How does a film get made?

A two-hour film is 172,800 still photos, cut from 100 hours of footage by hundreds of people. Every film goes through development (the script and the money), pre-production (planning), production (the shoot), post-production (edit, VFX, sound, colour) and distribution. The shoot is often the shortest part: a feature takes one to three years in all.

Read how it works: How does a film get made? · The history of making films · More boxes on Glassbox

Chapters in this interactive model

1. From idea to cinema in five stages: Walk a film can across the studio lot, and see how long each stage takes and how many people it needs.
2. Why still pictures seem to move: Flip frames at 6 to 60 a second, spin a zoetrope, and find out what your brain is really doing.
3. A day on a film set: Meet the crew, run a take, and line up picture and sound with the clapperboard.
4. Where the film is really made: Cut a hundred hours down to two, drop in VFX, set the colour and mix the sound.
5. Who pays, and who gets to watch: Split a budget, count India’s films, follow the money from cinemas to OTT, and read a censor certificate.
6. Make a five-shot film with a phone: Build a shot list, frame each shot, and learn the two rules that make a scene cut together.