First, our town existed only on paper — a collection of sketches and possibilities. Then it became something we could touch: paint, lumber, and the first hints of a real place. Before long, a life-sized diner, museum, and graveyard stood beneath 140 feet of painted sky. In Week Five, the final ingredient arrived: lights, cameras, and people — actors, more specifically — transforming our town from a set into a living, breathing place.

The actors who arrived represented a rare collision of worlds: young performers just beginning their careers, some as young as 14, working alongside veterans with more IMDb credits than years lived by many of our campers. Some, like Lukita Maxwell, came directly from this year’s biggest Hollywood releases, including A24’s Backrooms, the studio’s highest-grossing film. Others were familiar faces from films our campers grew up loving, like Heather Matarazzo from The Princess Diaries and the cult classic Welcome to the Dollhouse.

For our students, suddenly these weren’t distant names on a screen — they were collaborators, standing beside them on the set they had built.

This wonderful blending of youth and experience was never more apparent than when Aria, a 14-year-old camper-actor, played opposite Heather Matarazzo. On the page, there are very few lines between the mother and daughter duo. Director Pascal and his two actresses realized they needed more to help them get into the scene — sometimes these things only become apparent once you’re on set and under a major time-crunch, which is both thrilling and hair-raising — so Heather and Aria began to ad-lib, inventing a strange mother-daughter dynamic where Aria was the responsible party, urging her mother to be reasonable and part with her cherished possessions in the hopes they may etch out a living this month.

To see the two invent together, one great line informing the next, was like watching two old titans play off each other, except that one was a freshman in high school. It was incredible to witness, and spoke to not only Aria and Heather braving the unknown together, but the incredible work acting teacher, Josephine Chiang, did to prepare Aria for this massive moment (more there below). The lines they ad-libbed will likely make the final cut of the film — a reminder the script is a living, breathing thing that sometimes takes huge leaps forward minutes before you shoot it.

Becoming Young Sorcerers

Something extraordinary began to unfold as the week progressed — not just with our visiting actors, but across the entire crew. Suddenly, our students were watching the things they had written only weeks before, the sets they had spent hours painting and building until they felt real, being captured and preserved forever. Their ideas were no longer sketches in a notebook or conversations in a room; they were becoming images, moments, and memories — brought to life by their peers working alongside industry pros.

There was a look in many of the students eyes familiar to every filmmaker who has ever experienced it: the realization that making a film is a little like dabbling in magic. You start with almost nothing — an idea, a feeling, a fleeting image in your mind — and somehow, through hundreds of tiny acts of collaboration, it becomes something real. A place. A mood. A living world that didn’t exist before.

That feeling is rare. You have taken something invisible and made it visible. You have captured it, preserved it, and created something you can share with your friends, your family, and anyone willing to step inside the world you imagined. For a moment, you feel a little like a sorcerer: you whispered something into existence, and now everyone else can see it too.

Don’t Just Meet Your Heroes, Direct Them

When Lukita Maxwell, fresh off this year’s massive hit Backrooms, arrived on set to act opposite Scoot McNairy — the veteran actor who recently played Woody Guthrie opposite Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown — she experienced something she had rarely, if ever, encountered on a film set.

After her very first take, the high schoolers watching from behind the monitors erupted into applause. It wasn’t the polite, obligatory applause of a professional set — it was pure, unfiltered joy. They were celebrating the impossible thing they had just witnessed: an idea they had carried in their heads for weeks suddenly existing in front of them. Lukita began to tear up. So did camp founder Joe.

These actors are in extraordinary demand — one visiting actress told us she had been home for only four days this entire year because she had been working so constantly — which made their decision to come to San Francisco and become part of the students’ film all the more meaningful. Their presence was already a remarkable vote of confidence. But what happened in that first take revealed something even more powerful: the joy of filmmaking itself.

This is not usually what happens after a first take on a Hollywood production. But maybe it should. The scene was directed by Camila, a student who flew in from Brazil for the summer, and shot by Story, a student cinematographer from San Francisco.

Again and again, actors and visiting faculty remarked that what they felt at 48 Hills was a rare and powerful reminder of why they fell in love with filmmaking in the first place

This kind of a program, this way of creating, is unfortunately rare, though it shouldn’t be! But in most other programs, students study actors like these from a seat in the audience — at most, maybe they get to ask them a question in a Q&A. Here, they cast them, direct them, light them, act across from them. They are in the thick of creation with them as equals — these actors show up having read the script, but it’s the students who will guide them from a cursory understanding to the nuanced one they’ve been cultivating for weeks.

That distinction is what transforms this from mentorship into a true creative exchange. The veterans bring a lifetime of experience: the instincts, craft, and countless lessons that come from years on set. But the students bring something equally essential — an intimate understanding of the world they created, a perspective that no one else could have. They are not simply learning from these veterans; they are collaborating with them. Each side arrives with something the other needs.

How Do You Get Everyone Into the Same Movie?

The students in the acting department arrived from every experience level, from theater-trained to commercially-focused, with several being entirely new to film. Getting all of them to play within the same tone on a film that was still finding its own tone, fell to Josephine Chiang, a beloved indie actor and teacher who came in from New York to run the department.

Before there was a script, Josephine began Week One with improv games that taught students to trust their first instincts. From there, they started everyone “flat,” delivering lines stripped to the same neutral tone so they could build up together, making discovery a collective process.

This is critical for young actors — instead of rushing towards big expressive emotion as young performers so often want to do, this roots them in the words, then eventually slowly building towards feeling together.

Next, Josephine worked from the body. The “Returners,” an ensemble of inseparable of Robin Hood-esque girls who steal from the living and give to the dead, needed to move like one organism, so Josephine had the actors pick a herd animal to move like. They landed on the crow and, surely, their movements synced into something slow and deadpan, and their speech followed into the same stilted register.

From that somatic foundation came the character-specific work. Once there was a script, students kept journals in their character’s voice about the full day their character lived, and built playlists to help drop them straight back into character in between setups.

That groundwork helped Aria improvise so freely opposite Matarazzo in the scene that opened this dispatch. As Josephine puts it: when in doubt, the actors think their character’s thoughts. By now, they have written enough of those thoughts down to have them ready.

Learning to Light a World

Drew Daniels, the cinematographer behind Oscar Best Picture-winning Anora, came to lead our cinematographers, and light quickly became one of the film’s secret ingredients. Light touches everything — every building, every face, every corner of the world we’ve created. It can reveal or conceal, warm or isolate, make something feel familiar or completely otherworldly.

Outside, filmmakers have to work with the light the world gives them. Inside our warehouse, we get to invent it — every source of light becomes a creative choice. A street lamp, a glowing window, a passing headlight — each one is placed with intention. A fixture just beyond the frame can become our sun or moon; a carefully shaped beam can split an actor’s face, revealing one side while concealing another. Unlike the real sky, ours has no limits: we can move it, change its color, or create a world with more than one sun.

At first, some students wanted to match the painted sky to the color of a real one, familiarity winning out. Then came gaffer Mina’s iPad, which allowed us to adjust the color of every light in town a thousand different ways. Suddenly, the students weren’t just recreating the world outside — they were designing one of their own.

Slowly, the urge to recreate the familiar gave way to something stranger. The town began to drift away from reality and into its own universe — one that could only exist inside this film. The resulting movie has a glow that is neither night nor day, some strange netherworld where the sun perpetually threatens to set and the moon lingers long past nightfall. What began as an experiment became a defining feature of the film’s visual language.

This helps define the film’s tone — because if there is no true distinction between night and day, what does that mean for the people who inhabit this unusual purgatory? They exist in a place outside ordinary time, where morning never quite arrives and night never fully settles. The world feels suspended, just like the characters themselves: waiting, searching, carrying histories they cannot escape and futures they cannot quite reach.

Laura, a student director from Brazil, told us light was the single biggest thing she learned all week.

Light is mood — and as such, it’s one of the most powerful tools of expression we have as filmmakers. But often when starting out, its beguiling, and filmmakers lack the time, patience, guidance or resources to harness it’s power.

As audiences, it’s one of the first thing things we feel, long before characters explain themselves through dialogue, light has already begun telling their story. Light tells us what kind of place we have entered, what feelings live there, and what histories linger in the corners.

Before dialogue reveals who our characters are, we watch the light pave their way as they move silently through their surroundings: past cozy dwellings where old televisions flicker through stained-glass windows, beneath street lamps pulsing an artificial green, through streets where long shadows stretch across buildings.

There is a loneliness embedded in this town, a feeling of people searching for something just out of reach. The artificial sunlight hums orange, bathing everything in a warmth that somehow feels distant.

If the sun were a different color, if the shadows were shorter, then the words spoken here, the rich histories of these characters, would feel totally different. Light is that strong.

As an example — in one subplot, a girl comes to town hoping to reach the streamer she’s been following but will never be able to meet. But, for one moment, the light from the streamer’s window touches her face anyway. Hildy, one of the students who imagined the scene, watched it come together and was surprised by how much feeling had been hiding inside her own idea.

A Look You Can Believe In

The Hair and Makeup team had revelations of its own.

Sitara, a student in the HMU department, built a look for Oona, a student actor, which changed how Oona could play the character. The makeup caught the light in his eyes and seemed to hand Oona the confidence to take full hold of the character. Sometimes the fastest way into a role is a face you can believe when you look in the mirror.

Costume informs character too. Kinsey Thomas, our lead Costume Designer who’s got a decade of experience under her belt, brings her students in to rehearsals so they can watch a character come to life — how they move, whether they hunch, how different clothing materials might breathe and flow best with their movements.

Val and Suzie, the town’s “Runaways,” became a perfect example of the actors leading the designers. Rather than starting with a fixed costume concept, the costume students watched Oona and Sage discover their characters in rehearsal — how they moved, what they held onto, what they seemed to carry with them. The designs began to follow.

What emerged was something fluid and Araki-esque: layers carefully curated but also seemingly collected along the way, a look that felt both iconic and lived-in. Their clothes suggested histories — pieces gathered from the dumpsters of every town they had passed through, remnants rescued from forgotten places, assembled into something entirely their own.

Next Week

Production doesn’t slow down after a breakthrough — it only grows more ambitious. In Week Six, the cameras will keep rolling, new scenes will come to life, and new actors will arrive to step into the world the students have spent weeks building. Each arrival will bring the same mixture of excitement and uncertainty: a fresh collaboration, a new interpretation of these characters, and another reminder that filmmaking is an act of constant discovery.

But as the production grows, so do the challenges. More scenes mean more moving parts, more voices to align, and more opportunities for unexpected obstacles to emerge. The students are learning that making a film isn’t about eliminating uncertainty — it’s about learning how to adapt, problem-solve, and create together when the unexpected inevitably arrives. The world they imagined is no longer just being built; it is becoming something alive. Something that must evolve, breathe, and change.

Pre-production is officially complete. This week, cameras are rolling.

But first, each of our directors was assigned a scene and told to treat it like their own mini movie. They’re responsible for everything inside it: the performances, the shot list, the plan they build with their cinematographer. They’re even shaping the rooms themselves in some cases. One directing student spent part of the week with Olivia, head of the Art Department, rearranging the furniture inside his character’s house to fit how he wants to stage the scene. Another director brought their own books from home to populate the abandoned lot their characters have turned into a makeshift home.

Owning a scene sounds manageable until you count the shots and the characters you must track over the arc of a scene. Take one scene where five inseparable best friends – all of whom should be distinguished as their own person – wander into a historian’s museum. With the historian, that’s six characters spreading out through a room. Each one needs a shot to capture their performance and fully thought out blocking, with continuity too. A scene like that can swallow a shoot day if the director doesn’t have a plan.

So the week became a crash course in something harder to teach than logistics: judgement. Where a director focuses their attention, and ours as viewers, when time is limited. Can you fit two characters into one shot to elongate your shooting time? How do you simplify a character’s physical movement in a scene while not forcing an unnatural stiltedness upon them? And what about before they move at all – how can the way a character is staged, in combination with the camera’s framing, tell a big part of our story before a character has spoken a word?

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Cut It Before You Shoot It

The directors and DPs began by building their shot lists and storyboards. But then we asked them to take their actors into our half-built locations, shoot their entire scene on an iPhone, then edit it.

The edit is critical. Plenty of shot lists look great on paper but fall apart in the cut. Eyelines don’t match. Two angles that seemed different turn out too similar, so cutting between them looks goofy. Even with a perfect storyboard, some of this is only discoverable in an edit.

If you work in a field where the advice is to test and fail fast, this is that. A director who discovers a broken cut on a phone in week four can fix it for free. A director who discovers that same problem on set, with a full crew and just a day to get the scene, puts a film’s budget and timeline in jeopardy. Working filmmakers know this — a director who has already watched their scene cut together walks onto set with a tested plan. That changes how they carry themselves on set.

Why This Shot?

Almost every student arrives wanting the fancy shot. The long tracking move, the fisheye, the elaborate opening. So all week, in sessions with Joe, Eliza, and Link, the directors stood in front of the “studio” and answered one question about every choice: why?

The writers built an arc of information into each scene. If the script opens on a character showing off something she stole and your version opens on a different character entirely, you need a reason for that. Maybe the scripted opening wasn’t working. Maybe you found a better way in. Both are fine. But flourish that can’t serve the story or character won’t make the cut at 48 Hills.

These three teachers don’t share the same taste. A shot list that holds up across three different sensibilities is a shot list each director can drive with confidence and clarity.

An Audition Can Change the Role Itself

Casting finished in week four as well. First, students soft-cast the actors they felt strongest about, then ran chemistry reads, bringing different scene partners together to see which pairings lit up the scene.

Several performances were strong enough to bend the characters themselves. You don’t know if your dialogue works or not until your actors say the words aloud. It’s a gift that doesn’t always feel that way as a writer. But if you can push past the initial pain of discovering your dialogue isn’t there just yet, you discover your actors are granting you a chance to learn what isn’t working just yet, so long as you really pay attention. The script tells you what it wants to be.

Take, for example, a scene where two characters were meant to be excitedly antagonizing each other. Each actor that came in to audition struggled to gain the momentum in the middle of the scene necessary to reach its emotional zenith. There was a strong starting point and a clear end the writers intended for, but the middle was a sunken bridge. It didn’t allow the actors the proper runway to get from quiet tension to full-on hysteria. Adding two more lines in the middle of the scene changed everything – suddenly, it was actable.

Making Your Look Speak For You

The costume and hair and makeup students followed, inventing lived histories through bold makeup choices and purposefully aged clothing.

That’s how the Costume Department works here. Kinsey, who has spent a decade designing in the industry, brings her students into rehearsals and has them imagine the costume in real time, on a person. When a designer gets stuck on who a character is, they can walk upstairs and ask the actor, or ask the director what they’re visualizing. On a professional set, you might get an actor over Zoom if you’re lucky.

Costume student Stella’s design for our ‘diner waitress’ shows how a costume choice gets tested against the world. She researched the character, decided building the uniform from scratch wasn’t feasible, went hunting for the real thing, told Kinsey she feared it would never turn up, and then found it: a yellow waitress dress that fit the character exactly. Then she went to see the diner the Art Department is building and noticed the green tints in the tile. Now the waitress may go green instead. The dress fit the character, but Stella caught that it also has to fit the room.

Her other design needed no revision. Dahlia: a lonesome dreamer with a big interior world received a look that was carefully layered, polka dot tights, the kind of staple outfit that puts her in the lineage of Juno and Lady Bird. Kinsey’s review: you see it and it reads. That’s Dahlia.

That’s the third lesson, which you can only learn in a live filmmaking setting. The students spent weeks developing these characters on paper, and then real actors and a real set arrived with new information. The strongest designs adapted accordingly.

Coming Up

Drew Daniels arrives on set. The last film he shot, Anora, won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and when our directing and cinematography students show him a shot list, he’ll ask the same question we asked all week: why this shot? Our students will be prepared to answer.

More from the first week of the shoot in the next issue.

In a blink of an eye, we’ve arrived at Week Four: our final week of pre-production. Last Monday, 84 high schoolers took over 48 Hills and announced their arrival with their whole chest.

As camp balloons to it’s largest size, we are delighted to see wide-ranging talents bloom across all our new departments: directing, acting, cinematography, costume design, hair and makeup, and a growing art department.

Last week, the producers made an offer to a celebrated A-list talent, the costume department took a special field trip, and hair and makeup began testing out a special look for the town clown.

Field Trip to Fabric Heaven

The Town Gets A Graveyard

As we bring this town to life, we must too honor it’s dead.

As students prepare to build its cemetery, the question on the floor is how do you turn styrofoam into a tombstone?

You start with a block of foam. You carve it. Then you spend the rest of the day convincing it that it has been standing in the rain since the 1850s. Our students are learning to age new material into old stone, softening the lettering, weathering the edges, leaning each headstone a few degrees off true.

Two weeks ago, the Art Department promised to transform sketches on paper to a cemetery where the graves lean slightly off-center. In week 3, they started making good on it and the tombstones are halfway there.

Behind them a sky emerged and with it a new horizon. Completely white and lifeless this time last week, the entire back wall is now painted. The measurements are faintly absurd — 140 feet of wall standing 20 feet tall. Stand at one end and you can’t quite take in the other.

The Actors Arrive

Then the actors showed up, and the town got its first residents. Watching a fictional mountain town fill up with actual faces is its own strange milestone. A character who existed as a line in a script two weeks ago now has someone reading for the part.

Most of us spend all day editing ourselves. Acting asks for something the world trains out of you: to do less, say the first thing, stop editing yourself in front of a room. How do you teach instinct?

Their teachers Joesphine and Mikiko start on the floor. Every morning the actors curl into a fetal position, breathe, and pull everything inward until the only thing in the room is themselves. Then they stand, walk, and open back out until they’re holding eye contact with the whole room. They call it the womb to walk.

Then the unlearning begins. Josephine leads them through improv games like “I’m a tree”, where the only way to lose is to hesitate. The first thought is the best thought.

Only then do they open a scene, and the first instruction is to do almost nothing. Two actors, knees close and eyes locked, read flatly with no emotion. The second pass is still flat, but they can look away when it feels true. On the third pass the rule comes off, and by then it’s already there. An authentic feeling enters lines they were trying to say plainly.

Contrary to popular belief, students are learning that acting isn’t adding -- it’s taking everything off until only what is true is left.

By then the actor has done the hard part. The last move belongs to someone else: the director, grounding them one degree deeper and finding the choice that makes it interesting.

Directors Learn to Give Notes

The actors weren’t the only ones being tested in those rooms.

Under writing and directing teachers Joe and Eliza, the directors were auditioning too, in their own way. Their job was to learn how to give notes. It can be almost as unnerving to stand in front of your peers and find the clever note that lifts a performance as it is to give the audition itself.

The first lesson is what not to say. You don’t tell an actor to be sadder, you give them a reason to be sad.

The directors are learning to externalize feeling through behavior, to direct what a person does so an audience understands what a person feels. Be sensitive to the actor. Be honest to the scene. Nudge the performance somewhere true without ever telling it where to go.

A Special Visit From Our Oscar-Nominated Friends at Pixar

Last week, Trevor Jimenez and Jesse Andrews came by for a special visit. Between them, they’ve worked on Coco, Hoppers, Soul, and Inside Out 2, which is to say they’ve spent their careers building worlds that millions of people live inside.

So we let the students give a sneak peak of ours and walk them through the town they’re building — the sketches, the streets that don’t exist yet, the logic of a place invented from nothing. And the visit turned into the thing we keep hoping for. The people who do this for a living were the ones asking the questions. How did you arrive at this? Why this character, why this corner, why build it this way? They loved the drawings. They were genuinely taken with what these teenagers had conjured in a warehouse.

In a highly-engaging Q&A, Trevor and Jesse shared their own process and how long it takes to find your voice, learning to take a creative notes without without ego, and how the thing nobody tells you when you’re young and picture the lone genius at the desk, which is that none of it happens alone. A film is hundreds of people deciding to build the same thing.

You spend a career making places for the world to disappear into. Then you walk into one that a group of high schoolers dreamed up, and you find yourself immersed.

Week Two: Turning Imagination Into Reality

Last week, eighteen writers invented a town.

This week, six producers showed up and immediately inherited all of its problems.

Because once you decide to build an entire town inside a warehouse, someone eventually has to figure out how to actually make it happen.

Enter our producers.

They’re all teenagers, some as young as 14. And they arrived on their first day to discover that the town now needed actors, budgets, schedules, logistics, and, somewhat urgently, a goat.

Not a metaphorical goat. An actual goat – as documented here.

The writers had written one into a scene. Which meant the producers now had to find one. This is the strange thing about producing. Writers get to imagine. Producers get to ask, “Okay, but how?”

How do we cast dozens of residents for a fictional mountain town? How do we build an entire world without running out of money half-way through? How do we coordinate artists, builders, actors, and schedules? And, apparently, how do we acquire livestock?

Most people outside filmmaking have only a vague idea of what producers do. At its core, producing is the art of turning ideas into reality. Producers are the people who take a dream and begin making lists. They turn imagination into calendars, budgets, conversations, and concrete plans.

Which is why it’s been so remarkable watching these five students jump straight into the deep end.

Within days, they found themselves working on a challenge most aspiring filmmakers won’t encounter for years: helping bring major talent to a film. As our team begins conversations with actors and works through the complicated puzzle of schedules, availability, and commitments, these students are helping manage the process. They will be tracking conversations, organizing information, and getting a firsthand look at what it takes to attract performers whose names regularly appear at the top of movie posters. For real.

At the same time, they’ll begin overseeing budgets for a town that doesn’t yet exist. Every building, storefront, and street corner begins as a number on a spreadsheet before it becomes a physical place. And somewhere between discussions about construction costs and actor availability, they’re also helping source a goat.

There was no simulation. No practice assignment. One day they were students arriving at camp; the next, they were helping build the infrastructure for a film that hopes to attract A-list talent.

The writers imagined a world. The producers have begun making it real.

And thanks to five determined teenage producers, that world feels a little closer to opening its doors every day.

The Producers get their goat.

Art Department: The Architects of 48 Hills

If the producers ensure the town can be brought to life, the art department makes it real to the touch.

This week, students began sketching the buildings that will eventually fill our fading mountain town. Diners, theaters, graveyards and autobody shops — places that don’t yet exist, but soon will.

The challenge is that the town isn’t supposed to feel newly built. It is meant to feel as though it has been standing since the 1850s, accumulating generations of stories, repairs, neglect, and memory.

Which means our students are learning one of the central illusions of production design: how to make something brand new feel impossibly old.

A freshly built chair will need a patina — the worn shine that normally takes decades and a thousand hands to create. Headstones in the cemetery will lean slightly off-center, their lettering softened by imaginary weather. Storefronts will sag. Paint will peel. Nothing shiny, nothing new.

In filmmaking, authenticity often comes from imperfection.

The students also began learning about forced perspective, one of cinema’s oldest visual tricks. By subtly altering the scale of buildings and streets, filmmakers can create spaces that feel larger, stranger, or somehow dreamlike. The eye accepts what it sees, even when the proportions don’t quite make sense.

It’s the perfect technique for a town that exists somewhere between reality and memory.

Working at a scale of one inch to one foot, students are now constructing a detailed model of the entire town. Before a single wall goes up in the warehouse, they’ll be able to walk the streets with their eyes, tracing where residents live, where they work, and where their lives inevitably intersect.

For the first time, the town is becoming visible. Not as a script or an idea, but as a place.

Boomtown: Town Population Goes from 18 to 80

Two weeks ago, this town was a list of themes. It now has a early renders, a first draft of a script, and a room full of collaborators.

Two weeks ago, eighteen kids. Last week, thirty kids. This week, eighty.

This week, every department moves into pre-production together: writers, directors, actors, art, camera, costume, hair and makeup. Campers begin pitching and refining each scene before anyone reaches the set.

As more hands arrive, so will more ideas, and more of the thousand small decisions that quietly add up to a world. The room stays the same size. The ambition keeps growing.

Meet The Writers

Keep up to date throughout the week by following us on Instagram, where you’ll see videos like our latest featurette, Meet the Writers.

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Every summer, more than one hundred high school students spend seven weeks working alongside Oscar nominees, Sundance and Emmy winners, and master builders to create a feature film from scratch.

This year, however, the students have set out to do something stranger. Before making a movie, they’re building a world.

How Do 18 Teenagers Write One Cohesive Movie? By Reinventing What A Movie Is

Inside a 50,000-square-foot warehouse this week, eighteen young writers met for the first time to begin dreaming up how to tell a story together.

One of the first challenges facing the writers was a practical one: how do eighteen people write the same movie?

Traditionally, a writers’ room searches for a plot everyone can rally around. Our students found another path. Rather than searching for a plot everyone could agree on, our writers started looking for the themes that kept surfacing across their ideas.

As pitches emerged, certain themes surfaced again and again. There was a shared melancholy to many of the ideas. Characters living in the shadow of better days. People searching for reinvention. Communities struggling to define themselves after the thing that once made them special had disappeared.

A place began to emerge.

The writers imagined a fading mountain town somewhere between Nevada City and Twin Peaks—a former boomtown whose glory days are long gone. The kind of place where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where old dreams linger like ghosts. Its most famous resident is a streamer who never leaves his bedroom. An aging gay clown has become a recluse after years of being ostracized by the town. A teenage girl claims responsibility for the mysterious fires that flicker around the county’s edges.

Everywhere, people are longing for something: redemption, escape, connection, recognition, a second chance.

Our writers scrapped the screenplay and drafted a shared universe.

Instead of forcing eighteen writers to tell one story, the students discovered something more interesting: they could tell eighteen stories that all belonged to the same place.

Instead of writing big dramatic arcs that fill most movies, the students began imagining more intimate happenings of the day – this is where Edward Hopper’s work began to really inspire them. Each resident will have a history, a home, relationships, secrets, ambitions, and regrets.

But how we capture each resident requires a whole new way of writing.

A New Process Emerges

To tell the story of each resident, each of our young writers will be responsible for mapping the complete day of one character’s life — from the moment they wake until the moment they fall asleep — whether a camera is watching them or not.

As we collectively began formalizing this different way of writing, we quickly realized we were no longer making a traditional film, we were crafting a living ecosystem. At any given moment, dozens of stories will be unfolding simultaneously across the town. A shopkeeper might be arguing with his wife while, across the street, the town historian receives devastating news, all while a child steals something that will alter the course of another family’s life. When the cameras arrive to begin filming, we imagined half-built sets that our eyes can see through, allowing for all stories to play out at once, whether in the foreground or background.

Part Movie, Part Performance Art, Part Immersive Theater, Part Video Game?

As the concept evolved, we found ourselves discussing everything from immersive theater to The Sims, Synecdoche, New York to Sun & Sea, an opera set on a beach…indoors. There are echoes of productions like Sleep No More, where entire worlds continue existing beyond the audience’s gaze. But even that comparison falls short. This town is being designed not just to be explored, but to be filmed. Walls may remain unfinished so multiple lives can be seen at once. The mechanics of filmmaking may remain visible. Crew members may become part of the choreography. Time itself may become part of the storytelling, with makeup artists entering the frame each evening to age exhausted townspeople before the next day begins.

In nearly twenty years of making films, I have never encountered an idea quite like this.

What these students are building feels less like a movie and more like the invention of a new artistic language: one where filmmaking, theater, worldbuilding, video games, and collective imagination merge into a single living thing.

They’re Inheriting a World They Can't Control—We Created One They Can.

Why have them make a world? What’s the point in having teens concoct a place from scratch?

"It's a hard world for little things," observed Lillian Gish a near century ago. Sadly, it’s only become more true. Young people today are inheriting a world that often feels impossibly large and increasingly beyond their control. They live amid technologies, economies, algorithms, and institutions that can seem to shape their lives more than they shape them. Much of modern life asks them to react — to consume, adapt, scroll, respond.

For one summer, we wanted to give these students the chance to experience what it feels like to imagine something of their own making, to control every facet of it.

Not just to write a story, but to create the conditions for hundreds of stories.

Not just to dream privately, but to dream at a scale large enough that dozens of collaborators can join them in making it real.

Most teenagers have never had the experience of seeing an idea leave their notebook and become a shared reality. In the coming weeks, more than one hundred students and thirty-five artists — Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Sundance-filmmakers, expert builders, craftspeople and teachers — will join this effort. A character imagined by a writer will become an actor. A building described on a page will become a physical structure. A street that exists only in conversation today will soon exist beneath our feet.

At its core, 48 Hills is an exercise in agency. It is an opportunity for young people to discover that the worlds around them are not fixed. They are made by people. And if worlds can be made, they can be remade. We hope that lesson stays with them long after the sets come down and the cameras stop rolling.

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