Ken Burns’ massive, years-in-the-making PBS series “The American Revolution” won’t air until November.

But to mark April 19, 1775, exactly 250 years after the start of the American colonies’ transformative revolt against British rule, the filmmakers — Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt — will participate in Patriots Weekend events, beginning Wednesday in Boston’s Old North Church.

There Burns receives the Third Lantern Award in a midday program that boasts a dramatic reading of “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Wednesday night sees the Boston Symphony Orchestra and GBH preview the series with live music from the soundtrack, clips and a behind-the-scenes conversation with the filmmakers and three historians featured in the film.

“Most of the celebratory stuff is focused on July 4, 2026, about a year and a quarter from now, when the actual 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence happened,” Burns, 71, noted in a phone interview.

“But our film is called ‘The American Revolution’ and it begins with the events of the 19th of April, 1775, which is the signaling that the British were leaving Boston to try to find, not only caches of gunpowder and other munitions, but also to try to catch John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

“Of course, the Old North Church is where the warning went up. So we will be there. That evening we’ll go to the Boston Symphony and show how much film and music go together (and how important music is to everything that we do), as we screen clips and musicians play live music from our soundtrack.

“The next day, we will be at Lexington and then Concord for public screenings of a set of clips and conversations. It’s all very appropriate, because this is where it all started.

“In the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes said there’s nothing new under the sun. And that’s pretty much true.

“Human nature does remain the same — and that same complicated and sometimes contradictory human nature is within many of the characters that populate our series.

“But this thing — the United States of America — is something new under the sun. In a time when we’re so divided, it could be so helpful and inspirational to go back to our origin story, cut the barnacles of sentimentality and tell this rich, complicated and inspiring story of how we started. Against impossible odds.

“If you were making book on this, on April 19, 1775, nobody would give us a snowball’s chance in hell of beating the most far flung empire on Earth, the greatest navy on Earth, one of the great military powers.

“The idea that we beat them. That we never, until the very end, had an assured victory, is beyond stupefying and gob smacking and, more importantly, really great!”

Ken Burns joins fellow “The American Revolution” filmmakers Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt at Patriots Weekend events. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Authors Guild Foundation)