The bathroom of Mick Slattery's house in Willow Close, Kilkenny, is a mess; there's chocolate smeared over the wash-hand basin, more chocolate on the floor and a half-melted Mars bar on the toilet seat.
To make matters worse, the bathroom and the adjoining hall are crammed with teenagers, one of whom causes uncontrollable laughter whenever he picks up an item of clothing and offers some choice words about the chocolate stains he finds on it.
The laughter abruptly stops, however, when Liane Murphy calls for silence, checks that the operator is ready, and a shout of "Action!" quickly follows.
Liane (17) is first assistant director on the set of D'Boyz, a feature film being made in Kilkenny which is scripted, acted and directed almost exclusively by teenagers. It is surely the only film being shot anywhere in the Western world on a budget of £5,000.
It is the latest offering from the Young Irish Film Makers (YIFM), which for the past eight years has been giving Kilkenny youngsters the opportunity to participate in a range of artistic activities, including film-making.
The plot of D'Boyz has nothing to do with chocolate but concerns a youth in an Irish town who believes he is receiving visits from God, who tells him to leave school and form a punk band.
"It's not a normal, all-knowing kind of God," says Donal Hanrahan (18), who has been involved with the YIFM since he was 10 and plans to study film production in college this autumn. "It's more of an Oprah-watching, hip kind of God . . . a God who applied for the position."
The story-line was the result of a collaborative effort by Conal McLoughlin, John Morton, Conor Jenkinson, David Ruth, Chris Walsh and the group's artistic director, Mike Kelly.
Ultimately, however, it was left to Conal (16) - who also plays the film's central character, Ratbanks - to write the screenplay. He was given the job after his effort at writing the difficult opening scene, in which Rat banks first encounters God, was well received by his colleagues and it was decided he should script the entire film.
"I just sat down and started writing it. I hadn't written anything before and I didn't think I had it in me, to be honest," he says. "I always wanted to be an actor and I still do, but I'd like to explore the writing side a bit more now. I'll keep trying different things."
It is this flexible approach that allows the young people to experience the art of film-making from both sides of the camera, which makes their involvement with YIFM so rewarding.
Liane Murphy, for example, played the lead role in the group's biggest project so far, a film version of the Famine story, Under the Hawthorn Tree, which was screened by RTE and Channel 4. "This is a lot of fun but I prefer acting," she says of her current assignment.
While Mike Kelly has a supervisory role in the film, the young people agree that they have ultimate control over the final product. "This is entirely the young people's own work," says Mike.
"The story is very original. It's aimed at a youth audience from age 12 upwards . . . We haven't seen the youngsters the film depicts on the screen before, and we certainly haven't seen them in a film written by the youngsters themselves. It's normally written by adults telling us `This is how young people speak'."
The low budget, made sustainable by the generous support of the Kilkenny community, is not the only obstacle the youngsters face. Shooting must be completed by the end of August and, in this case, it's a deadline that must be adhered to.
"When we were shooting Under the Hawthorn Tree, Steven Spielberg was shooting Saving Private Ryan down in Wexford at the same time," Donal Hanrahan recalls. "Whenever we were kept in because of the weather, people were saying `Well, Spielberg has to stop and wait for the rain to pass as well'. But Spielberg didn't have to go back to school in two months."