We Gave 10 NYU Film Students $10 and a DV Camera—Only One Survived the Weekend

In an unholy fusion of reality TV, social experiment, and film school panic attack, we decided to ask a simple question: what happens when you give ten NYU film students a $10 budget, a borrowed DV camera, and 48 hours to make a short film… with no access to gear lockers, crew help, or caffeine subsidies? The results were unwatchable, beautiful, and somewhere between a Werner Herzog fever dream and a freshman’s failed narrative workshop final.

Here’s how it went down.

The rules were simple: Each student had 48 hours, $10, and a 2006 Canon ZR500 DV camera. No phones, no laptops, no friends for sound mixing. They could shoot anything—fiction, documentary, found footage horror, ASMR—but the final product had to be under five minutes, and it had to screen in front of their peers. The only editing software allowed? Windows Movie Maker. On a school-issued Dell. From 2008.

Day one: chaos. One student attempted to barter their $10 for expired ketchup packets at a bodega, hoping to build a metaphorical war film set entirely in a refrigerator. Another tried to film a “slow cinema” epic about loneliness in Queens using only subway ambience and one continuous shot of their foot. By hour six, one participant had already quit to “pursue emotional clarity.” We suspect they just went to brunch.

By nightfall, the usual film student mental breakdowns began: minor fights over whether aspect ratio is a capitalist construct, someone yelling “Godard wouldn’t play by these rules!”, and a failed attempt to synchronize sound using a kitchen timer and a prayer.

But one student—let’s call them Alex—leaned into the madness. They spent $9 on a broken umbrella and $1 on a lighter. Their concept? A man who slowly becomes convinced the umbrella is controlling the weather. They shot in one location: their fire escape. The film was handheld, borderline unwatchable, and deeply unsettling. But it worked.

Screening day came with the usual parade of strange: a claymation made entirely out of chewing gum, a black-and-white mockumentary about pigeons organizing a labor union, and one film that was just four and a half minutes of someone screaming under a blanket.

But Alex’s film? It received a standing ovation and an offer from a visiting adjunct to “talk next semester about possible grant funding.” The umbrella is now being optioned for a feature.

What did we learn? Film school doesn’t teach resilience. It reveals it. Give a student a RED camera and a $5,000 grant, and they’ll stress over ISO settings and craft services. Give them ten bucks, a DV tape, and a dream, and you’ll find out who’s truly deranged enough to make cinema out of thin air.

So yes, only one survived the weekend. But in film school terms? That’s basically a win.

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Want more stories from the trenches of art school madness? Follow for our next experiment: 10 CalArts students, one green screen, and a broken Roomba.