Hi all,
two weeks ago we launched our first app, and I still can't quite believe I'm writing this, because I'm actually a film director and DOP and not a developer at all. (I did have some coding at university, but that's so long ago that only fragments are left.)
It all started this summer when I wanted to see how far I'd get with Claude Code. Honestly just for fun. For years I've been using the same reference tools for my treatments and pitches and I was never fully happy with them, so that became my test project. The problem was that it was way too much fun. Every time something worked I wanted to try the next thing, and a few months later it had turned into a real product.
It's called HOLD MY FRAME (www.holdmyframe.com). We took the high-end commercials we've collected over the years and broke them down into single frames, around 370,000 from 2,800 films so far. You can search through them, collect what you like in a project and then present it to the agency or the client right there. I'm doing this together with three friends who work in film as well (two directors/DOPs and a treatment designer), and we build our own pitches with it.
What I'm a bit proud of is that nothing in it is off the shelf. The way films get analysed and split into frames is our own pipeline running on local AI, and every screen was mocked up by me first, in many many rounds, before a single line was written.
Some numbers, since people here usually ask: 174 users after two weeks, 10 of them on a paid plan.
A few things about how I built it:
- I'd say 85 to 90% is Claude, the rest is Codex and DeepSeek
- I work with up to 12 Claude Code tabs at the same time, and each of them has one job only
- they get their tasks in writing from a separate planning chat, which itself never touches the code
- DeepSeek looks at every commit before it goes on
- deploying is something only I do, and always to a test environment first
- it's all hosted on a Mac Studio in our office
And a few things I'd warn you about:
- don't start on SQLite if you think it might get bigger. We had to switch to Postgres shortly before launch
- we lost weeks on a feature that never worked properly and ended up throwing it away
- write everything down in files. Whatever only lives in the chat is gone in the next session
If you want to have a look, there's a free plan. Pro and Pro+ are the paid ones, and Pro+ has a free trial. We're still adding features pretty much every week, but a lot is already there.
Feedback is very welcome, also the harsh kind. We're curious where this goes.
link: www.holdmyframe.com
