Last weekend, you might have spent 48 hours doing some combination of sleeping, working, thinking about working but not actually working, and hanging out with your friends. Or you might have created an entire magazine from scratch.

Something remarkable happened in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center this past weekend: a group of Wesleyan students worked for two full days to produce a magazine filled with articles, drawings, photos, and more. By Sunday at noon, the team was mentally and physically worn out but had created an incredible product to share with the rest of campus.

This is the second volume of the 48 Hour Magazine, based on the model created by Longshot Magazine. A team of students produced the first volume in November 2011.

This year’s process began at 12 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 1, when editor Daniel Nass ’13 announced the theme of the issue: “inside out.”

“We chose this theme because it has plenty of literal and metaphorical interpretations,” Nass said. “It was meant to be a jumping-off point for peoples’ submissions rather than a content filter.”

While numerous literary magazines exist on campus, the 48 Hour Magazine is unique in that all of its content is created, curated, edited, and laid out within—as its title might suggest—48 hours.

“What really differentiates the 48 Hour Magazine from a typical campus publication or a literary magazine is that it’s not just a curatorial process; it’s not taking from the best of what already exists and then selecting the best of that,” said editor Benjamin Soloway ’13. “Instead, it’s actually increasing the net amount of creativity, because we’re asking people to create new things really quickly for this specific project.”

Nass, Soloway, and the rest of the team publicized the project as much as possible; by midnight on Friday, more than 75 students had sent in original artwork and pieces of writing.

“This was a perfect amount to work with because it wasn’t overwhelming, but it was also enough to put out a magazine of a length we wanted,” Nass said.

At midnight on Friday, everyone in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center gathered to read through the submissions and rank them on a scale of one to five. An hour or two later, they deliberated about which pieces they wanted to publish; by 3:30 a.m., they had reduced the submissions by half.

“We didn’t plan on this, but there seemed to be a medical thread through the selected pieces,” Nass said. “For example, our cover image is a cool collage made by Jules Berman [’16] of images from the book “Grey’s Anatomy.” There are pictures of different cross-sections of the human body such as the muscles in someone’s leg, his bones, his organs, and even his lymph nodes. We thought that was pretty perfect to capture the theme because it’s a window into the human body.”

Nass noted that the theme had no single interpretation. While some interpreted the suggestion literally, others did so metaphorically.

“We got one piece that we published on the website which is a detailed explication of a character’s psychologies, his neurotic thought processes,” Nass said.

At 9 a.m. on Saturday, the editors got down to business: they contacted writers, revised the selected pieces, and went through round after round of copy-editing.

“That night the design team also began laying out the issue and planning where content would go, which photos went with each article, and how we’d make everything fit,” editor Samantha Maldonado ’13 wrote in an email to The Argus. “Meanwhile, we had super talented illustrators working on art based on the writing we chose.”

Editor Amy Block ’13 spent most of the day photographing an elaborate diorama that a few girls created on Friday afternoon.

“The diorama was pretty eccentric; there was no clear subject,” Block said. “There were a lot of magazine cutouts, image silhouettes, ambiguous scenes, and painted backgrounds. It was something that you could spend a good few minutes finding all the details in. The impression was that they were trying to model a whole outside world inside a lot of boxes.”

Late Saturday afternoon, Nass started designing the website edition, which features all the material from the printed magazine along with three videos available exclusively online. One of the films is a documentary that Nass made with Soloway and editor Piers Gelly ’13, the second is a short comedy, and the third is abstract video art.

“The three submissions ended up representing a broad range of what’s possible for the film media,” Nass said.

As the night went on, the mood in the room fluctuated.

“People would be very serious and focused and then really silly and ridiculous,” Maldonado wrote. “Personally I got a bit stir-crazy on Saturday night, so I left to go out and socialize for an hour.”

By 4 a.m. on Sunday it was time to go home, but only for a meager four and a half hours; at 8:30 a.m., everyone had to return to work. The editors reviewed the work they’d done the night before, put the finishing touches on their pieces, and by noon launched the website and sent the magazine PDF off to press. The print copy will arrive on campus within the next couple of weeks.

Even though this was only the second time Wesleyan has published the 48 Hour Magazine, the entire process ran very smoothly.

“We had learned a lot of lessons from last year about how to make it work,” said Nass. “We had a really great team both years, but this year we had more people who were committed and stayed through the whole thing.”

Block also added that the atmosphere at the Shapiro Center, which recently moved from the Allbritton Center to 167 High St., helped relieve a lot of stress.

“It kind of felt like a house,” she said. “It had cushy leather couches, blankets, nice desks, a kitchen right next to the main room for tea and coffee, and lots of little crannies where people could meet with their writers or editors.”

Soloway, Block, and Nass hope that the project will continue next year, even after some of the core editors graduate.

“I really hope that when we’re gone, some of the freshman, sophomores, and juniors who participated this year and liked it enough can continue the project,” said Soloway. “I hope we can leave this behind as something that happens regularly.”