After earning his bachelor's degree in English literature in 1993, Nolan worked as a script reader, camera operator, and director of corporate videos and industrial films. In 1995, he began work on the short film "Larceny", which was filmed over a weekend in black and white with limited equipment and a small cast and crew. Funded by Nolan and shot with the UCLU Film society's equipment, it appeared at the Cambridge Film Festival in 1996 and is considered one of UCL's best shorts. He filmed a third short, "Doodlebug" (1997), about a man seemingly chasing an insect with his shoe, only to discover that it is a miniature of himself. Nolan and Thomas made their first attempt at a feature in the mid-90s with a project called "Larry Mahoney", which was scrapped and never released. During this period in his career, Nolan had little or no success getting his projects off the ground; he later recalled the "stack of rejection letters" that greeted his early forays into making films, adding "there's a very limited pool of finance in the UK. To be honest, it's a very clubby kind of place ... Never had any support whatsoever from the British film industry."