This week has been national SADD week and the organisation has called on high school film enthusiasts to submit five-minute films to help promote its cause.
This year's theme has been "One person's choice, a community of consequences", a theme that indicates the butterfly effect of one person's decision to drink-drive.
Wakatipu pupil Jonty Norton has taken on the director/producer role for the short film and the cast and crew of about 10 pupils have already spent 20 hours filming.
"With exam week coming up and it being a very busy time of year for us, we wanted to get the majority of it done in the weekend," Jonty said.
The crew gathered last Friday to film the majority of the script over 48 hours.
However, Jonty spent the hours between 8pm and 4am the night before soldering a wire that would allow him to switch on 30 supplied cameras to capture the footage simultaneously and create a "bullet time rig".
"And yes, it did work," he told the Queenstown Times.
The 30 cameras were used to film a scene where a key character drinks far too much and spews "chunks of risotto and cranberry juice" all over his girlfriend's shoes.
This causes the girl to leave the party and ask her friend, who has been drinking, to drive the two of them home.
Jonty said the film would be relevant to a lot of people around his age and he hoped it would send out a positive message.
He expects the pupils still have another 20 to 40 hours of filming and editing to go, but they will get it done.
So far, they have filmed about 60 hours of footage and are likely to film 100 all up.
They will then edit the footage to just five minutes before the September 21 closing date - something he said was going to be quite a task.
"It's going to be a mish to sort through all the footage."
If the film meets the criteria and standard of the judges, the team will be flown to Auckland for a red-carpet event and the film used around high schools nationwide to warn drivers against drink-driving.
That would make all the hard work worth it, he said.
"I've seen the past ones. They're all right, but some of our shots look pretty nice."
While Jonty wrote the script, fellow pupils Tomm Armstrong (15) was in charge of the cinematography and Andres Cavallari was the film's technical director.
The film is 100% pupil-made and most of the 20 or so entries in the competition are from schools in the North Island.
After taking a gap year in Denmark, Jonty plans to return home to study computing and, eventually, rip into his passion of filming.
"I do love it."
