Golden Ratio and their Short-Film Thirst
Recently Thames High School students were given the opportunity to participate in the 48 Hours Film Challenge, and what a fun opportunity it was! The challenge was to create a short film within just one weekend to the highest quality possible. The time leading up to the weekend was spent planning our roles and responsibilities and excitedly waiting. We called our group Golden Ratio, a name to inspire perfect balance in our piece and to reference our rich gold mining history here in Thames.
Finally, at 7pm Friday 15th August, the theme for our short film was announced on a livestream. Teams were given different genres, and our assigned genre was ‘Man vs Nature’. Every team also had to include four elements: something precious, a miniature, an accident, and slow-motion.
The adrenaline was intense – as soon the instructions were given, our scriptwriting team went straight to brainstorming! We came up with so many different ideas that we didn’t end up using, but by 9pm that night we had a script we could be proud of.
Unfortunately, we were not able to stay at school overnight to continue working, but that didn’t stop us from jumping on online calls to finalise ideas and offer new ones.
There was just too much passion and creativity to call an early night!
From 8am to 9pm on Saturday, it was non-stop working for a lot of our crew. Something we didn’t expect was how a few roles got adjusted during the process. Some roles got dropped and some got promoted, like how I became a co-director during the Saturday to even out some of the heavy workload of the director. With so much to get done in such a short amount of time, we needed all hands on deck. We managed to finish filming around 6pm that night. Exhausted, we sorted through our footage and gave our final takes to the post-production team.
On Sunday we sent off our final version of our short film Thirst and finally stopped to breathe. Our film was shown in The Village Cinema in Tauranga on 7th September, among other film submissions. Regional finalists get announced between 13th September and 3rd October. The winners of the competition get announced on 25th October.
No matter whether we win anything with our final product, Golden Ratio gained a lot of valuable things from the experience. It was amazing to work with such a cool group of unique and creative minded people. Even our year 13s are planning to come back next year to help out!
I know I am not alone in saying that before the 48 hours had even started, it felt exciting to just be a part of a project like this. We were all here for the same purpose – to create.
A lot of us had never considered making films to be a hobby before, but that weekend got some of us hooked. Taking part in the 48 hour film competition even inspired us to start our own film club outside of school and enter more short film competitions.
The moment our weekend was over, we started planning what our next film could be. We’re excited to see what we can do with fewer time restrictions, so we can possibly include things we wanted to insert into our final film but didn’t have enough time for, like original music and Tayo’s incredible stop-motion animations!
Golden Ratio would like to give a VERY big thanks to Coromind for sponsoring our short film and allowing us to enter this competition. We are so grateful for this opportunity and it was great getting to see some of you – even if it was briefly during a very hectic and busy day!
We would also like to give a huge thank you to Dr Carla Grosman, our team leader, who played such a huge part in all the organising that had to take place before the 48 hours began and also provided us with delicious food, along with the Thames High School kapa haka group and Burton’s on Pollen Lunch Bar and Catering.
Thank you for keeping us well fed and energised to achieve all of this. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without your support, so once again, thank you!
Win or lose, Golden Ratio calls this challenge a success and we cannot wait to take part again next year.
Words by Naomi Hinton
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