CineSuite
Digital playback for film sets
A playback platform for film production: it displays fake applications on the device the camera is filming, driven live from a second screen. Thirty-nine interfaces, a cue sheet, and one absolute rule — never a blank screen during a take.
Demo
One device drives, the others are filmed
A reconstruction of the core mechanism. Pick a cue from the sheet, or fire the next one with GO: every screen in the shot switches together.
Cue sheet
3 screens connectedDormant devices are part of the rig: on a set, not every screen is in the shot at the same time.
Screenshots
The editor and its live preview: logo, colour and period styling are set on the left, and the render follows immediately on the right, inside the frame of the filmed device. Every module has its own editor. For an incoming call: the contact, the fictional carrier, the looping ringtone, and what happens on pick-up — including cutting to another scene. The terminal: colour, the command typed live, typing speed and how the sequence ends. An Appearance section overrides the theme case by case. On launch each device picks its role — control or filmed screen. A standalone mode allows preparing scenes with no network at all. The control device in session: latency, connected screens, scenes and cue sheet. Live control steps through the sequence and types straight into the chat on the filmed screen. The assistant takes a scene described in plain language and generates the matching module configuration.
Context
When an actor looks at a phone on camera, that screen is a prop like any other: it has to behave like a real device, fire on the line, and show exactly the same thing on take 1 and take 14. The usual answers are a frozen screenshot, or a crew member typing just out of frame.
CineSuite splits the rig in two: a control device — the operator's phone or tablet — running an ordered cue sheet and firing on GO, and the filmed device, which displays nothing but the scene it receives. The two talk over SignalR on a local network, because a shoot does not always have internet, and a link that depends on cellular is not a link.
The constraints of the set shaped the code far more than my preferences did: a ruined take idles an entire crew, and a blank screen on camera costs as much as an error message. Every technical decision in this project answers a specific incident that could happen mid-take.
Features
- Real-time control of a second device over the local network, through SignalR
- Thirty-nine fictional interfaces: messaging, search, CCTV, banking, navigation, terminal and more
- Synchronised multi-device scenes — desktop, tablet and phone coordinated within one shot
- An ordered cue sheet, fired on GO like a sound or lighting desk
- On the filmed screen a failure falls back to black, never to a message: the incident surfaces only on the control device
- Network reconnection with no retry limit, so a dropped WiFi link never leaves the screen deaf
- Media preloaded as soon as a cue is armed, never during the take
- AI-assisted content generation, and screenplay import that extracts the sequences involving a screen
- Shippable Electron desktop build, with a kiosk mode locked to a single project