When two filmmakers turned their cameras on a local hobby club, they found a cast of willing subjects – and a little bit of internal tension, too.

Things seem tense. There’s a pause. In a chilly Dunedin room filled with train enthusiasts, you could cut the air with a knife. The issue? “For some time some of our members haven’t been getting their copy of the Conrod,” protests one club member, his arms crossed across his chest.

The Conrod is the newsletter of the Otago Model Engineering Society. It’s sent out every month via email, which means members who don’t have the internet, or a computer, aren’t getting to read it. After some niggle, the issue is resolved by the dozen or so attendees: “We’ll have to print it off for them.”

This group of train enthusiasts can be found most days at their clubrooms on John Wilson Ocean Drive. Dunedin filmmakers Grant Findlay and Ryan Inglis discovered the club, founded in 1936, while looking for their next subject after making the feature-length documentary about the personalities behind the long-running local station Radio Dunedin. At an open day for the model train club they discovered a cast of willing enthusiasts keen to be part of a documentary. Dunedin is full of niche clubs and specialty groups like this, says Findlay. “They’re things you wouldn’t get in a big city. Here, they’re still doing it.”

When he saw how passionate the group was about their trains, both large outdoor sets capable of taking people for rides, and the smaller, indoor, Rod Stewart kind, Findlay says he and Inglis decided they had to film them in a fly-on-the-wall style. He remembers feeling there was something “beautiful and charming” about the club, and deciding “we’ve got to showcase this and show it to the world”.

Filmed over several days, the eight-minute documentary captures the day-to-day life of the club. They host open days for kids (who often have to compete with the adults for a turn), and deal to weeds by hooking up a spraying mechanism to the back of a train. Some members admit the place is like a “second home”. One jokes he has a bed under a table; another says he’s been a member since 1948.

It would be easy, admits Inglis, to make fun of these people who are so passionate about their hobby. “You can easily go down the path of taking the piss,” he says. “But Grant spent so much time with them, he was so deep in it and very conscious of that. He doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body.”

Filming the club’s AGM, including the saga over the missing newsletters, is the perfect example. To Findlay, it’s reminiscent of The Office, without the nastiness. “That’s the stuff that we like, the general mundane chat,” he says. “To them it’s probably, ‘We’re just talking about the newsletter’.”

The pair have made another short documentary about a long-running filmmaking club, and hope to turn the project into a full series – the local bonsai society, they say, looks immensely promising. In fact, the lower South Island is full of enthusiasts that would make great documentary subjects – they just need to find the time to do it.

“There’s heaps of wee clubs,” says Findlay, “[but] we’re both flat out.”