Finlay Woods (18), a pupil of Mount Aspiring College, made his eight-minute film Shimmer about fellow pupil Cody Tucker's (17) bid to win the New Zealand wakeskate nationals.
The film is one of 144 local and international films entered in the New Zealand Mountain Film Festival, due to begin in Wanaka on July 6.
It was shot over three days near Ruby Island, on Lake Wanaka, and at other locations in the Upper Clutha and features Cody performing skateboard-like tricks on his wakeskate at speeds of about 30kmh.
Shimmer was runner-up in the New Zealand section to another film with an Otago connection - Airborne, the Life of Chuck Berry - which features the well-known Queenstown base jumper.
Airborne was made by Aucklander Jon Forder and it follows Mr Berry's building of a microlight aircraft and his search for base-jumping sites in the Southern Alps.
Festival director Mark Sedon said that in the film Mr Berry finds some sites and "throws himself off in true adventuresome style".
The overall festival winner is a 22-minute film called Race for the Nose, produced by Americans Nick Rosen and Peter Mortimer.
Mr Sedon said it was a "high-octane" film about professional climbers racing the clock up the 1000m El Capitan wall in the Yosemite Valley in California.
Mr Sedon told the Otago Daily Times he spent three days making the climb himself 10 years ago.
The climbers in the film complete the same climb in three hours.
This year's festival is the 10th organised by Mr Sedon and his wife, Jo.
Seventy of the films will be shown in Wanaka and Queenstown, for the first time, over the six days of the festival.
Speakers this year include Christine Byrch, of Queenstown, who completed a mountaineering trip to Afghanistan in 2011, and Mal Haskins, of Wanaka, who will talk about his attempt to climb, ski and speedfly from the world's eighth-highest mountain.
