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An intense four-week workshop at a Bay Area film studio resulted in a 15-minute documentary about “speedcubing” that earned Sachi Schuricht ’09 invitations to two major independent film festivals.

Working last summer with three high school students, Schuricht served as producer and director for the documentary titled “Piece by Piece.”

The film examines the growing subculture of people intent on solving the Rubik’s Cube – the perplexing puzzle that became a 1980s pop-culture icon --  as quickly as possible. (See a clip from the documentary above)

Sachi Schuricht '09 (right) sits with Lars Petrus, the 1982 Swedish national speedcubing champion,  during a showing of Schuricht's documentary about the Rubik's Cube at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

Schuricht’s hometown of Berkeley, Calif., is a speedcubing hotbed, and she was able to track down several people willing to talk about their obsessions with quickly reaching one of the 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible solutions to the standard 3x3x3 cube.

Schuricht and her partners interviewed high school students, Caltech undergraduates, and the 1982 Swedish national speedcubing champion, Lars Petrus, who now works at Google.

Petrus created one of the best known methods of solving the mechanical puzzle. He says in the documentary that he would cube for 10 hours a day one summer while he was unemployed. Other speedcubers are seen using just one hand in solving the puzzles, while others do it blindfolded.

The documentary was shown three times at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, and Schuricht went up on stage and answered questions from the audience.

“It was so incredible, and also intimidating. You have this huge theater filled with people watching your documentary,” she said. “And I was surrounded by film school graduates from places like NYU and USC.”

The week in Austin, which came during spring break, has prepared her for the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, where she was invited to show the documentary this weekend.

Schuricht has been passionate about creating videos since middle school, and when her mother told her about the workshop offered by West Side Filmworks in her hometown, she jumped at the chance.

A philosophy major, she also is taking film and media studies courses at Colgate, and knows she’ll continue to work with video in some capacity.

Schuricht is deeply involved in another project with a multimedia component. A proposal she submitted with fellow sophomores Emily Katz and Alyssa Martino to the 100 Projects for Peace initiative was accepted, earning the trio a $10,000 grant.

Funded by Kathryn Wasserman Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist, 100 Projects for Peace is a competition for college students to create grass-roots projects for peace that they implement.

The three sophomores will create a website with information about current humanitarian crises around the world, using video and other multimedia elements to inform students about crises such as Darfur.

They also plan to create an online forum for students to interact and organize projects in a collaborative way.

Schuricht, Katz, and Martino had to prepare a formal proposal that was approved by a Colgate committee and forwarded to the Davis program, which also approved the project.

The final project will be completed by Sept. 15.