Gates and convergence
Four gates, what each locks, who leads at each, and the rule that closes one on a table, not a feeling.
Departments persist; stages gate. A gate is a row in a table too: which departments lead, sketch, advise or sit out; which artifacts must be committed before it can close; what closing locks.
What each gate does
- Ideation locks the logline, the beats and the spine. The Producer writes the Brief and diffs it against every department’s needs. The Director drafts three visibly different treatments and you choose one; the two you did not choose stay in the vision as roads not taken. Story writes the beats. Sound judges the spine. Look & Cast and Camera sketch.
- Pre-production locks the script, the bibles and the shot list. Story writes at shot resolution, one scene per call. Look & Cast writes an entry with an id and a reference prompt for every place and person the script names. Camera writes one shot list entry per script shot, same ids, none added and none missed. Sound lays the temp track. Unit + Edit plans tests and flags anything that cannot render as specified.
- Production locks every take you accepted. Sound writes a native-sound line per shot, the standing negative, the music prompt. Unit + Edit writes the render sheet. Everyone else critiques it against their own artifact. You render, and report.
- Post locks the cut, the mix and delivery. Unit + Edit writes the edit sheet from the takes you accepted; Sound writes the mix sheet; the Producer writes the delivery checklist; the Director makes a final pass and stops.
Rounds
Every gate runs the same round structure. Round 1 is the plan: the Producer writes or updates the Brief and asks what cannot be guessed. Round 2 is the writes: the leads write at lock resolution in dependency order. Rounds 3 and 4 are argument: flags are ruled on, owners revise, stale critics re-read. Extra rounds run only when something is unresolved.
The convergence rule
Two halves. No flag of severity revise or block is open. And for every department active at the gate, the version of each lock it last evaluated equals the current version in the lock table. That second half is what replaced the first design’s cascade. A change to the script does not propagate to Camera. It makes Camera stale, and a stale department is woken as a critic with a bundle that says exactly what changed. It resolves its old flags, raises a new one only if the film genuinely cannot proceed, and says whether its own artifact must now change.
The table is a projection, so it can be read at any moment, and the board shows it under every gate. “Are we done?” became a table that is either all green or is not.
The round cap
Story changes, Camera flags, Story changes again, Camera flags again. Rounds per gate are capped at four. On the last round, anything short of a breaking problem is downgraded to a note and recorded as a disagreement. If a revise or block survives the cap, the Producer opens an ask with both positions, the Director’s last ruling and a best guess, and you decide: side with the flag, keep it as is, or say something else. Loops end in a question, never in silence.
The escape hatch
A projection can insist on something the film does not need: a character id the shot list cited by mistake, a scene whose seconds are off by one. So the board offers set aside for ids and keep as written for scenes. Both are events. The gate stops waiting; the log remembers that you waived it, and why.