Slate Clapperboard

Slate Clapperboard turns a foldable iPhone into a film clapperboard. Hold the open phone up to the lens like a hardware slate: colour-bar clapper sticks across the top, SCENE and TAKE in huge type on one half, and a glowing red LED timecode with roll, camera, production, date, sound and director on the other. Nothing on the board crosses the fold. Then snap the phone shut. That is the clap.

When you snap the phone shut, the closing phone is your visual mark and the sound is your audio mark: a wooden clack with a 1 kHz sync tone that starts at the same instant. Slate gives a firm haptic tap and logs the take with its timecode and wall-clock time, and the cover screen, now facing the camera, shows the take you just slated marked in green, with the timecode frozen at the clap and an UNDO key. Open the phone again and the take number flips to the next take. Clap again within six seconds and it is logged as second sticks for the same take.

Slate fires only on a fast, full close: the hinge has to snap shut while moving quickly, and it will not fire again until the phone has been opened back up. Holding the phone shut or letting it drift closed never claps, and a close that is just too slow tells you so.

Slate also works on any iPhone with iOS 26 or later. Tap CLAP, or turn the phone sideways and strike the drawn clapper stick down hard: the stick drops, the screen flashes for two frames at your frame rate and the take is logged. With the CLAP button, the screen flash marks the frame. On an iPhone with an Action button, add the Clap the slate shortcut to it to clap without looking while Slate is open.

A short guide explains all of this the first time you open Slate. Tap any field to edit it. The NEXT menu moves to the next setup (12A to 12B, skipping I and O), the next scene, the next roll, a pickup or a series take, each with undo, and marks the next clap as a wild track or a tail slate. MOS takes show in amber everywhere and skip the sync tone.

The take log groups takes by shooting day and scene. Circle the good takes, mark NG, add notes, edit or delete a take, and share the log as a CSV file through the iOS share sheet, with standard RFC 4180 quoting and UTF-8, and columns for the take kind, circled, NG, notes, date and timecode mode. The file is created only when you share it.

Timecode runs as time of day by default, or free run, which keeps counting across launches until you reset it. Both are non-drop-frame at 24, 25, 30 or 60 fps.

While Slate is open the screen stays on at full brightness and dims after three idle minutes, and the status bar and home indicator are hidden. A day board with light fields reads in sunlight. Every setting is in the More menu.

Slate is private by design: no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no network calls. Your slate and take log live in the app's own Documents folder on your device. The app does not use the microphone or camera. Data leaves the phone only when you export the CSV and choose where to send it. It is a one-time purchase with no subscriptions.

Limits: no drop-frame timecode and no 23.976 fps, and there is no Bluetooth or audio timecode sync, multi-camera or iCloud sync. The clap sound is a sync aid, not a timecode source.

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