madameblogalot

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, I was blessed to be cast as an extra in a local shoot done by Nike!! It was pretty cool! The shoot took place at Space Center Houston. I got there fairly early Monday morning. As I was walking in, I noticed a chimp eating some breakfast out in the parking lot. I wondered if he (turned out it’s  a “she”) was going to be part of the commercial.

I reported to the conference room where the other extras were waiting as well. I was taken aback to be only the fourth person to arrive. Come to find out, there were only five of us (supposed to be six, but one never showed)!! I had expected a large crowd. When I asked another extra later how I got cast when there were so few roles, he said that the pool of extras is mostly younger people (the age range for this part was 30s-50s.)

We had our pictures taken and then the other four extras donned blue jump suits for the first scene. I was told to just wait. Then we all headed to the moonscape. Here we learned who the star of the commercial was and what the commercial was about.  We were extras in a commercial for Nike snowbaord boots, with a pro snowboarder who has two silver Olympic medals! Oh, yes, and Susie the chimpanzee!

I was at first told I would take notes on a clip board during this scene, but then was told, no, there was something else I was going to do. After shooting this scene for about two hours (!) we went back to the conference room to get snacks. At first we thought this was going to be our lunch so we were really trying to eat as many snacks as we could. Then the director came in and gave us our $15 meal ticket!

After lunch, we all sat around some more while the star and the chimp did some more shooting. By 5:00, three of the extras were released. I stayed along with another man to see if we would get to the “mission control” scene, which is what he had for me to do. We stayed nearly two more hours and never got to it. We left that day with me having done nothing!