“I worked as a teacher on film sets. Actors under 18 have to have time each week to do schoolwork. The required hours vary by local regulation, but it’s generally two to three hours per day, and the production is required to have a licensed teacher.”
“This one depends on the show/movie; I’ve only come across it a couple times. ‘Beauty’ shots are video where an actor has been retouched. I worked on a 12-episode season that spent almost $1 million retouching the lead (insignificant sh#t like wrinkles).”
“Sometimes you’re just dancing in silence. They add in the music afterwards. So you could be at a party dancing to nothing. Or at a ‘concert’ with no music.”
“Once I was an intern on a movie set and one of the scenes involved a concert where people were outside in the rain waiting to get tickets. Because we filmed the scene so many times, some of the extras got pneumonia and us interns had to fill in.”
“There’s LOTS of ‘hurry up and wait.’ I worked on the 2019 Little Women film and as soon as we arrived, we were rushed into our costumes and through hair and makeup. Then it could be up to seven hours before we even went to set, let alone started filming.”
“You might never see your coworkers again after a movie or TV show is done. Once a project is over, everyone goes their separate ways looking for the next job.”
“Before I started working in film, I naively thought that extremely hot/cold locations (ie: a scene in a desert) would have lots of ways of keeping cool. Nope — a desert scene where it looks like it’s 50°C/120°F is indeed set in a desert at that temperature, and everyone is suffering.”
“You get extra pay for weather circumstances. Like if it’s raining in a scene, it’s a bump on your check.”
“This may seem obvious to some people, but a lot of the background audio is recorded separately from the video. For example, if the scene is a hockey game, they tell the background actors to *mime* their cheering, yelling, etc. because they need to focus the audio on the characters on the ice.”
"Extras who have to smoke for a scene get a slight pay increase for doing so. The cigaretts, of course, are fake."
“I once was an extra for a movie shot in central Oklahoma. It was supposed to be a busy New York City scene in like the 1920s. The camera was only shooting from the knee down, so since there was only four or five of us, we had to walk back and forth randomly changing our speeds and patterns so that it looked like a packed NYC sidewalk.”
“We were filming for John Wick 3 in the summer, and yet they had us all in winter clothes, so there was a lot of sweat all around. I made the mistake of wearing heeled boots and — when I tried to sneakily change to sneakers — I got called out by a wardrobe supervisor.”
“I was an extra for the movie P.S. I Love You, and it was awful! Two days of work, waiting around for hours with no food. When the actors even pointed out the extras were exhausted, production said, ‘So what? They’re only extras.'”
“I worked as an extra for the first Jurassic World and it was horrible. We were in the direct heat the entire time and had to do a lot of running and such. They did not take care of us. Occasionally, waters and Powerades were handed out, but we were still in the direct sun!”
"When they need to film a scene with amputated limbs, actors wear green socks on their limbs and then those parts are deleted in post-production."
"During the shooting process, the actors’ makeup has to be tweaked quite often. But during some scenes, makeup artists just can’t be near them. In these situations, actors have to fix their own makeup themselves. They have a set of napkins, powder, and lipstick."
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