Volunteering as an extra

I rarely get the opportunity to do anything pertaining to filming, so whenever I can, I make the most of it. I had an oportunity this past Saturday to be an extra in a tv pilot called Young Adult that's being shot here in Washington DC. Here's my scoop from the day.

I woke up at 5:45am yesterday, drove out to the set at 6:30am (got lost on the way there because the directions from googlemaps weren't right), but thankfully I was only 15 minutes late and they were still setting up. I was able to get my makeup touched up by the make-up artist, which was pretty cool. She had an air brush for the foundation and that gizmo was pretty tight. I had never seen one in person before. (The last film I did there wasn't any time for the extras to get touched up).

The story is about 5 guys in their 20s hanging out and learning about the real world. The guys have a meeting place where they get together at a bar for the trivia night. So yesterday was shooting the couple of scenes at the bar and I was an extra in those scenes, pretending to be another group at trivia night. I had to bring two sets of clothes because they were shooting the scenes that would encompass 2 days. (I learned that wearing red on camera is bad because the color bleeds on the film. Thankfully that red shirt was option number 3 that I brought just in case).

I only had to do a little bit of waiting around before we started shooting. (The last time, half of the day was waiting until I was needed on set). We started up with rehersals at around 8:30-9:00. The director wanted to run through the scene a few times with just the actors, and then they rehersed some more, but added the sound and lighting guys. It started out rough because this scene required a lot of movement and the cameraman was running into a lot of shadowing problems. So as an extra I did a lot of sitting on the set. There were four other people with me and we all were quietly chatting when we could. When they finally got around to shooting, they did about 14 takes of the guys walking into the bar and talking to the hostess. In between those takes they would go back and review the footage to see if any were doable. (But since there were 14 takes, I think it took them a while to get what they wanted). There'd normally be a "take 10" break and people would be getting leftover breakfast food that was provided by the production. Today's was bagels, donuts and coffee from Dunkin' Donuts. We finally broke for lunch at around 12 and got pizza ordered in.

The afternoon was a bit more rushed as they had to get a more scenes in a smaller amount of time. The extras got to change as along with playing people on different days, they wanted to make the bar look busier, so we also got to pretend we were different people in different parts of the bar. I don't know how well that'll be pulled off, but I guess we'll see. We got to chat a lot with the artistic staff. The props guy and the makeup artist chatted with us extras a lot and I was able to chat a bit with the sound guys whenever they weren't busy. I sketched a couple of pics of one of the sound guys during the down time.

I didn't get too far with the left image, basically it was the girl holding the boom mic for the scene and the second one was the same girl waiting in between takes. When the actors weren't needed we made small talk with a couple of them. One of the lead actors was the one who had been emailing the extras, so I got to chat with him for a bit.

We ran into a little dilemma in the afternoon with the managers at the bar, who double booked us with a party that was coming in to set up at 3:30. (They had told the production that we could be in the room until 4). So for the last hour, we were rushed to get everything done. We didn't have the luxury of doing many rehersals and they did only 3 or 4 takes at most before moving to a different shot.

I was out and heading home by 3:45. Exhausted! I get to go to the wrap party in November and my name will be in the credits. If I wanted, I can add this to my resume. The director commented that if the show gets picked up, in future episodes the five guys compete against a rival trivia group and suggested to us that it be the five of us extras since we're already here. So if things end up looking good for the show, I might be in it again.

Even though there was a lot of waiting to shoot the scenes, I still had a fantastic time. I loved being part of it.