Montage
A montage compresses time by presenting a process as a short series of connected shots.
What this is about
In corporate and documentary work the montage does the job of a paragraph nobody wants to listen to: a production process from raw material to finished part, a construction site over months, a training programme in forty seconds. Music usually sets the structure, and cuts land on the beat, which is why the track should be chosen before the sequence is built. The risk is emptiness — a montage of pretty but unrelated shots communicates nothing. A clear order, from first step to result, keeps it readable.
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
In planning terms, that means:
- Choose the music before building the sequence; cutting to an unfinished track means doing it twice
- Give the montage an internal order — first step to result — so it reads as an argument
- Vary shot sizes deliberately; five similar wide shots in a row read as filler
With TillyGen
When a montage is planned in advance, its shots appear in the plan as their own items instead of being assembled from whatever the shoot happened to leave over.
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.
Frequently asked
How long should a montage run?
Rarely longer than the music phrase carrying it — often twenty to sixty seconds. Beyond that the audience stops reading it as compression and starts waiting.
How long does it take to get started with TillyGen?
A first project takes under an hour to set up. There is no configuration phase in which templates and fields have to be defined before the tool produces anything.
Can the results be exported?
Yes — as PDF for the crew, CSV for downstream systems and through the API for anything automated. The plan stays the source; the exports are views of it.