Before Revenant Systems built software for anyone else, it built software for me. I run Mr. Camera, a production company in Las Vegas, and for years I ran it the way most small businesses run: on grit, spreadsheets, and an alarming number of text messages. This is the story of the system that fixed that — and how it became the reason Revenant Systems exists.
Running a production company the hard way
Production work is logistics wearing a cool jacket. Every job means building an estimate, chasing a client to approve it, then calling down a list of camera operators, gaffers, and grips one by one to ask the same question: "Are you free on the 14th?" Then someone's date moves, and you make all those calls again.
Meanwhile the cameras, lenses, and lights walk out the door to jobs and rentals, and you'd better know where each piece is, whether it came back, and whether it's actually earning back what it cost. Then come the crew invoices, the client invoices, and the joyless ritual of retyping everything into QuickBooks.
None of it was hard, exactly. It was just endless. If you've read our piece on the signs you've outgrown spreadsheets, I had all of them. The businesses we've built for since — another production company, a nonprofit bookkeeping firm — had their own versions of the same chaos.
Building our own fix: Mr. Camera HQ
So we built Mr. Camera HQ: one system that runs the whole business, from inquiry to paid. A job follows the same path every time: build the estimate, send it, staff the crew, shoot, invoice, reconcile. The software gives every step a home.
The part the crew loves most is booking by text. The system texts a crew member about a date; they reply 1 (yes), 2 (pass), or 3 (need more time). No phone tag. If someone answers off-script — "can't do Tuesday, but Wednesday works" — AI reads the reply as a yes, no, or needs time and texts a short answer back on its own; anything unclear goes to a person. If the first choice passes or goes quiet, auto-staffing moves to the next person on the list, and the roster fills itself while we do other things. Confirmed jobs drop straight onto each person's calendar, and if a date changes, their calendar updates itself. Crew also get their own portal: upcoming jobs with call times and directions, a button to block dates they can't work, and a wrap form to submit hours when the job's done.
On the office side, the estimate builder handles line items, markups, and multi-day jobs, with an AI assistant that turns "add two camera ops for three days" into actual line items. It reads uploaded vendor bids into the estimate too. In the office, AI also reads uploaded certificates of insurance and W-9s — expiry dates, coverage, carrier, tax details — and flags anything that needs attention for someone to check. Approved estimates push to QuickBooks with one click, payments sync back, and a reconcile tool flags anything that doesn't match.
Equipment gets tracked from checkout to return, including insurance status, maintenance, and return-on-investment per item. There's even a public storefront where rental requests come in and wait for approval.
And because we ran real jobs through it while building it, every rough edge got sanded off by actual use — not by a requirements document.
Then it became the base for a network
Here's where it went next. Equipment owners in town share a familiar problem: your gear sits on a shelf while someone else's earns, and theirs does the same. So we used Mr. Camera HQ as the foundation for Gear Locker: a rental network where several companies pool their equipment into one shared catalog. Gear Locker is a working prototype — it runs, but it isn't live yet, and no real renters have booked through it.
In the prototype, renters browse a single storefront, book, and pay. A fair-share engine rotates rentals across the owner companies so nobody's gear gathers dust while someone else's earns. Each owner gets their own portal to manage their gear and see their numbers. And a rules-based insurance gate checks each renter's certificate of insurance — coverage minimum, named insured, expiry date — before anything leaves the building. No AI is involved in that check.
That's the real lesson of this case study: a system built well for one business is a foundation, not a dead end. The software we built to run one company became the base for a multi-company platform without starting over.
Why this matters to you
Plenty of dev shops will build you software they'd never use themselves. We can't make that mistake, because we use ours every day. We know what happens to a system at 7 a.m. when a client moves a shoot date, because it happens to us. We build what we run.
It also means we're not guessing about feasibility. When we scope a full operations platform, we're scoping something we've already built and run ourselves — and our cost guide shows what one costs. And when we built Stickman HQ for another production company, we were adapting a playbook we'd already proven running our own.
The first client was us. Everything since has been the sequel.
Frequently asked questions
Do you still use Mr. Camera HQ?
Every day. Mr. Camera is still an operating production company in Las Vegas, and every estimate, crew booking, invoice, and rental runs through the platform. When something is annoying, we feel it before any client would, and we fix it.
Can the same platform work for my industry?
The specifics are production-flavored, but the underlying problems are universal: quoting jobs, scheduling people, tracking equipment, invoicing, and syncing with accounting. We build each client their own system around their workflow. The point of this case study is that the approach works, not that you need our exact software.
Where do we start?
Tell us the one workflow that eats most of your week: the spreadsheet you dread, the phone tag, the double entry. We'll scope a build around that single pain point first, put it in a written quote, and expand from there once it's earning its keep.
