Okay, here's my report on my experience on the set of a "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" project in Erie.
The house is in a low income part of town. There are a couple of boarded up houses nearby and several of the occupied ones were in serious need of repair.
There was a parking and sign-in area a few blocks from the site. That's where we got our vendor VIP credentials and the mandatory EM:HE T-shirt and white hardhat that would allow us inside the crowd control barricade and onto the actual job site. We were also given a printed page of rules, including not to tape the show personalities.
The old house had been demolished and completely hauled away in a matter of hours. When we got there they were finishing excavation for the basement.
It looked like the show had temporarily relocated the residents of the adjoining houses, and there were probably payments made to them that allowed the show to trample their property. There was also an empty lot across the street from the project house. That's where the VIP area was set up.
There's an old industrial zone immediately behind the project. That became the access area for heavy equipment and the staging point for piles of building materials. I tried to imagine how the show pulled off the logistics in other neighborhoods.
Our client's product wouldn't be installed until after the foundation and basement were finished. That would be delayed because one of the trucks hauling the pre-cast concrete basement walls had tipped over. New panels were being rushed from New York. We went to the hotel, took naps, had dinner and then returned to the project to see how things were progressing. A lot had been done but our product still wouldn't be used until late morning of the next day.
When we arrived the next morning, crews of non-construction volunteers were at work beautifying the surrounding neighborhood. They were hauling away trash, trimming bushes, digging weeds and such. I don't know if it was simply part of giving to the neighborhood or if it was to make the area look less bleak for the big reveal. The main contractor was also donating repairs to the community center, so maybe the cleanup was more philanthropic than self-serving.
I heard that the first day they had something like 300 building trade people show up to volunteer. The show had to turn a lot of them away. Even so, there were times when it seemed there were too many people on the job. About a quarter of the men at any one time were looking for a way to help.
Whenever we were out on the site we were supposed to have a production assistant with us to make sure we stayed out of the way and didn't tape anything we weren't supposed to. That never happened. We went wherever we wanted, avoided heavy equipment and didn't get in the way of people doing actual work. It was easy to blend in since we all had the same T-shirts and hardhats. Just act like you know what you're doing and you're supposed to be there.
Because the house was to be built in five days, things that would ordinarily happen sequentially were happening simultaneously. What looked like chaos was actually rather coordinated. I was impressed, especially since the crews were conglomerates of volunteers who don't ordinarily work together.
It was raining by the time the first of our client's products was installed, but that was a fortuitous thing, since moisture resistance is one of the product's main selling points.
The interviews with the CEO went well. He's good on camera like modern executives should be. We also interviewed the lead contractor. He joked how he'd become expert at it from all the interviews he'd done in the past couple of days. We also shot the CEO helping with the construction. He started out as a builder, so he knew what he was doing.
We had to pause in our shooting whenever the official video crew shot a segment with their construction phase on-camera talent, Paige Hemmis (in pink hardhat and matching boots) or Paul DiMeo. Ty Pennington is only there to tell the lucky homeowner the good news and for the big reveal at the end.
Our other product wouldn't be installed until sometime in the middle of the night. We were back at 2:30 AM. (Even then there were onlookers.) The exterior walls were up, the windows were in, the plumbers and HVAC guys were installing their stuff, a crew carried in pre-assembled stairs, and the roofers were hard at work. We shot our stuff and called it a wrap. It might have been nice to see the rest of the process. Guess I'll catch it on TV sometime in October.
