Slate and log takes

What this is about

An editor opening an unlogged shoot faces four hundred clips called by serial number, with no idea which of nine interview takes the director loved. So they watch everything, which the budget pays for twice — once as edit hours, once as lost momentum. The log that prevents this fits on one sheet: scene and shot as named in the shot list, take number, a word on quality, a note when sound or picture had an issue. Someone at the monitor can keep it between takes. The discipline is not clerical; it is the shoot speaking to the edit.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• The naming scheme is decided before day one and matches the shot list — invented conventions at 8 a.m. die by lunch
• A circle take marked three seconds after the director says 'that one' is data; remembered at wrap it is fiction
• Voice slates cost two seconds and survive every workflow: scene, shot, take, spoken into the recording
• Never rename camera files after the fact — notes point at clips, clips keep their born names

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Agree the naming logic in prep: scene and shot identifiers from the shot list, take numbers counting up, and one shared understanding of what a 'good' mark means.
2. Slate what the workflow needs — a clapper where dual-system sound must sync, a voice slate where a board is impractical, a tail slate when the moment could not be interrupted.
3. Keep the log at the monitor, one line per take, written in the seconds after 'cut': take number, usable or not, and why. The bar is low on purpose so it actually happens.
4. Mark circle takes the instant the director reacts. The sentence 'that was the one' evaporates within two setups; a circled number on the log does not.
5. Note problems that post must know: the plane in take three, the soft focus at the end of take five, the improvised line that replaced the scripted one.
6. Reconcile at wrap: does the log cover every card, does every scene on the schedule have its takes, is anything shot that no one logged? Five minutes now beats an email thread next week.
7. Deliver the log with the media as a document post can search — a table, not a photo of handwriting. It becomes the map for the entire edit.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Believing 'we will remember which take was good' past the second setup of the day
• A log that lives in one person's head and leaves with them at wrap
• Renaming files on the drive so every note and every relink points at nothing

With TillyGen

Because TillyGen numbers every shot in the list, the slate and the log borrow their names from the plan — and a CSV export of the shot list becomes the log template the monitor person just fills in.

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.