Often overlooked in the filmmaking (and VFX) process is the messy, unglamorous planning stages of shot and sequence design. A great-looking shot that doesn't tell the story -- or doesn't flow in the context of the edit -- is a shot that doesn't work. Indie filmmakers can elevate their work beyond the all-too-real limitations of time and resources with careful planning and problem-solving with CG tools in preproduction. In this talk, I'll walk through how I used Blender to make staging, blocking, and shot design choices, create a shotlist for production -- and also wrestle through problems in the edit. I'll show before / afters to compare the plan with the execution. In many ways, Blender has been my secret weapon as a filmmaker: not to create pretty pictures, but to figure out what pretty pictures I need to create.