The Old Film-Set Ritual That Still Saves Shots on Digital Sets

Making a movie is one of the most tedious things you can do as a pastime, if you're doing it right. You're setting up shots, finding the right angles, getting the lighting perfect, hyping up your actors... all before you roll. So when you do roll, you don't want some silly little mistake messing up your frames.

In ye olden days before digital filmmaking, you might run into a particular issue on film cameras. So in an old print, you could sometimes see a squiggly dark line twitching at the edge of the frame for an entire shot.

That's a hair in the gate. On a film set, the defense is a three-word call you'll still hear today.

"Check the gate."

Just because we're in this territory, I wanted to add the cue you hear before every take, when the sound mixer answers, "Roll sound," with "Speed."

A new StudioBinder explainer walks through checking the gate. We're going further into where both calls came from, why film's comeback keeps them relevant, and what they mean on a digital set.

Check out StudioBinder's video below.

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What the Gate Is, and What Counts as a "Hair"

On a film camera, the gate is the opening that holds each frame still behind the lens while it's exposed. Anything lodged there gets photographed on every frame of the take.

The name is maybe a little misleading. Novelist Jasper Fforde, a focus puller before he wrote books, explains on his site that loose slivers of film stock can catch in the gate and show up across an entire take, looking as big as a tree trunk. Actual hairs, lint, and dust count too.

Obviously, as StudioBinder points out, "Hairs can ruin a shot or even an entire scene, and are nearly impossible to remove in post-production without digital effects."

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