Al-Jazeera, Ha'aretz, Bank Hapoalim, what's next?

Since I've gotten to Israel I've been pretty lucky and have had a few chances for my 15 minutes (ok, 3 seconds) of fame. First, I was in Al-Jazeera for a focus piece on Aliyah for Israel's 60th anniversary. Then, I got to be in a Ha'aretz article about the American elections (still glowing about Obama and the exciting path that the US has decided to follow). 

This morning, though, I think takes the cake. This past Saturday my friends and I ran in a 5k and afterwards there was part of a film crew looking for extras for a project this week. Being recently unemployed (and my friends having the time as well) we took them up on it... and I'm so glad I did. 

I've never been part of a production set before and this was definitely a production. For a simple bank commercial, they had recreated an entire city block set complete with a cafe, bank (duh), fruit stand, secondhand clothes shop and apartment buildings above. For anyone who thinks you're watching a real life scene in a commercial, odds are you're not. They had all of the smallest details down also; halfway through our part they decided the fake sidewalk didn't look authentic enough, so they first splashed all kinds of stuff on it (coffee color, oil color, etc), added some dead leaves to the mix and then when that wasn't enough painted it blue and white instead of red and white!

Anyway, getting back to the point of the story... so we dressed up as runners for the commercial (hence the crew looking for extras at the end of a race). About 25 times we ran for about 5 seconds as part of the end of the commercial. The director does yell "cut" and "action" as many times as they do in movies... pretty cool. 

Certainly it'll be tough to distinguish me from the other runners since our part of the production is probably 2 seconds out of 30, but I'm still looking forward to seeing it on TV!