Contact sheets are back, and so are we

A model can give you four hundred takes before lunch. Watching them on a screen, one after another, turns judgement into scrolling. So we started printing them.

Paper slows the eye down

Every generation pass now goes onto a contact sheet: twelve frames to a page, numbered, dated. The director circles, the producer crosses out, the colourist writes notes in the margin. Then we scan the sheet and the circled frames go back into the pipeline.

A circle in grease pencil is a decision. A click is a maybe.

It costs us a printer and a box of pencils a month. It saves us days of second-guessing, and the sheets end up on the wall, which is where a film should start.