Exploring paranormal life
Like any TV shoot, there was a lot of waiting around, but luckily there were also lots of jokes when Emily Brookes joined filming for the hit series Wellington Paranormal.
It’s not raining. It’s Wellington in July, and it’s not raining. Everyone is thrilled about this. There’s been a lot of rain, recently, and if it had rained tonight. . . well, if it had rained tonight Wellington Paranormal would probably be shooting anyway. It’s a Wellington production, after all. Three seasons in, the crew is used to dealing with the rain.
But it’s easier not to have to shoot in the rain, producer Paul Yates tells me, which is why in this season of TVNZ’s mockumentary series more scenes are set indoors than previously. That way it’s easier to stick to a schedule, and a budget.
The budget is a thing. Last season budgeted for about 150 visual effects; in all, more than 300 were used.
Plus, Wellington Paranormal has used most of the city’s iconic outdoor locations, some more than once, though Yates has yet to set an episode at the Brooklyn wind turbine.
Tonight’s setting – because it’s not realistic to set a whole season of a cop show inside, and if there’s one thing Wellington Paranormal is going for, it’s realism – is the Left Bank arcade, where under the clear skies that everyone is so thrilled about, a crew member is diligently wetting down the paving stones with a hose.
Welcome to life on the set of a hit TV show.
It is commonly known that most of being on a set involves waiting around: Waiting for the shot to get set up, waiting for the light to be right, waiting for the script to be tweaked.
Waiting for the crew member to hose down the paving stones, which, it turns out, isn’t to simulate rain but to reflect lights.
There are lots of people on the set, too, most of them working behind the scenes. There are a couple of different producers and the director, Tim van Dammen. There are camera operators, props co-ordinators, set dressers, people on lighting, on scripts, on costumes.
There are people whose job is to stand at the entrances to Left Bank and ensure no members of the public interrupt when cameras are rolling, as they occasionally are.
And there are extras, needed for just a few vital seconds of footage. Mostly what they do – what we all do – is wait.
Luckily, when the show you’re shooting is Wellington Paranormal, a lot of the waiting is pretty funny. The set is so funny, I’m told, that the crew can’t be mic’d because they laugh too much.
Tonight’s episode has Officer Minogue chasing down a carload of ghosts who died in a crash on the way to the Sevens. They were all dressed up as Where’s Wally, which should make them easy to spot, except it turns out lots of people wear striped tops and beanies.
(Beanies are a good call, actually. All the crew members are wearing them, and puffer jackets, and fingerless gloves. As I’ve come straight from the office, I’m hatless and gloveless, in a basic wool blend coat and stack heels that I will come to regret. There is a lot of standing around on a TV set.)
The episode originally explicitly referenced Where’s Wally, but after some legal to-and-fro, the producers nixed this for fear they would be sued by the publishers of the puzzle book series.
Instead, the writers added an exchange between Officers O’Leary, Minogue and Maaka in which they say they must not refer to the case as Where’s Wally, lest they be sued.
Officers O’Leary and Maaka aren’t here tonight. The scene being shot features just Minogue, chasing a group of stripe-shirted young people around a corner in the Left Bank.
At one point he reaches out and grabs one of them. An extra has been plucked from obscurity to take his 15 seconds of fame as the kid whose shoulder Minogue catches.
Now a ‘‘featured extra’’, his name is Jack, and between takes (the between times lasting roughly 15 times the length of any actual take), Minogue chats to him.
Minogue chats to everyone between takes, in fact. He’s very open and very personable, bouncing around from person to person and group to group, peering into monitors and mingling with the owners of local businesses.
Night shoots aren’t his favourite, Minogue tells me. He likes to spend evenings at home with his family. But tonight is a bit special because he’s brought his mum in to watch.
Clearly something of a VIP, Mrs Minogue gets to sit on an actual chair behind the director’s screen. You can tell she knows people in high places: She’s turned up in a knit hat and flat shoes.
Tom Sainsbury, aka Constable Parker, isn’t in this scene either, but he is here, fully costumed, to film a link for Seven Sharp. He says the same thing over and over, and it somehow gets more and more hilarious. In fact, he’s hilarious just standing around saying nothing.
Take after take happens. Van Dammen keeps asking if anyone has a radio to talk to the group of extras waiting out on Cuba St for their two-second walk through.
A set dresser has an idea, which van Dammen considers.
‘‘I love it,’’ he says in the end. ‘‘I just think it’s one of those things where people will look at that, instead of the story.’’
The takes continue. Sainsbury goes home. It’s getting late, and the extras are getting antsy. But they’re not allowed to leave, the extras wrangler tells them, as it breaks continuity. They walk through again. And again.
Finally, that part of the shoot is over, and the action shifts to a cafe where my stack heels and I are, mercifully, directed into a chair at a round table from where the back of my shoulder and about two centimetres of my hair will make their TV debut.
There’s a kerfuffle in this scene between Minogue and another character (us insiders are not allowed to say who).
I’m told to react naturally to the kerfuffle, and my shoulder and hair turn on, if I do say so myself, quite the performance. I may not be a featured extra, but I am featured, and extra.
Several takes of this and we’re done. Surprisingly quickly, the equipment is packed up, the extras gone, Minogue and mum off home, waving farewell.
So, that was a night on the set of Wellington Paranormal. It was cold. It was slow. At least it was funny.
Wellington Paranormal season 3 airs on TVNZ 2 on Wednesdays at 8.30pm and is available to stream on TVNZ OnDemand.