The twin brothers making movies and rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty

There's a crowd gathered at the bottom of one of Glasgow's steepest streets. Hardly surprising since Spiderman is weaving his way down the now-transformed New York sidewalk.

Hollywood star Glen Powell is in another part of the city centre working on his latest thriller, The Ghost Writer, while Joel Coen and Frances McDormand are scouting back streets for their Gothic mystery, Jack of Spades.

In the midst of these blockbusters, twin brothers Ben and Nathan McQuaid are fashioning their first feature film with a microbudget and a lot of help from other former students at the University of Stirling, which they themselves graduated from just weeks before.

Filmmaker Graham Hughes, who first encountered their work during a student competition, kick-started the project with the first offer of funding.

"It is unusual for graduates to take on a feature film straight away, but after watching their film I could tell they were hungry artists," he says.

"They reminded me of when I was their age and just desperate to make things."

Making things was something the 22 year-old film fans were good at.

Welcome to G-Town – an alien invasion comedy horror – was inspired by a piece of lurid green graffiti they spotted from the train.

"A lot of the props were made with stuff we found lying about, like bits of cardboard painted red," says Ben.

"The aliens have purple blood so we wanted it to have a kind of texture to it, so we just bought cans of prunes and used the prunes mixed with bits of purple food colouring. For anyone thinking of doing something similar, it does have an awful smell to it so I wouldn't recommend it."

"And children's bath slime which you dissolve in water," says Nathan.

"I'm not sure how responsible it is to bathe your children in it but it's very quick and easy if you need a lot of slime."

"And one pack of that slime will give five to 10 buckets-full," adds Ben.

They called in the help of many former students from Stirling University, including Dylan Antscheri and Calum Cownie.

"I was a couple of years above them and, like a large chunk of the crew, I met them at the university filmmaking society," says Calum.

"They immediately showed a passion and talent for filmmaking with the short films they made, and we've been working on films with them ever since."

The twins say they learned a lot from the frenetic timetable of student filmmaking.

"We always had a year at university to make a film, but all of the filmmakers would always start about two weeks before the deadline," says Ben.

"It was always a mad rush in April or May when we were all making our films at the same time, so we'd go from set to set, helping each other out."

"Part of the pitch for us making the film was that even if everything goes wrong, we would still be learning," says Nathan.

"So even if we came out of the project with a terrible film or it collapsed halfway through, we would have learned lessons, like film school."

Previous experience helped them plan their shoot carefully around the long summer daylight hours, and avoid pitfalls like noise complaints.

"On a previous horror film, we were using a private flat and hadn't warned the neighbours who complained about the noise," says Ben.

"A policeman arrived at the door, only to find Nathan covered in fake blood. He looked him up and down and said 'I've seen a lot of real blood and this isn't it', which was a relief because he let us continue with the film."

The twins say they admire filmmakers like Peter Jackson, Bill Forsyth and the Coen Brothers.

"We've always had an admiration for local filmmakers who don't necessarily have their sights set on Hollywood," says Ben.

And they were delighted to encounter one of the Coen Brothers, Joel, on his own set in Glasgow alongside his wife, Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand.

"We realised they were filming in one of the alleyways where we'd filmed just days before," says Ben.

"It was very cool because even though they have a hundred times our budget, it's still just a bunch of people in anoraks standing outside with a camera and a microphone," says Nathan.

"They asked whether we were filmmakers and we got to talk to them about making independent films and they wished us good luck for our film."

No luck needed for their debut, which has its world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival next weekend. Two screenings have already sold out, with a third added to meet demand.

For executive producer Graham Hughes, who also composed the music for the film, it's allowed them to learn skills which are not taught at university.

"I've been making films for a while and the film industry is a very secretive and idiosyncratic world," he says.

"People are usually generous with their time, but when you're just starting out you don't want to try anyone's patience. It's hard to google reliable answers to questions like 'what percentage should a sales agent take' so a lot of my lessons were learned by making often embarrassing mistakes."

"I knew the team could make a good film, but that's only about half of what you need to know to make a film a success so that's the learning I wanted to pass on."

"We've been joking for a while that it would be pretty strange if a film called Welcome to G-Town had its première in Spain or Belgium or somewhere like that, so it was always been the goal to have it play in Glasgow," says Nathan.

"We've learned so much from Graham and the rest of the team from making this film," says Ben.

"Things we didn't get taught at uni like festival strategies or trying to sell films to a distributor. So we now have a festival strategy that we're working on and hopefully we can get it to some other countries and other festivals in Europe and then, if people like it, get it out there to as many people as possible."

Welcome to G-Town is at the Glasgow Film Festival on 28 February at 18:15, on 1 March at 19:30 and om 6 March at 22:45.