It was a secretive three months, an anxious five-day week and a long 24 hours — that all came down to 20 minutes.

For seniors Jefferson Leiva, Matteo Danforth, Ernesto Harwell and Aaron Vang, it felt like a neverending dream.

What people don’t know is a 20 minute video took three months in advance to film and put together. From gathering certain clips, to keeping it a secret from most of their friend, a lot went on beforehand. But the work really began the day of requiring them to stay up for 24 hours, they could barely stay awake to talk about how they felt the next day.

Vang said trying to get good shots while people were in their way half the time, and finding the best angles to shoot for certain scenes was harder than they expected. During the crash scene they had multiple cameras out, if one camera missed a shot hopefully another one got it.

“Everything was a one-time thing,” Harwell said. “They told us we were going to do a mock run on everything, but there was no mock run.”

The team was set back. Not knowing when or how things were going to happen, they managed to get through it — until the day of putting it all together. Clips getting deleted, tying chairs together to make a bed, and the servers shutting off, how much worse could it have gotten?

Video editing takes a long time. This particular video took 24 hours. Gathering clips from the cameras used, inserting music and voiceovers, the team had to spend the night at school in hopes of finishing the video on time. They thought they would be done with the video by 8 a.m., but when the server shut off at 2:00 a.m. they realized it would be delayed. Leiva said at that point they didn’t know what to do, except wait.

“We were awoken by the sound of a phone going off at five a.m.,” Leiva said. “If we didn’t get that call we wouldn’t have finished the video.”

Leiva said the day they had to play the video he was confident it would work because they had put so much time and effort into it. All hard work has its glitches. The video stopped, the laptop died, and nervous laughter throughout the packed gym was heard. “I could see he almost felt defeated that the video wouldn’t play,” Danforth said, describing the look on Leiva’s face.

Danforth added that if the team had left without the video playing, they would have all been devastated because of the hard work and time that they put into this video.

“It seems like everything that could go wrong went wrong, but they overcame adversity,” said John Gilgert, who watched over them all night.