York student filmmakers continued success at the Royal Television Society Student awards

University of York students Thalia Saleh (Director), David Merritt (Producer), Ed Shaw (Editor), Charlie Ord (Cinematography), Alex Weir (Sound) have been awarded the Best Factual (long form) Award at this year’s RTS Student Awards (Yorkshire Region) for their third year film project, HUNT. This follows previous successes for their work, which has already been awarded Best Student film at the Graddies awards in the Autumn.

The student filmmakers from the School of Arts and Creative Technologies (ACT) also picked-up individual craft awards for their work in cinematography, sound and editing, and judges also created new craft awards for directing and producing based on the overall strength of the work witnessed in those departments. HUNT faced competition from a number of other universities and colleges across the Yorkshire and Humber region and stood out in a strong field of filmmakers, with judges commenting on how the project would not ‘look out of place on Sky Sports’.

Thalia Saleh, director of HUNT, said: “I couldn’t be prouder of our team and I’m so happy to see people enjoy HUNT as much as we enjoyed making it. Congratulations to all the other winners. It was an honour being in a room with so many talented storytellers."

Matt Brannan, Head of Film & Television at the School of ACT said: “This was an amazing achievement by the HUNT team and the School is incredibly proud of them all. The team’s work, closely supported by their project supervisor, Lorianne Hall (senior lecturer in Film & TV Production) and all staff involved in their teaching further demonstrates and evidences the high quality of students and project work our Film & TV course continues to develop at York. It is great to see HUNT do so remarkably well at the RTS awards, and we are optimistic that further national success will follow. Our students are very talented and we could not be happier for them.”  

The winners will now go forward to represent Yorkshire RTS in the Royal Television Society National Student TV Awards in London in June 2025.