Build the gear list
from the shots, not from memory.

Connections and consumables, almost never headline items. Nobody forgets the camera body or the lens set; people forget the mount adapter for the one vintage lens, the battery type that fits the monitor rather than the camera, and the cable that is the right length rather than merely the right kind. Grip is the most consistently under-ordered department, and sandbags are under-ordered within it, because nobody has ever estimated sandbag requirements correctly on a first attempt. Then there is the department that belongs to nobody: gaffer tape, card readers, cable ties, a step ladder, water, and a first aid kit, which go missing precisely because no department owns them.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans starting at $9.99 a month, and a Free plan launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so your crew and rental contact can read the list without paying. If you want a free option this minute, a spreadsheet is genuinely good at this and better than a canvas at the budget side, which is a fair reason to use one.

For the money, yes. If you need to sum rental costs, filter by supplier, sort by department, and track spend against an allocation, a spreadsheet does all of that natively and a canvas does none of it. Where a canvas is better is the derivation step: attaching gear to the setups that need it, so the list is generated from the actual work rather than recalled, and keeping photos and spec sheets on the items themselves. A reasonable setup is to derive the list on the board and then move the collated version into a spreadsheet for costing, which is what a lot of productions end up doing anyway.

It can draft one and it will not be complete, which is fine if you treat it as a starting point. With your shot list and lighting plan on the board, the AI can enumerate the gear each setup implies, and enumeration is genuinely tedious work worth delegating. What it cannot know is what you already own, which mounts your lenses use, or what your rental house actually stocks, so every line has to be reconciled with reality. The most useful prompt is not build my list but tell me what people commonly forget for this kind of shoot, which is a pattern question rather than a judgment call.

Yes, by marking status on each item card along with the supplier, the collection date, and the return date. You can attach the rental quote or order PDF to the item as well, which makes substitutions and returns straightforward later. What Storyflow does not do is manage inventory properly: there is no barcode scanning, no availability checking across jobs, and no booking system. If you are running a rental operation rather than a shoot, you want dedicated software.

Yes, and it is the most accurate way to do it. If your lighting plan lists the fixtures, modifiers, gels, and stands each setup needs, the gear list is a collation of those requirements rather than a separate act of remembering. Keeping both on one canvas also means that when the lighting plan changes during prep, the gear list is visibly affected rather than quietly out of date, which is how rental orders end up reflecting a plan from a week ago.

Yes. Share a view-only link so whoever is loading can check against the same list, or export as a PDF and print it, which is usually more practical on a truck at six in the morning. A useful habit is to photograph the packed cases and drag those photos onto the board, because checking a wrap-out against a photograph of the load-in is the fastest way to notice that something did not come back.

Yes. Boards are unlimited, so you can keep a standing list for your usual kit and duplicate it as the starting point for each job, then add the setup-specific items on top. That combination tends to work well: the standard load is a checklist you barely think about, and your attention goes to the specialist items that this particular shoot needs, which are the ones actually at risk of being forgotten.

Yes, and it is the main reason to do this on a canvas. The gear list can sit beside the shot list that generated it, the lighting plan that determines most of it, the schedule that says which day each item is needed, and the props list that covers everything in front of the camera rather than behind it. When a scene moves days, you can see immediately which gear moves with it.