Acting: 12-10-26 CSI Las Vegas Shoot, Day 2

After the first day in Las Vegas, we were back at the studios in Universal City.

The highlight of the day’s shoot was the special effects.  The script says that my character is in the hospital with hives.  So here’s how the FX people interpreted that:

Pretty cool, huh?  So what they did was to put blue on the back of my hands.  Then they had a rubbery piece, which was the swollen part of the hand.  They painted it skin tone and blended it in with the rest of my skin.  Then they had blisters which were on sheets that dissolved in alcohol.  They took a section, placed it on the hand, added alcohol so the sheet dissolved, leaving the blisters.  After doing this several times to get lots of blisters, they painted red around the blisters.  And voila, a bad case of hives.

The other highlight was working with Elisabeth Shue, who actually goes by Lisa as opposed to Elisabeth.  Rehearsal and the first few takes were all about mechanics and props – as the lab tech, she had to take photos, take a blood sample, etc., so it took a little while to work out all the logistics and the timing with the lines.  I had it easier, because I just had to sit in the bed and do my lines:

By the way, I usually don’t ask the stars for photos.  As much as I love photos, I prefer not to bother them with photos.  I kinda think that if I were in their shoes, I’d probably hate doing it all the time, and having to take photos on set, which is usually considered a private setting, might be even more aggravating.

Acting wise, the scene itself was pretty straightforward.  The first few takes and the master shots are usually a little bit rough, but on the close ups the scene felt quite natural, and Elisabeth was quite good.  She knows when to do her thing.

We chatted a bit about the shoot and I asked her about Harvard.  She was class of ’88, and she was a transfer and lived off campus.  Which was a shame, I thought,  because I think being altogether on campus is a great experience.  But she said that she enjoyed doing her own thing, and she had a nice apartment and such.  She finished her degree when she was 38, and she herself said that education was wasted on the young.  She recounted how as a teenager, she was looking for a simpler life, easier classes, etc., but when she went back to get her degree – and she was paying for it – she was looking for the hardest classes, the biggest challenges.

Here’s a few photos from the set:


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