The class was broken up into groups of four to do the initial script part of the competition. We sent all the scripts from the class in, and ours was chosen by TnaG (as it was called then) as one of the five final scripts. From then on, the whole class was involved in some way in making the film. Our script was about the experience of a teenage girl whose best friend dies. We decided to deal with death and loss because when you get into your teens you generally have your first experience of the death of someone you know.

The film was shot in colour, with no dialogue, only music and a voice-over done in Irish by Clare. The two girls, Sinead and Niamh, are played by Kelly Shatter and Susi Coakley, who auditioned along with other girls. Most of the extras were other girls from the class, except the scene of Sinead and Niamh in primary school.

That was a really hard scene to shoot. We couldn't find two little girls who looked enough like Kelly and Susi - you know, the same colour eyes and things like that. Then we had to find Eighties clothes for them, get the Barney pictures down off the classroom wall because he wasn't around then - you have to be very careful.

Then, when we finally chose the two girls, getting the kids to perform and stop looking at the camera was very difficult! A crew sent by TnaG came to help us, a director and a cameraman. The actual filming took two-and-a-half days, but the editing took forever.

We shot the film as a series of flashbacks. It starts with Sinead at Niamh's funeral, in the family sitting room (actually Niamh Hayes' home); she can't stand being there with everyone looking at her as if she should be dead, so she goes up to her friend's room and starts looking through the photo album. She remembers the day they got their Junior Cert. results, their 16th birthday party, time they spent together in primary school and the time they went away on holiday together.

That holiday was quite a hard scene to shoot as well. We went to the Riverview health club, where there's a Jacuzzi with a rock and if you look at it a certain way it could be a tropical scene.

But it was really hot - the girls nearly died of heat shooting that scene! We couldn't believe it when the film won the overall competition. We went to Italy for the European competition, CIAK, which is an international junior film festival held near Venice. We were flown over and put up in a hotel for a long weekend at the beginning of June, and the whole thing was amazing.

The award ceremony was on the Saturday morning, and we were nominated in every category. In the end, Kelly won best actress. She hadn't been able to come, but Clare picked up the award for her - a trophy shaped like a clown, which is the symbol of the festival.

That evening we went into Venice and we went on a gondola and the gondolier sang us O Solo Mio, and it was such a laugh. A crew from TnaG came along with us to do a fly-on-the-wall documentary, which should be on soon.

Making the film was a really good experience. It's the sort of thing you just don't normally get to do in Ireland. We were brought to the editing suite at the studios of Telegael, a company which does work for TG4 and was commissioned to help us with our film. We do film at school, but our editing facilities are quite old. We'd done some editing in school, and it was really interesting to see the new technology and how it works. Most of us thought the best part was seeing the film once it had been finally edited, and we'd the voice-over and the music in. We edited it down to eight minutes, which took about a month.

It was hard work, but the whole thing was amazing, and the trip to Italy was just excellent!

In an interview with Jackie Bourke