The third time was the charm for a group of New Plymouth Girls High School students who came out on top at the Taranaki 48 Hour Film Festival.

The event sees teams write, shoot, and edit a film within the space of 48 hours, and this was the third time that Elena Hadlow, Melanie Bishop, Hannah Collinson, Savithi Gunasinghe, Myah Kemsley, Maya Jackson, Chante` de Villiers, Grace Jordain, and Adam Bridges had entered.

And for the first time they won - which resulted in a lot of screaming at the film screenings on Monday night at Event Cinemas in New Plymouth.

SUPPLIED The team with their trophy.

"We were all holding hands and Hannah was singing the entire time," American-born director Melanie Bishop said.

Although that may sound strange, their film was a musical.

Each team was given a film genre for their entry, but had to use the elements of shadow, a door slamming, and a puddle.

"I really wanted to write some songs, so I said to everyone at the beginning 'no matter what we get can we please do a musical?' and we ended up getting that genre," Bishop said.

In previous years the group, who are the first school team to win the Taranaki part of the competition, had imitated adult life but this year decided to stick to what they knew.

Their film, The Story of a Decade, follows Hannah Collinson's emotional rollercoaster journey through high school and adapting to adulthood over its running time of less than five minutes.

"We wanted to do something that was kind of close to home. Because we are so young in this competition and our main competitors are going to be adults, we don't want to do something about kids acting as adults because we are never going to be taken seriously, so we wanted to do a satire on the comedy of high school."

The group encouraged other aspiring film makers to give the competition a go.

"It's really cool seeing that youth culture of filmmaking," Bishop said.

"The skill level is crazy and even if you're not good at film making it's so much fun."

"It's a good team building thing, you're crammed in one house for 48 hours," Collinson added.