Jane Austin

Depending on where we have to go, because we kind of live out in the middle of nowhere, we usually get up around 3:00, 3:30. You know, if we have gear to pack up, if we don’t get it done the night before, pack up the gear that morning, drive to our location. When I’m stunting, it’s nice because you just have your bag, your gear bag that you have, and show up to the set. And I have a routine that I do every day when I work and that’s basically drop my bag off in my dressing room, go to the breakfast place, get my BLT. I always have a BLT on wheat for breakfast. Then, depending if we’re rigging, we’ll start rigging the gag. You know, get the equipment out. If I’m not rigging, if I’m actually stunting, then you go to hair and you go to makeup, you get your wardrobe on, get all your paperwork done and then you go to set. Your stunt coordinator will be there, and you go over what the action is, what the scene is, you kind of do the placement, if there’s rigging to be done. You find out what your rig is that you’re going to be riding, or if you’re driving, you figure out… you do a rehearsal of how the action is going to go. And then depending on the size of what you do… like, for example, I’ve done ballroom scenes where it’s just we levelled the place. And that would be like a master shot, and then we’ll do inserts all day long of different tables that were destroyed or… I mean, we can just level a ballroom in about two minutes. Totally! And it’s so much fun because we did this one — Superhero, that was the name of the movie — and there were about 20 stunt performers and about 100 background performers. And the stunt performers were all in groups of two or three, four, and we each had an area that we needed to destroy. You know, we slammed each other on the tables, or we took chairs and just slammed them over each other, or I mean just went sliding across, and it was so much fun!