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And Now, a Movie Hours in the Making!

Slide 1 of 10

The comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade made a film from conception to screening in just over 24 hours on Saturday. Here, writers and directors at the Funny or Die headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.

Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times
  • Slide 1 of 10

    The comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade made a film from conception to screening in just over 24 hours on Saturday. Here, writers and directors at the Funny or Die headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.

    Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, a packed house at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea watched the premiere of a new film: “Constit2tion.” It was warmly — nay, raucously — received, with whooping and hollering throughout, but it is a very safe bet that “Constit2tion” will not win any Oscars. It will not bring home a Golden Globe. Even an Independent Spirit award seems well out of reach.

The film did, however, carve out a small niche in cinematic history. Conceived, written and shot in just over 24 hours, it will probably go in the record books as the world’s fastest-made feature film, shattering the record set in 2013 by “Shotgun Garfunkel,” a South African film completed in 10 days, 10 hours and 30 minutes.

“By the time the film aired, my tired brain couldn’t tell you what happened in the movie we wrote just hours ago,” Zack Poitras, one of the lead producers of “Constit2tion,” said later Sunday. “This type of project forces everyone to collectively work on gut instinct, with ‘just go for it’ attitude, and I loved seeing that play out on screen. I also love that we made a whole movie for essentially 400 bucks.”

Mr. Poitras, a writer for the comedy website Funny or Die and a contributor to The Onion, makes up one fifth of Whale Thief, a team of comic writers and actors who created Sketch Cram for the Upright Citizens Brigade three years ago, offering a night of sketch comedy conceived and written in a day.

Last year, Whale Thief extended the idea to film with Movie Cram. Its inaugural production, “A New McDonald’s,” about three friends who decide to run a McDonald’s out of their apartment, went over big at the theater. A repeat was inevitable. This time, two observers sanctioned by the Guinness World Records were invited to clock the proceedings and report back to Guinness headquarters.

The stopwatches began ticking at midnight Friday, when 15 writers — all unpaid volunteers, like everyone in the production — gathered at the offices of Funny or Die in Midtown Manhattan. Immediately, the pitches began to fly. Voting shrank a list of about 80 ideas to 20, then five.

Shaun Diston, a story editor on last year’s film, came up with a man who accidentally invents a form of artificial intelligence that becomes stupider, yet ever more powerful, as it absorbs the world’s information. Katie Simon, a writer and improv performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade, failed to win votes for God descending to earth to start a stand-up career, but submitted the winning pitch, about a hapless character who has to rewrite the United States Constitution.

For several contentious hours, the writers expanded the idea to feature length, using the screenwriting manual “Save the Cat!” as a template for plot points, conflict resolution and the rest of the standard Hollywood vocabulary. “We’re comedy writers,” Ms. Simon said. “We throw out jokes and funny beats. It’s harder to do whole movies.”

Once the story was plotted out, writers were given a scene or two to write, and an hour to do it before an initial read-through and a quick rewrite. “The fact that you are writing faster than you can judge what you’re doing — that actually helps,” Mr. Diston said.

Meanwhile, 25 directors assembled in a nearby room, and about 100 actors, many of them milling a few blocks away in Madison Square Park, awaited the call. At 12:30 p.m., a production assistant slapped a Post-it note on the wall with “Constit2tion” scrawled on it and announced, “O.K., if you’re interested, here’s the title of the movie.”

Most of the directors, a varied group of actors and writers with connections to nearly everyone else in the room, kept their noses glued to their smartphones and iPads, where a semifinal draft of the script had been transmitted.

“It’s about the Constitution having an expiration date,” said Morgan Evans, a writer and director for MTV. George Kareman, another producer, said, “There seems to be a lot of Obama smoking weed.”

Yes indeed. In the final draft, the Constitution turns out to have a hitherto unnoticed expiration date inscribed on the back page: Nov. 15, 2014. Addressing the nation, Barack Obama announces that he is no longer the president and slips into a deep funk. Laws no longer apply. Only one person can write a new Constitution: whoever lives in Thomas Jefferson’s former apartment. Namely, Jamie, a young slacker and rule-flouter, who responds to the challenge with a one-line document: “Just be chill.” When society begins to unravel, she stirs herself long enough to add the first of several amendments. The new First Amendment reads, “No slavery, duh.”

In the writers’ room, Mr. Poitras and his team mixed and matched colored paper squares, pairing directors and actors for 49 scenes, then handed stacks of paper to the directors at 2:30, an hour behind schedule, with darkness looming. “Make bold entrances and exits in your scenes,” Matt Mayer, a Whale Thief member, told them. “If you find that something weird comes up, that’s O.K. Feel free to have fun.”

He was firm on one point: color-coded costumes. The film’s main characters — Jamie, President Obama and a burrito shop owner named Alex, plus a gaggle of villainous Europeans conspiring to absorb the United States — would each be played by multiple actors, identifiable only by their red, white, yellow or black T-shirts.

The directors picked up their actors and fanned out across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, as their assistants, thumbs working their smartphones, hustled to find locations for exterior shots and apartments or studios for interiors. Several composers got to work on the score. Maëlle Doliveux, an illustrator, began doing sketches for the movie’s poster.

Uptown, on West 110th Street, John Townsend fought the gathering dusk as he filmed Gary Richardson, cast as one of the many President Obamas, both black and white, mangling the words to the national anthem. Lizzy Bryce, playing a passer-by, needled the now former commander in chief before announcing that she had to return to her work at “The Hoofington Poost.” The scene was murky, but the artistic imperative was clear: Just get it done.

The directors had till 11 p.m., when they were to show up at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater with edited scenes in hand, ready to be arranged in a video playlist.

“I plan for cinematic magic, and I settle for something that works,” said Victor Varnado, a director. His scene involved two characters eating ice cream, then recoiling at the taste. Because milk prices have skyrocketed under the new Constitution, ice cream makers now use cow urine.

When showtime arrived at 12:36 a.m. Sunday, 36 minutes later than promised, about three-quarters of the audience had been involved in the film in one way or another, and their wild enthusiasm added crackle to the atmosphere. The five Whale Thiefers took the stage, spent but game. “We made a movie!” Brandon Gulya screamed at the audience, a stunned look on his face. “We made a movie!”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: And Now, a Movie Hours in the Making!. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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