Extra drama on Shorty
Shortland Street marked its 25th anniversary with a dramatic episode. We sent on set as an extra to experience the carnage.
In boiler suits and dust masks, hairspray in hand to make sure it stuck, they stood there throwing a specially made mixture of talcum powder and sand at me.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience I never wish to repeat and I assume the other 40 people being subjected to the same treatment would say the same.
The talc-sand mixture was designed to look like real volcanic ash: we were on the set of Shortland Street, ready to portray the traumatised survivors of the Ferndale volcano.
Secretly, I had always liked the idea of being an actor.
One thing I learned fairly quickly was that if you have ever dreamed of being an actor, you should try being an extra first.
It’s an incredibly long day, with hours of sitting around doing not very much. Experienced extras say that’s just the reality of the gig.
My alarm had gone off at 5am for a call time of 6.45am at Shortland Street‘s west Auckland studios. It was still dark when I arrived. It felt as though the sun had only just set not that it was about to rise.
Instructed to wear old clothes I didn’t mind getting dirty, I was swiftly changed out of my ‘‘nice’’ leather jacket into a slightly thuggish hoodiejacket combination.
My cheap Warehouse shoes stubbornly remain a horrible shade of grey to this day.
First stop was the makeup chair. My lanyard read ‘‘shrapnel victim #2’’ which meant – well, at that point I wasn’t sure.
For 15 minutes, fake cuts and gashes were applied to my face and hands. The fake blood might have smelled like $2 Shop playdough, but it looked real.
Looking sufficiently injured, I was sent outside to be ‘‘ashed’’ in that talcsand mix. A lucky few managed to escape the ashing and just be innocent bystanders. I sincerely hope they enjoyed not having to wash their hair four times.
Once on set, we discovered we were to be injured patients swarming the hospital in the aftermath of the destruction.
I ended up acquiring a pretend boyfriend – who also happened to be my aunty’s neighbour’s son, Oscar (that’s New Zealand for you).
While some filled the downtime with books and tablets, the rest engaged in idle chat. Even Michael Galvin came over for a yarn. Before I began this job, I’d thought that if I got to meet Chris Warner I could die happy. Sharing a giggle with Galvin was a career highlight.
He laughed, we laughed, then the next take came and we were back in character and I was crying (people on set told me I had a knack for it).
I sobbed, I wept, I shook my head, all in fake disbelief that a volcano had just wiped out the suburb of Ferndale.
Oscar, meanwhile, was distracted by the returning Claire Chitham (Waverley Harrison). ‘‘Maybe if I pass out on the floor, Waverley will give me mouth to mouth,’’ said Oscar.
The day must have yielded about five minutes of useable footage, but the size of the army it took to deliver was amazing.
There were more people than I could count and I had not a clue what their job title was. People walked around with iPads, photographing hair and clothes, to ensure nothing was out of place in the next shot. Others seemed purely responsible for moving wires out of the shot. But their job mattered and I found it incredible to watch.
Perhaps the most exciting part was seeing the actors on set, doing what they were good at.
In between takes they joked and fooled around, Ben Mitchell did a few burpees. But as soon as the director yelled ‘‘Action!’’ they went right back to straight faces and nailing their lines.
The worst part was not the ash or the waiting or the early start, but the food. The catering was not quite sufficient to feed the 30-odd extras hanging around behind the set.
With only crackers and a handful of Farmbake biscuits to sustain me, by the end of a long day, I just wanted to go home. Piles of red and grey baby wipes lay scattered over chairs as people tried to remove as much fake blood and ash as possible.
It took an hour in the shower and a bathroom full of products to make my skin a colour other than grey. That left enough time for a Popcorn Chicken snackbox and to fall asleep on the couch. It had been a hard day’s work.
The hard work was worth it. When the anniversary episode trailer rolled, you could see me (well, my back) in the background behind Chris Warner. Nailed it.