Take

What this is about

Between action and cut lives exactly one take. The camera assistant slates it, the script supervisor notes what happened — false start, plane overhead, usable — and the good ones become circle takes the editor watches first. Take discipline is money: every extra attempt spends light, energy and card space, so directors learn to name what was missing before going again. Once more, exactly the same is almost never a real direction.

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:

• Circle takes are the takes marked as usable; in the film era only those were printed.
• Slate order scene, shot, take keeps every frame findable months later in the edit.
• Pickups repeat only part of a shot and get noted as such instead of as full new takes.

With TillyGen

TillyGen plans down to the shot; take numbers happen on set, and the shot list is the reference they clip onto.

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.