A Hard Day's...Work?

Well Wednesday was my first day of filming for The Best Days of our Lives and I have to say it was quite good fun.

I arrived and was ready for my costume fitting at 7:45am. And the hassle of getting into a 1940s Sailor's outfit is a little crazy. The white shirt is so heavily shaped you literally have to dive into it. Then there's the light blue collar, which is supposed to tie around your waist, the black silky neck tie thing and a small piece of white rope. Nobody knows what that's for.
But the real fun was the pants. They fitted well enough, and the huge bell-bottoms were pretty cool, but why would you ever need 12 buttons on a pair of pants? Seriously. Going to the bathroom was a marathon task and I had to make sure I had enough time to struggle with the buttons! Like I said at the time, you wouldn't want to be struggling to get dressed on a sinking ship...

The first part of the day was spent sitting around in the cold. It was raining monsoon-style for a lot of the day, but we did have a dry bus to sit on, and there was plenty of convas covers to stand under. One guy looked like he may have already known someone on the crew, because he got called in for pretty much every scene going. Jealous? Of course not.

Keira disappeared into the green room as soon as she got there, and only came out to film the scenes. Cillian was very much the same way. But Sienna and Matthew were mingling with the crew and the extras with no problems. And I'm not sure if it was due to the make-up or what, but Sienna was actually looking a lot better than Keira. So there you go.

One thing I did discover was that as an extra in scenes like that, you were required to mime your conversations. I thought we might get away with whispering, but apparently not. It's very difficult to simulate a conversation and the right responses when you have no idea what the other person is saying. Even worse was the couple of scenes where there were three of us. When you can't hear the person speaking, how do you know who to look at? These leading role stars don't need to worry about that - their lines are scripted and they know what they're doing. Us? We were making it up as we went, and every scene was different.
Funniest thing was one of the crew said you can have great fun miming swear words to try and offend any deaf lip-readers watching the film. We fell about laughing at the thought of that.

We finally wrapped at 7:30pm, making it a very long day indeed. But watching the crew setting up, rehearsing and some of the clever tricks used to make places look busier than they are was pretty interesting. My next scene is on Sunday morning, but that's apparently only a 3 hour shoot. And I'm getting paid for it all, so that's just fine.

If I happen to get snapped up by any nearby agents I'll be sure to post here and let everyone know!