So for the Indianapolis 500 this past weekend, the good folks from Extra graced us with their presence. My department got to help out with production do production for the show.

We shot all of the standups and wraparounds with Mario Lopez, plus an interview with Danica Patrick in her garage.

If you haven’t seen Extra, they open the show with people tossing around a “monitor” playing video of something. For anyone not in television, it’s just a flat piece of wood painted green, with a checkerboard pattern for motion tracking so it can be added later in post-production. They usually have the person toss the board at the camera to finish out the opening. Danica was holding the board, and it was my job to sit right beneath the lens of the camera and catch it as she tossed it to me.

The first throw was a little low, it kind of looked like she tossed it on the ground. Our photographer told her to “throw it a little higher, it’s got to fall.” Boy did she come through. The board made a pretty nice parabolic arc, and came down gracefully, right on top of my head. I was assaulted by Danica Patrick with a piece of green wood.

We did a third take which ended up being a keeper. You can watch the raw video from ExtraTV.com after the jump, and see all the pics we snapped while working with Mario.