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Hundreds of teams have been running around the country writing, shooting and cutting a short film in one weekend.

Vanessa Patea and her team of bloggers and photographers captured some of the 48Hours movie making mania in Wellington.

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The 48Hours Film Competition has to be the best weekend experience a person can have. It is intense, creative, eventful and utterly exhausting. If you get your film over the finish line, you (and your team) have brought a film from script to screen in only 48 hours. Chances are it will leave you satisfied and elated or crying in the gutter.

Rove reporting for the Wellington 48 Hour live blog is the opportunity to share in everyone’s experience. You drive around visiting loads of teams, taking production stills, crew photos, soaking up the atmosphere and sharing stories. Teams find it encouraging to see how other teams are doing over the weekend and their mums can watch it too!

Last year Ruth Korver and I decided not to enter the competition but had a great time visiting the various teams, which we then blogged about. This year our team Traces of Nut were back in the game so I had the added challenge of doing lighting over the weekend as well as maintaining the blog in my spare moments.

We invited photographer Daniel Rose, writer Kelly Dare and Beth Brash to go and visit some of the teams, and post their experiences to the blog. Kelly Dare has been involved with the 48Hours organisation for years and she told me this is the most fun she has had to date; that it was so great to get amongst it all.

One of the best stories we heard about was from our friends team ‘Moffilaide’ who had a visit from four police with tasers, who had received a report of a girl in distress. When they showed up it was actually a ninja-clad David Brown-John doing an effective scream and, in true Moffilaide style, they convinced the police to pose for a photo with them.

We got some great shots at the launch and the finishing line, capturing all of the excitement and some of the disappointment - one competitor in Wellington arrived two seconds after the deadline and Dan Slevin (city manager) had to stop him at the door. It was heart breaking to watch.

We will be continuing the blog over the heats and the city finals on Wednesday 12 June.