I’ve written the script for a half-hour documentary, filmed it, and shown at a few academic conferences and public performances. The script was the easy part–the tough part for me was my other role as producer, wrangling all the permissions, hiring people (director, cinematographer, musical contributors, actors, etc.)
The funny part was that I started out thinking that I didn’t want to do the work of writing an academic paper, and since my idea was mostly visual I might as well make a short film, that turned out to be about 1000x the work of an academic paper.