Eli5 Why do movies, sometimes with just one star actor and usually less than 3 hours long, take years to make, but shows, which often have many stars and have hours in a season, take a winter of summer break to film, and the next season is out?
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Principle shooting (getting all of scenes shot, the part when you are paying most of the cast and crew for) goes about as fast on a movie as it does with a TV show. There’s a lot of reasons to make sure this is done efficiently, as it’s very expensive. (Just getting everyone fed and all the equipment you need rented is quite a lot of money). Principle shooting might take 1-4 months for a TV season or feature film. Even though a TV show might be 12 hours long an efficient shooting plan can get all the shots in a reasonable amount of time.
But principle shooting isn’t all of what a TV show or movie is. First there’s the Development phase. In this part the money is found, the script selected and bought and people like the director are hired and a bunch of legal agreements are reached. This can take years, but very importantly for this conversation most of the work in this phase only needs to be done once for a TV show, with some more development done with each new season.
After development, there’s pre-production. This involves planning everything that will be done in principle shooting and planning how the movie will be made, who they will need to make it and ordering all the things they will need. Sets have to be built, costumes made, storyboards drawn, actors hired, crews hired, permits secured and locations scouted.
Again, a lot of this can be reused for a TV show from one to the next, saving time for TV shows.
After that, you get to shoot! After principle shooting, it’s off to post production, where the film is edited, then the real work starts for a lot of shows as special effects are performed, it’s properly colored and the sound and music are added. This can take a lot of time, like ‘more time then every other part put together’.
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