As you probably noticed, I'm not Craig.

My name is Lily Gladstone. For the next fifteen weeks, I'll be leading you through Crash Course Film Production.

First, a little about me: I'm an actor and I love movies. I love making them, watching them, thinking about them - in fact, I've spent most of my adult life acting in or educating people about movies and all of that has brought me here to Crash Course.

Filmmakers do great things and some not great things with cameras, lights, microphones, actors, makeup, costumes, and special effects. They put together all these puzzle pieces to perform an amazing trick and communicate ideas and emotions on a two-dimensional screen. They make us laugh, cry, squeal, cover our eyes, and every movie starts very simply: it starts with an idea. Maybe it's a grand vision of an intergalactic war or a small and tender tale about a woman trekking cross country with her dog. Either way, both these ideas go through many transformations before they arrive in a movie theater or on Netflix or on Blu-ray.

But how? How do you take an idea and turn it into something that you can show people? And how do you get people interested in helping you make it? How do you cast it, crew it, edit it, score it, and release it? Are you going to direct it? And what does the director actually do? What are producers anyway? Do you even need one? Actually let's get this out of the way right now: yes, yes, producers are very necessary. And like, how much is this all gonna cost? Do you need two hundred million dollars to bring your idea to life or do you need two thousand?

With this series, we hope to demystify a lot of these questions and help everyone understand just how much goes into making a movie, because working on films is fun and exciting but it's also a lot of very focused work that can turn into chaos if you're not prepared or paying attention.

So join me, Lily Gladstone, for the next fifteen episodes of Crash Course Film Production, produced in association with our friends at PBS Digital Studios.

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