Setup

What this is about

Ask an experienced AD how big a day is and the answer comes in setups, not shots. Rolling three more takes costs minutes; carrying camera, dolly and lamps to the other side of the room costs an hour. Shot lists are therefore sorted to exhaust one setup before opening the next, even when that scrambles story order. Turning around — reversing the camera for the opposite angle — is its own small setup, which is why dialogue scenes eat time invisibly.

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:

• Several shots and many takes can share one setup; the count that matters is positions, not clips.
• Setups per day is the honest capacity metric when quoting a job from a shot list.
• A lens swap is not a new setup; a camera move or a relight is.

With TillyGen

TillyGen counts the setups behind a shot list and sizes shooting days from that number, not from optimism.

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.