.
  • Gorilla workbook and Movie Magic XML export need a separately installed budget engine.
  • Email goes through your own Resend account or Google Workspace.
  • AI assists run on a local Ollama model or your own API key.

Dumptruck

Camera card offload that checks every copy

Dumptruck copies a camera card to your backup drives, reads each copy back off the drive to check it against the card, and writes an HTML and PDF report with ASC MHL manifests. A card shows SAFE TO WIPE only when two separate drives hold verified copies. There is no erase button. Wiping the card is still your call.

This is a beta. SAFE TO WIPE means the job passed Dumptruck's verification when it ran. It can't protect you from a drive that fails later. Keep your usual backup routine alongside it, and read the report before you erase a card.

  • Verification that reads the drive. Copies are written past the macOS file cache, so the verify pass reads the data back from the drive itself instead of from memory.
  • Cards that keep shooting. Bring back a card that wasn't formatted and Dumptruck copies only the new clips into the same folder, adding a new manifest generation. Changed or reused clip names get a loud warning, never a silent skip.
  • Reports for the client. Every offload gets an HTML and PDF report with clip thumbnails and metadata, a JSON receipt, ASC MHL v2.0 and legacy MHL v1.1.
  • Camera formats. Dumptruck reads R3D and BRAW files for metadata and thumbnails through bundled helpers, which ask you to accept their terms the first time. ARRIRAW metadata needs the ARRI Reference Tool installed separately. Copying and verification work either way.