TheEMan Interview

TheEMan and the PokerStars Chip Trick Commercial

Trip to London

As some of you guys already know I got an offer to got to London to shoot an chip trick commercial for Pokerstars.com
I found this out on Tuesday the 21st and the shoot was on Friday the 24th. Not a lot of time to prepare.
Anyway I actually hesitated at first cause of the time pressure, I’m really, I mean REALLY glad I didn’t back out.
Anyway, Myles, the director booked the flight on Wednesday 22nd and I went to London on Thursday afternoon the 23rd.

I went from Heathrow Thursday night to Myles office and we went thru all the tricks that were going to be performed.
Then I went by taxi across London, lol it’s not a big city, it’s massive. Anyway I crashed at Adam’s place, he was the Production Manager.

So on Friday it was up 6.30 am and off to the Black Island studio. When we got there nothing was set for filming, so got to practise some.
I even got my own dressing room, how cool is that!

 
Camera Dolly and rails

Practicing

 
Chiproll

The shoot started about 9am on Friday morning. It was a big setup with rails for the camera dolly and stuff like that.
 I think it was 15 or so persons in the studio at all time doing different things, it was really cool, always found someone to talk to between camera setups.

Myles told me that the whole commercial is filmed in HD - High Definition. Awesome quality, he said that 1 second of film takes up about 1GB of hard drive space.

 
HD Camera

First setup was the camera going in a straight line towards the table. I did 7 or 8 tricks with that cam angle, almost half the day went by really quickly.
Then they changed to rails in a half circle beginning behind me going forward to the front of the table.

 
Practising

Ed the Camera Man

 
Shooting DH Riffle

 
Just having fun

The hardest thing was to do tricks on command. When Myles yelled Action, the camera started moving, I had to wait, then he yelled Anders Left hand, then Anders right hand.
This might sound really easy. I know I can do these tricks in my sleep, but there was lot of stuff that made things really difficult. When Shoot failed they had to reset the camera.
The light at the table was really bright and generated such heat that I got all sticky and it made the chips also get sticky which is not a good combination.

 
Resetting Cam

 
Shooting

 
Myles

 
Serious

 
Shoot 2

Since they only needed my hands there was no full body shot or interviews, so I couldn’t plug 21ace. I did talk a lot to Conrad, the Pokerstars representative, and he was really curious on how I got this gig, and I told him it was through 21ace.com, and he picked up his mobile phone and asked for the address again, so he put the 21ace address in his phone, that’s better then nothing. I also told everyone there about 21ace.

When Conrad walked in he went right over to me and shook my hand, then he turned my hand and looked at my watch and nodded.
He said “good it’s not a Swatch”. so that was really cool that I got to keep rings, my watch and my bracelet.

And one other thing is those chips Pokerstars provided was those crappy dice chips, and I told Conrad my thought about these chips, and he totally agreed with me =)
So he provided me with some real casino chips from his own collection and I got to use my own chips. And those decks in the pictures and in commercials are also my own, Myles put some decks on the table, I said to him are you going to use those?
I have some really nice decks with me. So I showed him one viper fan back and one tally red fan back and one Bike league back.
So he used those, I think that’s awesome.

 
Pokerstars EPT Table

 
Practicing between shoot’s

Movie Clapper

And I got to meet Isabella (No Mercy) Mercier that was really cool, she’s one of the best female poker players in the world, but she was very down to earth, she’s gorgeous too. Sorry to say I was just leaving for the Heathrow when they started her shoot =(
Myles told me she was going to do some riffles and twirls and a shoot where she comes out from a totally black backdrop and in to the light.
I guess we just have to wait for that commercial to air.

 
Me & Isabella Mercier

I’m really happy about the whole trip and all the people involved, Myles, Adam, Conrad, Ed the camera man and his crew were really awesome. 
Also all the other people who asked if I needed water, coffee etc, I couldn’t have felt more welcome than I did. It was a totally unreal experience =)

When we got to the studio I picked up my camera and it just died, I told Adam I needed some new batteries, 15 min later I had 4 new to put in my camera.

Pokerstars wanted 6 Tricks for the shoot; we recorded 12 tricks I think. Lot’s of ambidex tricks can’t wait to see what the finished product looks like. I’ll get the DVD when it’s done edited.

The whole trip was free, Myles said they had an budget of 450-500 L and when that limited time I think my flight ate most of the budget, but I don’t really care cause the whole experience was so awesome, and I got lots of Pokerstars.com stuff which is cool.

I will post the commercial when I get it from Myles, if I can.

If I get to rate this trip on scale from 1 to 10, I rate it 1 million!!

Peace,

TheEMan