happydalek (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
happydalek) wrote2011-08-07 09:06 am
happydalek) wrote2011-08-07 09:06 am
"Behold the instrument of your destruction!" AKA, My taste of Hollywood.
You guys! YOU GUYS. Guess who got to act in a scene opposite Tom Hardy on Saturday? THIS GAL.
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT SATURDAY.
So, on Saturday I went with a couple of friends to Pittsburgh, PA to be an unpaid extra in The Dark Knight Rises, the Batman sequel coming out next summer. The filming was taking place at Heinz Field (where the Steelers play), and we were going to be spending the day in crowd scenes, cheering on Gotham City's football team, the Rogues. We were given a detailed list of what to bring, what to wear (and what NOT to wear), and told to expect to film from our call time of 9:45 AM to about 7:00 PM that evening.
The first thing that happened was we got caught in a monstrous traffic jam trying to get the set. We aimed to arrive at 9:15 AM, but there was so much traffic that by the time we finally got a parking space and were loaded onto the shuttle bus, it was 11:00 AM. That's what happens when you've got a city full of construction and some 6.000 people all trying to go to the same parking lot at the same time. A Pittsburgh police officer tried to help us out by giving us directions for an alternate route, but changed his mind when we told him we weren't familiar with the city. Because Pittsburgh has a rather bizarre layout that seems to confuse people and GPS systems equally, and nobody in the town seems to know how to give directions with actual road names. One good thing about the traffic nightmare was that the route was well-marked. The production team had put up big yellow signs with arrows pointing the way, so it was actually pretty easy to navigate the official route. So we crawled through downtown, getting passed by pedestrians and having to make merging decisions that would have been suicidal to attempt had we been driving at speed. When we finally got to the parking lot, we were told it was full, so then we got redirected to overflow parking at the 1st Avenue parking garage. The paper they gave us claimed the detour took 3 minutes. About 40 minutes later, we actually arrived.
Parking was free, and we got loaded onto a series of shuttle buses that took us to Heinz Field. It had been reiterated over and over again that cameras were not allowed on set, and I had chosen to be a paranoid good citizen and didn't bring one. We were given release forms to sign, then subjected to a quick pat down and had our bags checked. We were issued a brown paper bag with sunscreen, some snacks and a little water bottle in it, as well as a plain yellow bandana to use as a cheering prop, and two food tickets. (I also got a free 5-Hour-Energy from a stand outside the field. It was cranberry flavored and not nearly as gross as I had expected it to be.) One of the wardrobe stipulations had been that while we were encouraged to wear black and yellow (the colors of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Gotham City Rogues), we were NOT allowed to have anything on us with any kind of logo on it, so Terrible Towels were out. The other wardrobe instruction we'd been given was to dress for cold weather. We'd be filming a football game, so the time of year was late fall/early winter. I wore jeans, a thin long-sleeved cotton plaid shirt that looked thicker than it was, and a zip-up vest over an undershirt. I took a winter cap and a pair of gloves along, but didn't use them because it ended up being so ungodly hot.
The day began rainy, and ended up partly sunny and muggy as a swamp. We only had to wear our winter gear during filming, and there was a cooling station inside and lots of cold water being distributed throughout the day. We found out that shooting had actually begun at 7:00 AM that morning with a crowd of about 9,000 people. By the time everybody at our call time had arrived and taken seats in the stands, the crowd was about 15,000 strong, which is about 1/4 its total capacity. I've never seen a more demonstrably loyal sports crowd, ever. People took the "black and yellow" color advisory to heart. It was all you saw!
We were all seated together near one of the endzones. We knew we were there to film crowd scenes for a football game, but it quickly became clear that there would be a lot more to it than that. A large platform had been constructed near the opposite endzone, made to look like a section of the turf had been lifted out of the ground. There was concrete and rubble around the edges. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how a villain would raise up a section of the turf like that until it occurred to me that what was actually going to happen was that the rest of the field was going to get blown up, and that platform would be the only part of it left.
Once we were all seated, the waiting began. And oh! So much waiting! The production crew tried to keep things interesting with a number of prize raffles conducted throughout the day, and even staged a singing competition at one point, but there was an awful lot of downtime for the first half of the day. This was because I was right; they immediately hyped everybody up by explaining that the agenda for the day included blowing up Heinz Field. What they didn't say was that the stunt was going to take more than three hours to set up. They just kept saying "it's going to happen soon!".
Filming had begun earlier that morning with the singing of The National Anthem, and now shooting was moving on to the kickoff of the game. Playing the Gotham City Rogues (and their unnamed blue-and-white adversaries) was the majority of the Pittsburgh Steelers themselves, plus the coaches. Hines Ward was the celebrity of (much of) the day, getting a nice closeup of running the ball. We got to watch the crew set up a camera track on the field, and then the players performed the kickoff about three or four times. One of the takes was ruined when the Rogues player failed to catch the ball. He ran it about halfway down the field, meeting little opposition, but he always stopped before reaching the endzone. That's because the field blew up.
We were put through our paces for the explosion a number of times. They were only going to set off pyros once, so it was important that we didn't screw it up. They filmed a bunch of reaction shots prior to the actual stunt. A second-unit director (I assume) gave us instructions with a microphone. When he yelled "BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!" we had to pretend that the whole field had been blown up. Then a production assistant was given the role as stand-in for the villain (whom they carefully did not identify for much of the day), and we were told to stare at him in fear and horror. There were paid extras in paramilitary fatigues with machine guns who ran out onto the field after the explosion to train their guns on the crowd, and we were reminded to act like this was real life: "A guy aims a gun at you, don't struggle with him, okay?"
And that's what we spent most of the day working on. The takes began with us cheering on the kickoff, then freaking out when the field suddenly explodes, then staring in fear and horror at a guy in a T-shirt (or nobody at all once we knew where to look) who didn't say anything. It was about 4:00 PM before they were finally set up and ready to go with the pyros. They dotted the field with detonators covered with piles of sod, and surrounded the area with orange caution cones. It looked like the least subtle minefield you could possibly imagine, but even so, there came several strenuous reminders to the crew to keep out of the minefield. Prior to the explosion, they did a pyro test, which they made entertaining by rolling out three Tumblers (the low, tank-like vehicles that serve as the new Batmobile), and letting one that had a roof-mounted gun "shoot" at one of the sod piles. (Later in the day, they rolled out the Tumblers again, and this time, Hines Ward was riding on one like it was a parade float, waving at the crowd.)
Finally, it was Go Time. By now it was the hottest part of the day and everybody was slightly sunburnt and glistening with sweat. Nonetheless, we piled our winter gear back on and did our part. This time, I didn't have to listen for a voice yelling "Boom! Boom, boom, boom!" because there were 59 detonators on the field to actually go BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. Well, 58. One turned out to be a dud. They blew their sod piles into the air some 20 feet, littering the field with debris. They cautioned us several times about the loudness of the explosions (like fireworks) and encouraged us to use earplugs, but I found it unnecessary.
After the stunt was over, I wondered if we'd be let go early, because it was not quite 5 PM and we hadn't been told what else was going to be shot that day. Not long after the stunt was over, they corrected that. Tom Hardy was coming on set, they said, to shoot a scene as Bane, the villain responsible for blowing up the field. Before that happened, however, they brought out some of the ballplayers again to shoot some close-ups on the platform, which had trap doors in it shaped like jagged holes in the ground. It was greatly amusing to watch these guys jog up the platform, ducking and weaving like usual, and then almost casually tip themselves into these great "chasms" in the ground. Hines Ward had a stunt double for the occasion.
Tom Hardy's scene was short, featured a few lines of dialogue, and was done about three times, plus a rehearsal. It was hard to see exactly what was going on, since he was on the other end of the field on the platform, but here's basically how it went down (despite my best efforts to remember, some of the lines are a bit paraphrased):
After witnessing the explosion of the field and the appearance of guys with guns, we turn our attention towards the platform, now the only remaining section of the field. Bane, flanked by body guards and bringing a hostage with him, struts out onto the platform and says, "Take control, Gotham! Take control of your city! Behold the instrument of your destruction!" (Not kidding, that's what he actually says.) Part of his entourage is pushing a large piece of equipment around, but I couldn't be sure if it was prop, or something the production crew was using. Then he turns to his hostage and holds out a microphone. "Introduce yourself," he says to the hostage (or something to that effect). There is a moment of silence during which the hostage does not speak. At first I couldn't tell if it was because the hostage wasn't answering, or because they didn't have him mic-ed. (There was speculation in my section that the hostage (whom nobody could really see at our distance) was Christian Bale, but I rather doubted that. Why would they hype Tom Hardy's presence, but not Bale's? Unless they wanted to avoid any potential fanboy mayhem that might arise by finding out THAT'S THE STAR, RIGHT THERE, so who knows? Presumably the crowd wouldn't know who the dude was anyhow, so maybe it wasn't important regardless.) The hostage didn't make an audible answer in any case, so either Bane or one of his goons knocked the guy over or shot him (I couldn't tell, all I could see was the hostage doing a face-plant onto the turf). And then the director called "Cut."
After completing the scene, there was another break for more prizes to get raffled, including the major prize of the day, a new car. They got Hardy to pull and announce the winning ticket number. For this, they put him up on the jumbotron so I could finally see his costume. It looks pretty cool. Paramilitary fatigues, and a bondage-type mask over his mouth and nose that muffled his voice in a very Classic Doctor Who way that I found hard not to giggle at. I knew Hardy was English, but a number of people around me were kind of surprised to hear his accent once he was out of character. He uses an American accent for Bane. I suspect they will have Hardy re-record his lines later to fix the muffle. Or maybe they won't. Have to wait for the movie and see what gets tweaked.
Once the raffle was over, Hardy thanked Pittsburgh for being such a cool place to film, and left. But filming wasn't done quite yet; the crew wanted to pick up some crowd shots from The National Anthem, so they had us all sing to the pre-recorded vocals of the child who had actually sung the anthem that morning. We did that a couple of times...and then one of the cameras broke. By now it was about 6:30 PM, so the production gave us a choice: we could go ahead and leave now if we wanted, or we could stay to finish out the shooting day, which would take another couple of hours. Thinking of the traffic mire of that morning, my friends and I opted to make an early getaway. We were driving out of the parking garage by 7:00 PM and back at my apartment around 8:30 PM. I got sunburnt on my nose, one of my friends got rosy from his nose to his forehead, and my other friend had ended up spending the last three hours of the shoot in the cooling tent because of the heat. And it was interesting for me to note that in 12 hours on set, the crew shot at most about 90 seconds of the actual movie. I know this because they had the digital clock on the field running for the game, and changed the time as needed depending on what part of the sequence was being filmed.
I'm excited for the release of the film; I really want to see how the blowing up of the field looks when they complete the digital effects, and of course, I'll be checking the crowd shots to try and spot my section. And it's nice to know that since it's such a big scene, there's little worry of it getting cut out of the film. ;)
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT SATURDAY.
So, on Saturday I went with a couple of friends to Pittsburgh, PA to be an unpaid extra in The Dark Knight Rises, the Batman sequel coming out next summer. The filming was taking place at Heinz Field (where the Steelers play), and we were going to be spending the day in crowd scenes, cheering on Gotham City's football team, the Rogues. We were given a detailed list of what to bring, what to wear (and what NOT to wear), and told to expect to film from our call time of 9:45 AM to about 7:00 PM that evening.
The first thing that happened was we got caught in a monstrous traffic jam trying to get the set. We aimed to arrive at 9:15 AM, but there was so much traffic that by the time we finally got a parking space and were loaded onto the shuttle bus, it was 11:00 AM. That's what happens when you've got a city full of construction and some 6.000 people all trying to go to the same parking lot at the same time. A Pittsburgh police officer tried to help us out by giving us directions for an alternate route, but changed his mind when we told him we weren't familiar with the city. Because Pittsburgh has a rather bizarre layout that seems to confuse people and GPS systems equally, and nobody in the town seems to know how to give directions with actual road names. One good thing about the traffic nightmare was that the route was well-marked. The production team had put up big yellow signs with arrows pointing the way, so it was actually pretty easy to navigate the official route. So we crawled through downtown, getting passed by pedestrians and having to make merging decisions that would have been suicidal to attempt had we been driving at speed. When we finally got to the parking lot, we were told it was full, so then we got redirected to overflow parking at the 1st Avenue parking garage. The paper they gave us claimed the detour took 3 minutes. About 40 minutes later, we actually arrived.
Parking was free, and we got loaded onto a series of shuttle buses that took us to Heinz Field. It had been reiterated over and over again that cameras were not allowed on set, and I had chosen to be a paranoid good citizen and didn't bring one. We were given release forms to sign, then subjected to a quick pat down and had our bags checked. We were issued a brown paper bag with sunscreen, some snacks and a little water bottle in it, as well as a plain yellow bandana to use as a cheering prop, and two food tickets. (I also got a free 5-Hour-Energy from a stand outside the field. It was cranberry flavored and not nearly as gross as I had expected it to be.) One of the wardrobe stipulations had been that while we were encouraged to wear black and yellow (the colors of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Gotham City Rogues), we were NOT allowed to have anything on us with any kind of logo on it, so Terrible Towels were out. The other wardrobe instruction we'd been given was to dress for cold weather. We'd be filming a football game, so the time of year was late fall/early winter. I wore jeans, a thin long-sleeved cotton plaid shirt that looked thicker than it was, and a zip-up vest over an undershirt. I took a winter cap and a pair of gloves along, but didn't use them because it ended up being so ungodly hot.
The day began rainy, and ended up partly sunny and muggy as a swamp. We only had to wear our winter gear during filming, and there was a cooling station inside and lots of cold water being distributed throughout the day. We found out that shooting had actually begun at 7:00 AM that morning with a crowd of about 9,000 people. By the time everybody at our call time had arrived and taken seats in the stands, the crowd was about 15,000 strong, which is about 1/4 its total capacity. I've never seen a more demonstrably loyal sports crowd, ever. People took the "black and yellow" color advisory to heart. It was all you saw!
We were all seated together near one of the endzones. We knew we were there to film crowd scenes for a football game, but it quickly became clear that there would be a lot more to it than that. A large platform had been constructed near the opposite endzone, made to look like a section of the turf had been lifted out of the ground. There was concrete and rubble around the edges. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how a villain would raise up a section of the turf like that until it occurred to me that what was actually going to happen was that the rest of the field was going to get blown up, and that platform would be the only part of it left.
Once we were all seated, the waiting began. And oh! So much waiting! The production crew tried to keep things interesting with a number of prize raffles conducted throughout the day, and even staged a singing competition at one point, but there was an awful lot of downtime for the first half of the day. This was because I was right; they immediately hyped everybody up by explaining that the agenda for the day included blowing up Heinz Field. What they didn't say was that the stunt was going to take more than three hours to set up. They just kept saying "it's going to happen soon!".
Filming had begun earlier that morning with the singing of The National Anthem, and now shooting was moving on to the kickoff of the game. Playing the Gotham City Rogues (and their unnamed blue-and-white adversaries) was the majority of the Pittsburgh Steelers themselves, plus the coaches. Hines Ward was the celebrity of (much of) the day, getting a nice closeup of running the ball. We got to watch the crew set up a camera track on the field, and then the players performed the kickoff about three or four times. One of the takes was ruined when the Rogues player failed to catch the ball. He ran it about halfway down the field, meeting little opposition, but he always stopped before reaching the endzone. That's because the field blew up.
We were put through our paces for the explosion a number of times. They were only going to set off pyros once, so it was important that we didn't screw it up. They filmed a bunch of reaction shots prior to the actual stunt. A second-unit director (I assume) gave us instructions with a microphone. When he yelled "BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!" we had to pretend that the whole field had been blown up. Then a production assistant was given the role as stand-in for the villain (whom they carefully did not identify for much of the day), and we were told to stare at him in fear and horror. There were paid extras in paramilitary fatigues with machine guns who ran out onto the field after the explosion to train their guns on the crowd, and we were reminded to act like this was real life: "A guy aims a gun at you, don't struggle with him, okay?"
And that's what we spent most of the day working on. The takes began with us cheering on the kickoff, then freaking out when the field suddenly explodes, then staring in fear and horror at a guy in a T-shirt (or nobody at all once we knew where to look) who didn't say anything. It was about 4:00 PM before they were finally set up and ready to go with the pyros. They dotted the field with detonators covered with piles of sod, and surrounded the area with orange caution cones. It looked like the least subtle minefield you could possibly imagine, but even so, there came several strenuous reminders to the crew to keep out of the minefield. Prior to the explosion, they did a pyro test, which they made entertaining by rolling out three Tumblers (the low, tank-like vehicles that serve as the new Batmobile), and letting one that had a roof-mounted gun "shoot" at one of the sod piles. (Later in the day, they rolled out the Tumblers again, and this time, Hines Ward was riding on one like it was a parade float, waving at the crowd.)
Finally, it was Go Time. By now it was the hottest part of the day and everybody was slightly sunburnt and glistening with sweat. Nonetheless, we piled our winter gear back on and did our part. This time, I didn't have to listen for a voice yelling "Boom! Boom, boom, boom!" because there were 59 detonators on the field to actually go BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. Well, 58. One turned out to be a dud. They blew their sod piles into the air some 20 feet, littering the field with debris. They cautioned us several times about the loudness of the explosions (like fireworks) and encouraged us to use earplugs, but I found it unnecessary.
After the stunt was over, I wondered if we'd be let go early, because it was not quite 5 PM and we hadn't been told what else was going to be shot that day. Not long after the stunt was over, they corrected that. Tom Hardy was coming on set, they said, to shoot a scene as Bane, the villain responsible for blowing up the field. Before that happened, however, they brought out some of the ballplayers again to shoot some close-ups on the platform, which had trap doors in it shaped like jagged holes in the ground. It was greatly amusing to watch these guys jog up the platform, ducking and weaving like usual, and then almost casually tip themselves into these great "chasms" in the ground. Hines Ward had a stunt double for the occasion.
Tom Hardy's scene was short, featured a few lines of dialogue, and was done about three times, plus a rehearsal. It was hard to see exactly what was going on, since he was on the other end of the field on the platform, but here's basically how it went down (despite my best efforts to remember, some of the lines are a bit paraphrased):
After witnessing the explosion of the field and the appearance of guys with guns, we turn our attention towards the platform, now the only remaining section of the field. Bane, flanked by body guards and bringing a hostage with him, struts out onto the platform and says, "Take control, Gotham! Take control of your city! Behold the instrument of your destruction!" (Not kidding, that's what he actually says.) Part of his entourage is pushing a large piece of equipment around, but I couldn't be sure if it was prop, or something the production crew was using. Then he turns to his hostage and holds out a microphone. "Introduce yourself," he says to the hostage (or something to that effect). There is a moment of silence during which the hostage does not speak. At first I couldn't tell if it was because the hostage wasn't answering, or because they didn't have him mic-ed. (There was speculation in my section that the hostage (whom nobody could really see at our distance) was Christian Bale, but I rather doubted that. Why would they hype Tom Hardy's presence, but not Bale's? Unless they wanted to avoid any potential fanboy mayhem that might arise by finding out THAT'S THE STAR, RIGHT THERE, so who knows? Presumably the crowd wouldn't know who the dude was anyhow, so maybe it wasn't important regardless.) The hostage didn't make an audible answer in any case, so either Bane or one of his goons knocked the guy over or shot him (I couldn't tell, all I could see was the hostage doing a face-plant onto the turf). And then the director called "Cut."
After completing the scene, there was another break for more prizes to get raffled, including the major prize of the day, a new car. They got Hardy to pull and announce the winning ticket number. For this, they put him up on the jumbotron so I could finally see his costume. It looks pretty cool. Paramilitary fatigues, and a bondage-type mask over his mouth and nose that muffled his voice in a very Classic Doctor Who way that I found hard not to giggle at. I knew Hardy was English, but a number of people around me were kind of surprised to hear his accent once he was out of character. He uses an American accent for Bane. I suspect they will have Hardy re-record his lines later to fix the muffle. Or maybe they won't. Have to wait for the movie and see what gets tweaked.
Once the raffle was over, Hardy thanked Pittsburgh for being such a cool place to film, and left. But filming wasn't done quite yet; the crew wanted to pick up some crowd shots from The National Anthem, so they had us all sing to the pre-recorded vocals of the child who had actually sung the anthem that morning. We did that a couple of times...and then one of the cameras broke. By now it was about 6:30 PM, so the production gave us a choice: we could go ahead and leave now if we wanted, or we could stay to finish out the shooting day, which would take another couple of hours. Thinking of the traffic mire of that morning, my friends and I opted to make an early getaway. We were driving out of the parking garage by 7:00 PM and back at my apartment around 8:30 PM. I got sunburnt on my nose, one of my friends got rosy from his nose to his forehead, and my other friend had ended up spending the last three hours of the shoot in the cooling tent because of the heat. And it was interesting for me to note that in 12 hours on set, the crew shot at most about 90 seconds of the actual movie. I know this because they had the digital clock on the field running for the game, and changed the time as needed depending on what part of the sequence was being filmed.
I'm excited for the release of the film; I really want to see how the blowing up of the field looks when they complete the digital effects, and of course, I'll be checking the crowd shots to try and spot my section. And it's nice to know that since it's such a big scene, there's little worry of it getting cut out of the film. ;)