Shooting the Piazza Commercial

On Thursday of this past week, the cast of Piazza gathered on stage for a blocking/set-up rehearsal of the television commercial for Piazza we'd be shooting the next day. Basically, the commercial director Chuck (a GREAT guy--very professional, calm, charming, and a big fan of our show :) would gather whoever was needed for a particular shot and explain to us the blocking/action for the actors and the camera. His crew was busy doing preliminary lighting work, our crew was busy helping with lights, sets, props...and the actors were busy trying to remember the blocking for what would ultimately become 11 approximately 3 second shots that would be edited into a 30second TV commercial.

The shoot itself started at 8:30 the next morning. Pretty harsh considering we had a show only 9 hrs. earlier and had 4 more shows to get through starting 2 hours after the shoot would finish on Friday night. But it was fun! We had a light catered breakfast and lunch, a make-up artist keeping us all pretty (she was fantastic), and I finally got to spend some quality time with the cast! I mean they all had 5 weeks of 8 hr. rehearsal days together, but I only rehearsed with them for 8 hrs. total (spread out over 2 weeks) before going on. So it was really great hanging out with my new 'family away from home' so to speak.

The day went pretty smoothly with no major snaffus (i.e. lights breaking, shots not looking right and having to be reconfigured, etc;). And because the shots were such small snippets of moments in the show, once the lighting was set, our job as actors was really easy. Just show up, relax, act and repeat--usually about 6-10 takes per set-up. But remember, the action itself in each shot lasted only a few seconds. It felt as though right when Chuck was calling 'action' he'd be saying 'cut' a moment later. It was a crazy compacted version of the basic Piazza plotline.

Since it was shot digitally (it's ridiculous how high quality digital has gotten. I got to watch on the monitors shots I wasn't in and they looked stunning), post production shouldn't take more than a few weeks. So look out for me on TV sometime this month. Unfortunately, I won't be singing (only Kelli and Victoria have 1 singing line each that helps underscore the action and i believe the rest is just orchestration), but the finished product should be really nice and hopefully avoid many of the cheesy pitfalls a lot of show commercials fall into.

Oh! I'm also gonna be on a billboard in Times Square (a monster version of our new photo poster of the show) in a few weeks. Let me know if you see it before i do :)

L'SHANA TOVA!