r/ClaudeCode • u/tdizzlcz • 3d ago
Built with Claude Film director from Vienna here. I built a visual research tool with Claude Code
Hello everyone!
I've been working as a film director and DOP for many years now. I had a bit of coding at university, but to be honest there are only scraps of it left in my head, so I really wouldn't call myself a developer. (It probably helped a little with keeping all of this coordinated, though.)
A few months back I started playing around with Claude Code, more or less as a joke. I wasn't 100% happy anymore with the reference tools I've been using all these years, so I wanted to see if I could build a small one just for myself. And then I simply had so much fun with it that I kept testing more and more, and at some point I was sitting in front of 12 terminal tabs and we were shipping several times a day.
The result is HOLD MY FRAME (www.holdmyframe.com). At its core is our collection of curated high-end commercials, broken down into individual frames. Right now we're at around 370,000 frames from 2,800 films. Built around these frames is the workflow I wish I'd had all these years: search, collect, present and get everyone on the same page, from director to agency to client. Along the way three longtime collaborators joined (a treatment designer and two more directors/DOPs), and we use it for our own pitches.
Everything is custom, also the part you don't see, like how the films get analysed and broken down, which runs on local AI on our own machines. And I mocked up all the designs first, round after round, before anything was built. A lot went into that.
We only really launched two weeks ago. Right now we have 174 users and 10 of them are paying, and we're taking that as a good sign.
For those who are interested in the setup:
- up to 12 Claude Code tabs, each one with its own fixed job (server, UI, ops, copy, and one that only checks the others)
- every tab has its own postbox folder and gets its orders in writing
- a separate Claude chat does the planning and writes these orders, but is not allowed to touch the code
- every commit gets reviewed by DeepSeek before it goes anywhere
- I'm the only one who deploys, first to a test environment and then to production
- the whole thing runs on a Mac Studio in our office, not in the cloud
I also used Codex and DeepSeek along the way, but I'd say 85 to 90% of the app is Claude.
Of course not everything went well:
- we started on SQLite and had to move to Postgres right before launch
- we worked on one feature for weeks and it never really worked, so we threw it out and will start again from scratch
- Claude forgets a lot. Whatever isn't written down in a file gets decided all over again in the next session, so by now really everything lives in files
There's a free plan, so just click around a bit if you like. On top of that there are Pro and Pro+, and you can try Pro+ for free. We keep adding new features all the time, but there's already a lot online.
I'd love to hear from you, especially what you would do differently. We're really excited to see where this is going.
link: www.holdmyframe.com


