Explainer 02
A film is years of paperwork with a few weeks of filming somewhere in the middle.
Seven stages, in this order: development, financing, pre-production, production, post-production, delivery, distribution. The part you picture — a camera, a set, somebody saying action — is the shortest and most expensive of the seven, and by the time it starts almost every decision that matters has been made.
This is the shape of the whole thing, with real timings and the people in charge at each point. None of it is secret. It is never explained, and not knowing it is one of the reasons capable people talk themselves out of this industry before they start.
The map
The seven stages, and how long each takes
These stages overlap constantly. Financing runs through development, visual effects work starts before the shoot ends, and marketing begins while the edit is still an argument.
Stage 01
Development, where almost every film dies
A producer options a book, commissions a script, or takes one that arrives. An option is a small payment for the exclusive right to try to set something up for a fixed period, usually eighteen months, renewable. Most options lapse. That is not failure; it is the ordinary metabolism of the industry.
The script goes round
Draft after draft, with notes from the producer, then a financier, then a broadcaster or a streamer, then a director who has just come on. Ten to twenty drafts is unremarkable.
Attachments make it real
A director, a lead actor, sometimes a DoP. Nothing is financed on a script alone. It is financed on a script plus the names willing to be publicly associated with it.
Somebody builds a budget
A line producer or production manager schedules the script, works out how many days it needs and prices it. This is the moment a film discovers what it is.
And a deck exists
Twenty pages of tone, comparison titles, audience, cast wish-list and finance plan. Most jobs in development are, in practice, the making and remaking of this document.
Development work is frequently unpaid or paid late, one of the sharpest class filters in the industry, and it is where a large share of producing careers begin.
Stage 02
Financing, which is a stack rather than a cheque
A British independent film is typically financed from five or six sources at once, each of which wants to see the others committed before it commits. Assembling that stack is the producer’s real craft, and it is why films take years.
Public funding and broadcaster money
National and regional funds, and a commission or pre-buy from a broadcaster or streamer. On high-end television that commission is often the whole budget; on film it is one slice for one territory.
The tax credit
An expenditure credit returning a defined share of qualifying UK spend, reliable enough to be borrowed against months before it arrives.
Pre-sales and equity
A distributor abroad buys the right to release the film before it exists; private investors take real risk for a share of any profit, recouped last and often not at all.
Gap and bridging finance
Loans against money that is contracted but has not landed. Interest on this is why a schedule slipping by a week is a financial event.
The green light is the moment the money is contractually committed. Until then everybody is working on a promise, and productions collapse the week before principal photography more often than outsiders believe.
Stage 03
Prep, where the film is made
The moment the green light lands, a production office opens and starts hiring. Heads of department come on first, then their crews, in a staggered order following what each department has to build. Camera comes on late; art and construction come on early, because they have things to make.
The schedule is built
The script is broken down into scenes, then reordered by location, cast availability and daylight. You will not shoot the story in order and you will rarely shoot a whole scene in one day.
Weeks 1–3
The budget is locked
Every department gets a figure. From here, wanting something means finding it somewhere else in the same budget, which is why the answer to a good idea is often no.
Weeks 1–4
Locations are found and recced
A recce is a visit to a possible location. The tech recce is the later one, where heads of department walk the space and work out what it costs them in power, noise, access and time.
Throughout
Design and build happen
Sets designed, drawn, built and dressed. Costume designed, sourced, fitted and aged. The longest lead time on most productions.
Throughout
Camera and lighting prep
The package is assembled at a rental house and checked item by item, lenses are tested, and the DoP shoots tests for the grade. Prep is where a trainee learns more than anywhere else.
Final 1–2 weeks
The paperwork that makes it legal
Risk assessments, insurance, permits, road closures, child licences, chaperones, medical cover, and a movement order telling everybody how to get there.
Continuous
Stages 05–07
Post, delivery and distribution
Post-production is where the film is made a second time and frequently made differently. Delivery is the technical audit that follows. Distribution decides whether the previous six stages mattered.
Six surprises
The parts that only make sense once somebody says them out loud.
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Where you fit
Every stage on this page is somebody’s whole career.
Development is a producing career. Prep and the shoot are where the crafts live. Post is a set of highly technical careers almost nobody is told about at school, and delivery and distribution are careers too — among the least contested in the industry.
