An Inside Look

One of my favorite aspects of working as an extra in the various films that I have participated in is that I get to observe how films are shot first hand. In my first film, The House Bunny, I noticed how much filming goes into a scene before it is actually finalized for the feature film. Specifically, of the three 10-12 hour nights of filming for the tiki party scene that I was in, only about three to four minutes actually made it into the film. Now I understand that this may vary considerably from film to film, but the more films I was in, the more I noticed this trend. The main cause for this is that the filmmakers will film over a certain shot in a scene at least two to three times, which could only comprise a few seconds of the actual footage. So, actually filming a four minute scene could take many hours. The repetition for a shot also depends on the importance of the dialogue and/or scene being shot as a whole. Most of the shots in The House Bunny that I had best screen time in were cut. Though, I was in one quick shot dancing in the background. Likewise, when I participated in the filming of Transformers 2, the whole scene I was in got cut. Whereas I do not expect great footage in the films, one of the best features of being in a film is observing the process for which they are made and all the details that are put into it's making.