For Derrick Downey Jr., the sciurus carolinensis is a companion. For most of the world, the Eastern grey squirrel is little more than an urban rodent. Derrick's affection for the species, however, has led him to create an app that everyone is talking about — DualShot Recorder.

The premise is straightforward, and perhaps that is precisely why it has enjoyed the success it has. Typically, creators must shoot footage in both horizontal and vertical orientations to ensure their content performs across social media platforms. That means twice the workload, and not every moment can be captured twice with equal spontaneity. A dual-mount rig is one solution, but that comes at considerable cost.

DualShot Recorder is built for iPhone users. It simultaneously records in both portrait (9:16) and landscape (16:9) formats, producing two synchronised video files from a single tap. The goal is to streamline production, particularly for content creators who simply cannot afford to miss a moment.

Derrick's career has been built on short-form video documentation. He loves squirrels and interacts with them daily on his patio in Los Angeles. Whether it is Instagram or TikTok, his accounts command over a million followers, all of them eagerly awaiting his next adventure alongside Maxine, Richard, and Hoodrat Raymond. He keeps nuts and water on hand for his squirrel friends, and when emergencies arise, he takes them straight to the vet. It is wholesome entertainment of the highest order… think Full House, but with considerably more acorns.

His fondness for squirrels began during the pandemic, when a member of the Sciurus carolinensis community wandered onto his patio and accepted a handful of peanuts. With lockdown making life monotonous, it sparked an idea: why not film his interactions with these animals? The bond deepened, and so did his sense of wellbeing. The squirrels, it turned out, were good for his mental health.

The app grew organically from this story. Derrick needed a way to capture vertical and horizontal footage simultaneously. A rig was one option; cropping clips in post-production was another. But cropping has its drawbacks. The iPhone camera already uses a crop of the full sensor when recording video, so taking a vertical crop from the centre of an already-cropped frame means working with a fraction of the sensor's total capability — and a noticeable loss in quality.

Then another tool entered his world: vibe coding. About a year ago, he experimented with ChatGPT, though without success. He then studied Apple's camera architecture more closely. The iPhone's camera API allows third-party developers to access footage from the full sensor, which meant he could save both horizontal and vertical crops without sacrificing resolution. The months that followed were spent as a prompt engineer — as a recent article in The Verge described it — cycling through AI tools until he had something workable.

After ChatGPT came Google's Gemini, and then Anthropic's Claude, which finally did the trick. He launched the app at a one-time price of £5.49 (or $6.99 in the US), and the first day was remarkable — it became the top paid app in the App Store. Pricing has since evolved, as success tends to demand. One thing, however, has remained constant: no user data is collected.

The app offers a range of granular controls over quality and resolution, and it allows simultaneous recording from two different cameras on the same device. Footage can be captured in 1080p or 4K, at frame rates of 24, 30, or 60 frames per second. Files are saved in standard .MOV or .MP4 formats, directly to the device's Photos library.

Who would have thought that wholesome squirrel content on Instagram could lead to a genuine filmmaking tool? Derrick's channel has a quietly calming effect on its audience, and his app has the same effect on a creator's workflow… cutting the complexity of dual-format capture down to a single tap.