Author: Wil

Author, actor, producer. On a good day, I am charming as fuck.

on the learning of lines and the telling of the story

Posted on By Wil

Scene 15 is a little over three pages of intense dialog, some important character beats, and a fair amount of technobabble. We were supposed to shoot it tomorrow, but it was moved to this afternoon, so my plan to learn it tonight was pushed up by almost 24 hours.

People always want to know how actors learn lines, and there isn't one correct answer, because we all do it in different ways: some of us learn by reading the script over and over again, some of us learn by performing the entire scene aloud by ourselves, some of us write the scene down, and some of us run lines with another person until we have the dialog in our heads.

I learn my lines by understanding the scene, deciding what each line (or dramatic beat) is about, and then trying different things with my lines until I find the choice that makes the most sense. For example, last week we had a scene where I kept blanking on one of my lines. After a couple of takes I realized that I couldn't remember the line because I was doing the wrong thing with it, and that was making my brain short out. I can't tell you the actual line, but I can tell you that the acting choice — which was wrong — was Make An Offer. When I realized that Make An Offer was wrong, and Look For Permission was right, the scene came together, and we were done in two more takes.

I also have to understand what's at stake in each scene. I need to know exactly what my character wants and needs, so I can make choices for him to get there. As I said on Twitter recently, I realized that Doctor Parrish's favorite thing in the world is "I told you so." Evil Wil Wheaton's favorite thing in the world is, "Ha! Gotcha, Sheldon Cooper." Cha0s' favorite thing in the world is, "I know something you don't know, and never will know, because I am so much smarter than you." Knowing these things gives me a place to begin in every script, just like "Don't Be A Dick" gives me a place to begin every day in my real life.

But back to today's work. I learned today's scene by breaking down the entire thing into beats, and then placed those beats within the context of the rest of the episode (In Eureka, something fantastic usually happens in the first few pages, and the bulk of the show — and the fun in each episode — is spent figuring it out and fixing it) so I know what the stakes are.

Some of the things Doctor Parrish is doing today:

  • Share scientific insight.
  • Correct them. Again.
  • Accuse him.
  • Solve the Problem. Easily. (Jesus they're idiots.)
  • Ha! I told you so.

It's easy, while doing television, to just learn the lines and rely on instinct and experience with the character you've been playing for a long time to bring it all together. We never have enough time, and some of us are working 12 hours a day, five days a week, so there are times when we're just so burned out and exhausted, we simply don't have the energy to really dig in and do more than that. While there are some great actors who can do that and deliver brilliant performances, I'm not one of them. I don't want to miss any beats. I don't want to miss any nuances because I'm relying on instinct instead of complete understanding of the scene. For example, the beat I mentioned above, where I share scientific insight, was originally Share a good idea, but while I was playing with the scene last night and again this morning, I realized that it was more specific, and stronger, and more interesting to share scientific insight. Maybe the difference between the two choices is too subtle to matter in the final cut, but it's a significant difference to me, so I made the change.

I guess I work a little harder than I have to, partially because I feel it's my responsibility as an actor to rise to the demands of the material and tell the story as fully as I can, but mostly because it's fun to break down a scene and find the strongest obvious and non-obvious choices that will tell the story the way it deserves to be told. The moments I live for — the moments I love — as an actor are the moments in rehearsal or during a take when I discover something about the character or the scene that wasn't aware of until the exact moment I found it … just like real life, which is what we're aiming to recreate whenever we make up a story, even a story that's all about nano[REDACTED] and hyper[SPOILER] [SPOILER].

to boldly go where no clown sweater has gone before

Posted on By Wil

Greetings from Vancouver, where the local hockey club is still in the playoffs, and the sky above our heads is the color of television, tuned to a dead channel (in 1980).

I am having a wonderful time on Eureka, keeping notes in my notebook so that I can write about the experience of making these episodes when they finally air, sometime just before the heat death of the universe.

My brother told me that the Endeavour crew made their own Star Trek poster, which is probably the most bad ass space shuttle poster ever.

He also told me that he felt like I should be there with them, on account of me being in Star Trek, so he made me this:

Wheaton_joins_Endeavour

I win at having the best brother in the world.

Various things I want you to know

Posted on By Wil

A few things before I forget:

1. Memories of the Future Volume 1 is available for your Kindle. It's also at Kindle.uk, and Kindle.de. It's temporarily out of the iBooks store, but I'll get that fixed in a few days. Hey, if you liked it, would you leave a review?

2. Yes, I'm working on Memories of the Future Volume 2 RIGHT NOW.

3. I don't know when Volume 2 will be out. I will likely have a preview of at least one episode from Volume 2 with me for my performance at Phoenix Comic Con.

4. I will be at Phoenix Comic Con in just a couple weeks. I'm doing a Eureka thing, and I'm doing a special STORYTIME WITH WIL WHEATON performance thing. I'm really excited about it. More on that later.

5. It was my great pleasure to perform John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation for Audible. (Here's a sample! Yay!) It's recently been released, and is getting great reviews (both the book and my performance.) At Whatever, you can hear some of it, as well as the OMG AMAZING power ballad by Paul and Storm that John commissioned to celebrate the release of the book.

6. 100.3 The Sound is my new favorite radio station in Los Angeles, because it reminds me of the glory days of KMET. It delighted me to hear a drop on the air the other night that explicitly referenced the Mighty Met. I believe that you can tune in online, and suggest that you do, provided you enjoy that sort of thing.

7. Fear Itself is not disappointing me, even a little bit. In fact, I kind of love it. Same with Invincible Iron Man and Thor. The next time I see Fraction, I have to kiss him. It's going to be weird.

8. For some reason, I never really publicized my Tumblr. Well, here it is. I put shit there all the time that amuses and enrages me. So now you know.

9. I have decided that this list needs to go to eleven, because it's one more.

10. Logan Bonner introduced me to a really fun iOS game calle DungeonRaid. Because Logan decided to destroy my life by telling me about this game, I have decided to destroy yours. Pay it forward.

11. My belt, which has served me well for many years (holding up not only my pants, but many onions) finally cracked and broke in twain while I was at Legoland last week with some friends to see the Star Wars miniland stuff (more on that later, also too and like such as). I was thwarted in all my attempts to find a replacement belt, until I remembered yesterday that I have Fawkes' wardrobe in my closet, and Fawkes owns a pretty sweet belt. So I got it out, and for the near future, I'll be wearing Fawkes' belt. I say this as a warning to any gas tanks who think they're going to go ahead and tell me when to fill them.

we are all going to reseda…

Posted on By Wil

This came into my mind recently:

When viewed from the sky, the sprawling neighborhoods that make Los Angeles are a series of small grids, linked by freeways and divided by boulevards into larger grids. When you fly into Los Angeles at night, it's like looking at a circuit board, traffic flowing along the freeways in streaks and dots of white and red, and along boulevards lined by the amber glow of streetlights. Bits and bytes of data move from node to node with the type of inefficiency that can only be born of bureaucratic planning that spans decades.

Also, this:

The Magic is everywhere, and everyone can see it, but nobody can actually see it for what it is. They talk about it like it's something wonderful: the Hollywood sign, the Ferris wheel at Santa Monica Pier, the shiny towering buildings in Downtown and Century City that turn into pillars of fire every day in the setting sun.

But some of us know what it really is. We can smell it, we can feel it, we can hear it like the droning of a far-off diesel locomotive. The Magic, fueled by the dreams that die here and stay trapped in the basin like smog, hides this city's true face.

The most concentrated Magic is in Hollywood, where the most powerful Dream Magic has been crushed underfoot and ground into the streets themselves to make them sparkle, a trap to lure in ever more dreamers, to feed the Beast that lurks just beyond their perception.

A big part of living in LA is hating living in LA, and talking about hating living in LA. That's not without reason: it's expensive, it's overpopulated, it has the worst transportation infrastructure in the fucking world, and it often feels like most of the people you meet here came from somewhere else on their way to Something Better, so nobody cares about making LA suck less.

But a city that can inspire me to see it as a Gibsoneqsue TechnoRetroCyberFutureSprawl in one moment and then as a living, scheming, hungry ancient Beast in the next can't be all that bad.

…or maybe it just wants me to believe that.

this post is titled Laika for some reason

Posted on By Wil

When I started my blog almost ten years ago, I made a dedicated effort to write something new every day. I figured that it was good practice for me as a level zero writer, and I also knew that the only way to keep readers engaged was by providing new content all the time.

As the years rolled by, I had to force myself to take breaks, even when I was writing multiple weekly and monthly columns, because I had fallen in love with writing, and I really enjoyed interacting with readers in comments.

But as the years rolled by, I changed. My family changed. My work changed. The world changed, man. You've changed! You used to be cool! What happened to you?

Um. Sorry.

A lot of things changed, and so did the way I wrote about them. The biggest change for me was watching my kids grow up and move out on their own. As they became teenagers and then young adults, I felt less and less comfortable writing about them. It felt okay when they were little, and I was writing about becoming a dad and the experiences I had raising them, but as they got older and made friends who read about them on my blog, I began to feel like it was an invasion of their privacy to write about them. And also, honestly, teenagers can be total dicks to their parents, impossible to deal with, and their existence is, as far as I am concerned, conclusive proof that we never master time travel. Because if we did, I'm pretty sure all parents would travel back in time and make sure they never hooked up at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance.

My career changed, too. Namely: I had one again. Writing about the struggle to find work was more comfortable and interesting to me than writing about how great it is to have the work. It's also damn hard to write about things I work on when they don't make it to the audience for a year or more, and we now live in an era when studios and networks explicitly forbid us from blogging, flickring, twittering and otherwise talking about our work. I'm lucky that the shows I work on are mostly willing to leave me to my own judgment, but I still play it safe rather than risk spoiling something through my own carelessness.

The world changed. The way we communicate online changed. Where I once had a blog, I now have a Twitter and a Tumblr and a podcast and a YouTube and Reddit and Flickr and and and and and like and such as. What used to turn into a 1500 word post on my blog is now a link on Tumblr, a picture on Twitter, and then nothing at all on my blog, because I've lost the need to write about it.

I'm not sure what happens next. I still love to write, though, and I still love interacting with readers. I still love telling stories. I've been writing more and more fiction, because I don't feel weird writing about people and places I've made up, but I stopped writing regular columns because I began to get really sick of the sound of my own voice.

I used to write every day, and I looked forward to it. I kept my eyes and my ears and my soul open because I never knew when something was going to crash into my life that would make a good story. I'd like to find a way to get back to that, but I think things have changed so much, it's not really possible to change them back again.