FILM STUDENTS GET RED CARPET CLOSE-UP

Students from The New Zealand Film and Television School were thrilled to be invited to the premiere of Paul Murphy's Second Hand Wedding at Wellington's celebrated Embassy Theatre, especially since they knew that many Film School graduates had worked on the film.

There was only a tiny price to pay - first they had to be the red carpet welcoming committee.

Producer Kerry Robins, whose son Michael attended The Film School in 2006, had decided that a crowd of paparazzi and celebrity spotters would create atmosphere and provide excitement for the arriving guests at the premiere, and who better to fill the roles than students from his son's alma mater. So the students duly turned up an hour before the screening, armed with cameras and flashes and a great deal of enthusiasm. They happily took to the celebrity spotting - actors, film people, the Associate Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage Judith Tizard, writer Nick Ward and singing legend John Rowles, teenage fantasy icon of Geraldine Brophy's character Jill Rose in the film.

Once the guests recovered from their initial surprise, they entered into the spirit of the thing, with several enjoying it so much they returned for a second and third red carpet welcome, says Film School programme co-ordinator Alison Langdon.

The highlight for the students, though, was the arrival of director Geoff Murphy of Utu and Goodbye Pork Pie fame - and father of the film's director - with whom they'd just been working. Murphy, an old friend and colleague of Film School head tutor John Reid, had readily agreed to provide professional expertise for the students' first significant crew exercise, Ms Langdon says, along with DP (director of photography) Phil Burchell, whose credits include television series such as Insiders Guide to Happiness and The Lost Children, as well as feature films like Black Sheep and King Kong.

As part of The Film School's learning-by-doing ethos, students make their first film at the end of the first semester, working with a professional director and DP, and filling all the crew roles themselves, right through script writing, pre-production (production management, location scouting, casting) and production (continuity, grips, lighting, sound, assistant directors and art department).

The students say that while they loved the pace and adrenalin-charged nature of the shoot, they also learned that filming doesn't have to be stressful, but that you have to have a can-do attitude. For many of them it was the first time they had rigged lights or set up for tracking shots, and they say they learned a great deal from Murphy and Burchell, and appreciated their patience.

While this particular film was shot on one of The Film School's Panasonic digital DVX-102 cameras, the school is one of the few in the country that specialises in film, and in their second semester the students are developing film skills with the school's Arriflex SRII film camera.

And for the future? They are all planning to approach Paul Murphy for work on his next film.