Franck Onouviet — A Cinematographer's Take on AI Pre-Production

Source of film posters on the article cover picture: IDMB.com

How Cinematographer Franck Onouviet Uses AI to Break Down Scripts and Plan Shoots with a Small Crew

Franck Onouviet has spent more than a decade behind the camera across fiction, documentary, and television, working between Gabon and France. He is a member of France's Union des Chefs Opérateurs (UCO), and his credits run from M-001 — the short he directed and shot within Gabon's ELIZIA collection, and the only Gabonese film in the official short-film competition at FESPACO 2017 — to cinematography on the Ivorian series MTV Shuga Babi and, most recently, Joseph Gaï Ramaka's Wamè, which won a Student Prize at the 2025 Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.

He is not the filmmaker who found a shortcut. He is the one who tested the tool the way a working professional tests anything: slowly, on real projects, with his producer and 1st ADs in the room. The question driving his workflow is the one every under-resourced production faces — how do you keep a professional process when you have fewer resources, or none, especially when you are starting out?

For Franck, AI pre-production is part of that answer. Not a replacement for craft — leverage.

A second brain for the script breakdown

Franck runs every script through an AI breakdown before he works it by hand. Filmustage reads an uploaded PDF or FDX and tags the production elements — cast, props, locations — in minutes, turning a first pass that once took hours into a draft he edits rather than builds. He calls it a second brain.

"It gave me deeper access to a story early on. I still break it down traditionally, but Filmustage lets me see whether I overlooked some aspect of the script. I treat it like a second brain." — Franck Onouviet

For a cinematographer who is also directing and producing, that early read is the difference between walking into prep informed and walking in guessing. The manual pass still happens — it just starts from something, not from nothing.

Where most of the work happens: planning a shoot with a small crew

Breakdown and planning are where Franck spends the most time in the tool — by his own estimate, more than 80% of his use. Once a script is broken down, Filmustage turns it into a schedule and call sheets, which lets him run the early stages with a small crew and hire more deliberately later.

"Breaking down and planning — those two features make up more than 80% of how I use it. It helps me come up with options for planning." — Franck Onouviet

"We're definitely saving time on prep and the early stages of a project. It's going smoothly with a small crew — which lets us hire more efficiently for the next phase." — Franck Onouviet

Under the hood, Filmustage groups scenes by location, distributes them across shoot days, generates a day-out-of-days from the cast tags, and exports call sheets as a PDF per shoot day. For a filmmaker starting out, that is the coordination layer a production normally hires for — available before the budget can support the hire. In Gabon, where local film infrastructure is thin and shoots often depend on imported crew and equipment, that leverage is less a convenience than a precondition for getting an ambitious production off the ground. His approach to rollout is unhurried on purpose:

"It's still new, and it needs to be flawless — so I go slow. But slow is smooth, and smooth is fast." — Franck Onouviet

The old way, and the way he works now

The shift is simple: instead of building every prep document from a blank page, Franck edits one the tool has already drafted. Across breakdown, scheduling, and risk — the parts of prep he leans on most — that is where the saved hours go back into the actual filmmaking.

Catching the risks before they reach the set

The feature Franck rates highest is not about speed. From the first breakdown, Filmustage's AI risk analysis flags scenes that need extra attention — stunts, minors, animals, environmental hazards, and legal or clearance issues. For an under-resourced shoot, catching those in prep instead of on the shoot day is where the tool pays for itself.

"There's a feature that gives you concerns and red flags as soon as the first breakdown — it lets you ask certain safety questions you might not think of early in a project. The AI analysis of potential issues in a script is genuinely powerful." — Franck Onouviet

That is the part a blank spreadsheet never does for you: it does not know to ask whether Scene 14 has a minor on set after 10 p.m., or whether the location needs a permit. The risk pass turns "things you hope you remembered" into a list you can actually work from.

The first question every 1st AD asks: what happens to my script?

Before Franck put Filmustage in front of his network, his 1st ADs and directors asked the same thing first: what happens to a script once it is uploaded? The answer is why he felt able to recommend it — scripts stay in a private, isolated workspace, are never used to train AI, and are covered by SOC 2 Type 2 and a TPN Blue Shield.

For professionals handling unreleased material, that question comes before any feature demo. Scripts are encrypted in transit and at rest and are processed only to generate the results you ask for — nothing else. Filmustage is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and holds a TPN Blue Shield, the content-security baseline major studios and streamers look for.

"It's all good to me — this gives me more arguments to push it." — Franck Onouviet

The Bottom Line

Franck Onouviet's take on AI in pre-production is measured, not evangelical — which is exactly what makes it credible. He uses it where it earns its place: a second brain on the breakdown, the backbone of his planning, an early-warning system for on-set risk. And he did the diligence on data privacy before putting his name behind it.

His view on where the technology is headed runs on the same pragmatism: "As long as it's human-driven, we'll be fine." For a filmmaker building professional-grade productions across borders with a small crew, that is the whole point — the tool handles the coordination so the people can do the work. His advice to filmmakers starting out is blunt:

"Jump on it — it will free you in ways you can't imagine. It gives you the confidence to push a project forward, because you understand what your project actually requires and can have deeper conversations with your ADs and producers." — Franck Onouviet