Who says you need years of financing, development and agony to make a movie? All you really need is a spare weekend.

The third annual 48 Hour Film Project involves more than 75 cities around the world, with more than 30,000 filmmakers participating. The frantic guerrilla filmmaking experiment takes elements of improvisational theater and merges them into the cinematic process. At the start of the 48 hour competition locally on Friday, May 15 at the Megaplex Theatres in Jordan Commons, participants are given a genre, a character name, a prop and a specific line of dialogue that must appear in the final film. Beyond that, it's up to creative minds to put together a cast, crew, costumes and locations, and scramble to script, shoot and edit a final product by the following Monday.

Early-bird registration ends today (April 20) for the Utah event. Screenings of the completed films will be shown at Jordan Commons free to the public on May 20 - 21, with an awards ceremony and wrap party mon Saturday May 23. You'll ask yourself what you have to show for your weekend.