Extra, Extra, Read All About It

Over the past couple of years, I have been a pretty avid follower of the yahoo top news stories. I know its not the greatest link for news, but it gets the job done and helps me stay knowledgable about what's current. Recently, I just saw an article that talked about movie extra's in feature films and how people will do anything to even have a chance to be on the big screen. The producers and directors will normally send out a mass invite to anyone in the local area interested in part taking in his/her feature film. This past summer, I drove out to Heinz Field In Pittsburgh, PA to be apart of the The Dark Knight Rises. The final batman movie had a scene in the stadium where the main villain interrupts the game being played with explosives and fireworks. It was sweet to see all the cast members and have the chance to be in the background of a very popular soon to be film.

At the end of the article i was reading, the author provided a link to a youtube video of the world's most used extra. The video identified the person in over 50 films and

shows, a pretty impressive number if you ask me. The man's name is Jesse Heiman,

a 33 year old actor who still to this day plays teenagers and young adults in the backgrounds of many films. In some cases, the actor is paid for the countless second he is on the screen for. I thought it was cool to have a chance to be in one movie, but this guy has been in over 50, a number that will probably never be topped.

Project 2 update

So we are now entering the third week of project 2, and I just wanted to show the class a couple things we were planning on doing in our film. For background information, our feature film starts off with a teenage boy (Jordan) going into his bothers room trying to find his nerd guns. His older brother, Patrick, is over seas in Iraq fighting for our country. Jordan decides to play with these guns in his front years with some friends, when all of a sudden, his brother gets dropped off in the driveway. Jordan is so excited to see his bro, and asks if he wants to play with him and his friends. He hands Patrick the gun, and this is where he starts to have his flashbacks. When this happens, we want the screen to flash to something like this:

In another scene, we are going to want o have realistic warfare sfx. I found a great site called free sound.org that has multiple war sounds that would be perfect for our film. Another post effect we want to have is camera shake or frenzy when a fake bomb goes off. We want the edges of the screen to whiten and the maybe the picture to flicker black and white to give the audience a chill. Something like this will definitely get the point screenshot.

I don't want to give too much away, but this is the premise of our film. Please give questions or comments.