When shooting a movie, each time the camera is set up, it is appropriately called a "set-up". On a given day in an efficient shoot, there can be as many as 30 set-ups. This information is good to know, because later when you're bragging to your friends about the production you're working on, you say things like, "yeah, we were hustling. Yesterday we shot 30 set-ups." Set-ups are simply known as "shots" after production.
Sure it sounds easy to move a camera into 30 different positions, but when you move the camera, you also have to move the: lights (which can include hundreds of light stands and cables); monitors (with stands and many cables); set dressings; actors (including extras); chairs to accommodate the cast and crew (there is actually a person whose job it is to move chairs around the set all day); wind machines; flags and masks and cookies (all things that affect the lighting--all of which have many stands); tracks and cranes (if the camera will need to move); scaffolding, rigging, traffic; and so on.
This is the reason expensive actors have stand ins. It takes a long time to move all of that stuff, so stand-ins literally stand on the actor's marker while the DP (director of photography) meters and calibrates the exposure and lighting. Meanwhile the actor sits around and drinks coffee and says things like, "Get my agent on the phone!"
Within each set-up (or shot) there are multiple "takes". Before the director yells action, the Assistant Camera (or AC) "slates" the take by holding a clapper in front of the camera and saying something like, "Toy Story shot 153 take 4-- marker!" At which point he will clap the clapper and the director will yell action. If the AC is a pro, he'll clap it with one hand, but that's hard to do.
What is the clapper for you ask? Well, unlike your camcorder at home, a film camera has no microphone. There is a second unit of crew members who consist of the location sound-mixer and a boom-operator (who holds that long fishing pole with a microphone at the end). These guys record all of the sound that will either end up in the movie, or be used later as reference when additional dialogue is overdubbed. The clapper comes into the scene so that the picture AND the sound both have a starting reference point to line up on. This is why the slate also has written on it what the AC called out before he clapped it. Later, in post-production, the film editor can SEE the picture of the slate, and HEAR the audio that goes with it, and line it up on the clap point.
But I digress. My point in telling you all this was to explain how it relates to editing. During the shoot, a person (usually a woman because they are exceptional organizers) functions as the "script supervisor". She will monitor the script as the shooting rolls along and watch for continuity issues. Continuity issues can arise when scenes that will be cut together, don't quite match. For example, if a zombie was walking down the street holding an axe in his left hand for one shot, he should not be holding the axe in his right hand for the next shot. This would present a continuity issue, and would look bad in the final edit. The script supervisor also monitors which dialogue was recorded in which shot. She dutifully tracks shot numbers and takes, marking them across the master script.
Her notes look like this:
These notes show which shot number corresponds to which part of the script, and how many takes were shot per shot. These notes become invaluable for an editor. That was my whole point to this article. I had never seen scrip supervisor's notes before, but I certainly would not have had as easy a time with this project if I did not have them.
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