ReelWERK is an award winning free app for digital creatives, offering a variety of tools to filmmakers, photographers and VFX artists. Available on the App Store.
Early in 2023, I approached a dear friend of mine, Silvan Wolff, with a draft for ReelWERK. Apps for creative work cost a pretty penny, and as students, we just didn't have the money. We heard the same complaint from many of our friends. So, we decided a free alternative to the industry standard tools had to be made for students and others on a tight budget.
I was finishing up school at the time and only had limited programming experience, none at all with Apple's Swift/SwiftUI for iOS apps. The same was true for Silvan. Nonetheless, within the year, we taught ourselves the necessary skills and created the first version of ReelWERK that went on to win the "Schülermedienpreis" in 2024.
While Silvan was responsible for designing a beautiful user interface, I handled the functionality of ReelWERK, what some might call the “backend". Furthermore, I was responsible for all administrative work like tracking progress and planning feature development.
ReelWERK contains many different tools. This creates the unique possibility to combine features in the app to make tools more powerful and integrated. A global camera library allows for easy use of sensor sizes in different calculators but also lets users quickly select their camera model in our viewfinder tool. The Clapperboard can be time synced via our TimeSync tool that also outputs LTC timecode to cameras. The list goes on, the possibilities are plentiful.
Current plans for ReelWERK include expanding upon existing tools, making them more robust and ironing out bugs and then moving on to new features. To find out more, visit: https://reelwerk.net/roadmap/
