No one in their right mind would actively encourage a critic to make films, but I've made one anyway. It's mercifully short: exactly one minute, and that's the length of my entire oeuvre to date. That makes me a micro- (possibly a nano-) auteur.

These things are always relative, and so is the length of a minute. In the average feature, it's barely enough time for the golden stars to revolve round the peak of Paramount mountain. But 60 seconds to get in and out - that's tight. The last time I saw it done was in a centenary-of-cinema compilation that challenged leading directors to hand-crank a facsimile of the Lumière brothers' cinematograph for roughly 53 seconds, the duration of the brothers' original strips of film. Wim Wenders filmed two actors smiling sweetly, David Lynch created a sci-fi comic-strip that must have taken months to set up, and Abbas Kiarostami, if memory serves, fried an egg.

But what if you have exactly 60 seconds to make your point? Stop For a Minute is a series of shorts commissioned by Dazed and Confused magazine together with FilmFour Lab, made by an eclectic bunch of directors, artists, designers, et al. The diversity is extraordinary. I've sat through enough shorts programmes at festivals to know that, given five, 10, 12 minutes, people more often than not end up doing much the same thing. But give them 60 seconds, and the possibilities seem endless - animation, portraiture, essays, documentaries, frozen moments. And invariably, whether it's explicit or not, the minute itself becomes the subject.

Michael Stipe recites all the things you can do in 60 seconds. Simon Pummell mounts a concise demonstration on relativity, showing what a minute means to a baby and to his great-grandmother. Harriman Steel give us 480 minutes - a night's sleep.

Yet no two films feel as if they last the same time. Some feel as if they're over as soon as you've registered them - not so much Stop For a Minute as Blink and You'll Miss It. With others, you can feel every second passing - and for once, that's by no means a bad thing. Some films cram in as many cuts as possible, while others take the minute as an unbroken stretch.

Roman Coppola folds his minute in two in a witty reverse-time gag. Breda Beban crams her entire life story into a single shot of the palm of her hand. In View, photographer Michael Cleary turns voyeur culture on its head by pulling back slowly from a blurry close-up of a single window, which as it gains in clarity, disappears in the mass of a city nightscape.

In more than a few cases, a film's whole meaning is placed in its ending, not so much by way of a twist, more in terms of retroactively reshaping what you've just seen - for example, US film-makers Ariel Rogers and A Kaufman with their seemingly banal slowed-down moment, given poignant new significance by the closing image.

Some films play on the fact that these films will initially be seen online, notably Plowman and Davis' pixillated rant against dotcommery, with its neat one-in-the-eye punchline. Others work a single striking image or technique: in Alnoor Dewshi's witty Shush, three speakers' faces are digitally mutated to make an unsettling commentary on language and lies.

My minute - which premieres online on January 12 - is a gag, a man-goes-to-the-doctor joke done in a single shot that lasts exactly 60 seconds from the first word to the last image. At least that was the theory, although I wouldn't bet your stopwatch on it. The actors, Lynda Steadman and Rupert Procter, produced some wonderful takes, then gamely went through another, then another, because they were a couple of seconds under or over.

In fact, at the topping-and- tailing stage of post-production, there was a bit of leeway for cheating - the last image is held for two frames. And there's a bit of digital tweaking. Put it this way, it wasn't done by the Dogme book.

I'm not sure if I learned much about directing, except that it's amazing what you can get away with if you have a terrific cast and crew and a producer who doesn't suffer fools gladly but might just tolerate a critic with delusions. I think I've pretty much mastered the technique of stroking my chin, though.

One thing I definitely learned was the importance of.... (pause, consults wristwatch)... timing.

• Stop For a Minute goes online on January 2 at www.stopforaminute.com and is on FilmFour from January 3.