Aperture

What this is about

Cine practice inverts the stills habit: instead of adjusting aperture to the light, many DPs lock one working stop for the whole film — T2 for a shallow romantic look, T5.6 for grounded realism — and then bring the light to the stop with lamps and ND filters. The 1st AC sets the iris on the DP's call; nobody else touches it. This discipline keeps depth of field, and with it the film's visual grammar, consistent from the first setup to the last.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• On set the stop is a creative constant; exposure gets managed with ND and lighting, not by riding the iris.
• Blade count and shape decide how out-of-focus highlights render — the aperture draws the bokeh.
• Wide open is where lenses show their flaws: soft corners, vignette, glow. Sometimes that is the point.

With TillyGen

TillyGen's shot list carries the working stop alongside lens and filters, so the look decision is documented before anyone lights a set.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.