Category: Television

This is my new show, Tabletop

Posted on 19 March, 2012 By Wil

Last summer, Felicia Day asked me if I wanted to develop a show together for her new premium YouTube channel, Geek and Sundry.

Spoiler alert: I said yes.

She asked me if I wanted to do a show about gaming, maybe a review show or something like that.

"I think it would be more fun do something where we play games," I said. Then, the light bulb went off.

"Oh my god," I said, "What if we did something that was like Celebrity Poker meets Dinner for Five, where we got interesting people we know together for tabletop games?!"

Felicia thought it sounded awesome, I was really excited about the idea, and we got to work. It took a few months to develop, and in December we finally shot our first block of episodes. In February, we got the band back together and shot another block of episodes, and just last week, I finished locking down the final edits for all the shows (that's why I couldn't come to Wondercon on Friday.)

In season one of the show, we play games like Settlers of Catan, The Last Night on Earth, Munchkin, Small World, and Alhambra. Some of the players include Grant Imahara, Sean Plott (better known as Day[9]), Dodger Leigh, Ryan Higa, Beth Riesgraf, Phil Lamarr, Morgan Webb, Garfunkle and Oats, Veronica Belmont, and Colin Ferguson.

My ulterior motive with Tabletop is to show by example how much fun it is to play boardgames. I want to show that Gamers aren't all a bunch of weirdoes who can't make eye contact when they talk to you, and that getting together for a game night is just as social and awesome as getting together to watch Sportsball, or to play poker, or for a LAN party, or whatever non-gamers do with their friends. I want to inspire people to try hobby games, and I want to remove the stigma associated with gaming and gamers.

I'm pretty sure we succeeded. By the second day of production, our crew was grabbing games out of our games library to play at lunch. All of our interns and production assistants have become complete game fanatics, and whenever I edit a show, all I want to do is go home and play that game until my face falls off.

I hope you'll subscribe to our channel, and please tell your friends about Tabletop.

If Robocop was a bad 80s sit-com

Posted on 15 March, 2012 By Wil

I am easily amused, so earlier today, when my brain said, "You know what would be funny? If there was a Robocop sit-com, where he was always screwing up. Every time he did something, the other officers would put their hands on their hips, cock their heads to one side, and do this sing-songy "Robocop!" catchphrase. Then he'd just shoot everyone."

I mentioned this to Twitter. A few people quickly replied with funny ideas of their own… then I got excited and made a thing:

INT POLICE HEADQUARTERS — DAY.

Robocop comes toward camera, doing that weird marching walk thing. He stops in front of a vending machine, and precisely turns to face it.

FLASH TO:

ROBOCOP POV

Through Robocop’s HUD, we see the nutritional information of the various items in the machine as he scans them. A can of soda has a mouse in it, a chocolate bar has traces of cocaine, a bag of chips is actually a bag of fingernails. All that skips by so fast, though, the audience doesn’t really notice it consciously. A crosshairs appears on the HUD and selects a bag of OIL-FLAVORED MICROCHIPS. They’re actual chips, with a cartoony, smiling Robocop drawing on the front. He’s giving a thumbs.

BACK TO SCENE.

Robocop puts a crumpled dollar into the machine, which spits it out. He does this three or four times.

ROBOCOP

Dead or alive, those chips are coming with me.

(Laugh track)

ROBOCOP

Accept my money.

You have ten seconds to comply.

He tries to put the money into the machine. The machine spits it back out.

ROBOCOP

I have ordered you to accept my money.

You have seven seconds to comply.

He tries to put the money into the machine. The machine spits it back out. It falls to the floor.

(Laugh track)

ROBOCOP

You have attempted to assault

a police officer with his own money.

You are under arrest.

An older, grizzled SERGEANT comes out of his office down the hall.

SERGEANT

Robocop, what the hell are you doing?

ROBOCOP

Making an arrest, sir.

The Sergeant rolls his eyes and shakes his head.

SERGEANT

Would you mind tellin’ me how you’re going

to arrest a vending machine?

(Laugh track)

ROBOCOP

By. The. Book.

(Laugh track)

SERGEANT

Robocop, you crazy. Let me help you.

The Sergeant picks up the dollar bill off the floor. ROBOCOP pulls his gun in a flash! He points it at the sergeant!

ROBOCOP

You are tampering with evidence.

You are under arrest.

SERGEANT

You can’t arrest me, Robocop! I’m your boss!

ROBOCOP

You. Are. Under. Arrest.

SERGEANT

Robocop, I ain’t got time for this. I retire in two days!

(Laugh Track)

ROBOCOP

Arrest. Arrest.

Arrrrrest. Arrrrrreeessst.

SERGEANT

(sighs)

Aw, dammit. You’re stuck in a loop. I’d better reset you.

The Sergeant makes a move toward Robocop.

(Audience: Ooohhhhhh!)

The Sergeant puts his hand on Robocop's shoulder. Robocop snaps out of it.

ROBOCOP

Assault on an officer.

Use of deadly force is authorized.

Robocop shoots about a thousand bullets into the Sergeant, blowing him across the hallway where hits the wall and slides to the floor, leaving streaks of blood behind.

SERGEANT

(gasping, dying, yet somehow still alive)

Dammit… Robocop… I had…

two days… until… retirement.

The Sergeant dies.

ROBOCOP

Thank you for your cooperation.

I am not arresting you any more.

(Laugh track, cheers.)

Dozens of officers rush into hallway, stopping short of the grisly scene. They look at Robocop, incredulous. Robocop turns back to the vending machine.

ROBOCOP

Your move, dirtbag.

Suddenly, the bag of chips drops from the vending machine for some reason, startling Robocop. He whirls toward it and destroys it in a hail of epic gunfire.

POLICE OFFICERS

(sing song, in unison)

Robocop!

Robocop turns to the camera and innocently shrugs.

FREEZE FRAME as the synth-tastic theme music plays.

(Audience cheers)

I’m on a boat: Stupid Cell Phone Videos

Posted on 26 February, 2012 By Wil

I’m on JoCoCruiseCrazy 2, and I’m taking an Internet vacation until I get home. So every day while I’m gone, something from my archives will post here automatically, for your entertainment. I had a lot of fun picking these different things out, and I hope you enjoy them again, or for the first time.

Today, I'm linking to the first stupid cellphone videos I did. If you're as easily amused as I am, you can watch them all on my YouTube channel.

We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

Originally published September 2010.

I'm home for a few days before I go back to Vancouver to finish out the season on Eureka. It's nice to sleep in my own bed, actually see my family, and work in my actual office, instead of sitting at a desk in a hotel.

Doctor Parrish was very heavy in the last episode I shot, so I worked 5 of 6 days, an average of 14 hours each day. It was exhausting work, but I loved every second of it. I wish I could get into the details of it, but that is right in the middle of Spoilertown, so I'll just say that it was a lot of fun, and I got to do a lot of origami.

There's this saying, possibly apocryphal, that actors work for free and get paid to wait. One of my days last week, I was called to the studio early, and then ended up not working for about seven hours. This sometimes happens when the scene before me takes longer than anyone expected, or it turns out that they're not going to see me in the background of a shot like they thought. Rookie actors tend to bitch about this sort of thing, but salty veterans like me have learned to be grateful for the job, appreciate that I'm getting paid to wait, and pack a Bag of holding that's filled with books and games and diversions. (Back in the old days, I'd bring tons of stuff, but now I just bring my iPad and a book.)

On this particular day, I played the hell out of Plants Vs. Zombies HD, re-read Metatropolis, spent some time looking for the end of the Internet, and actually started to get bored.

Once I started to get bored, my brain spit out an idea, that went something like this: "Hey, your cell phone has a video camera on it. You should make stupid videos with it, and upload them to YouTube!"

This sounded like a brilliantly stupid idea, so I did as my brain commanded, producing this:

I told Twitter about it, and there was much rejoicing. A few hours later, I did this:

Then I was finally called to set, where I was no longer bored, and my cretive energy was directed into the very useful and productive task of bringing Doctor Parrish to life.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that my stupid videos had been viewed about 7,000 times. "See, we're entertaining more people than just ourselves," my brain said, "let's make more stupid cell phone videos!"

"Yes, sir, Mister Brain," I said. I enlisted the help of some friends, and made this:

I don't know how long this will last, but it's easy, it's amusing to me, and it's a lot of stupid fun, so I'll keep doing it until I lose interest or get distracted and chase a red balloon down the street. If you want to see these stupid things as they become available, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel.

I’m on a boat: On the Delivery of Technobabble

Posted on 20 February, 2012 By Wil

On the Delivery of Technobabble

Originally published May 2011.

I was in three scenes yesterday, one of which contained a massive amount of technobabble.

For those who don't know what that is: on a sci-fi show, technobabble is what we call pseudoscientific dialog like "I'll have to run a level four diagnostic on the antimatter inversion matrix to be sure." It's pretty much the worst dialog an actor can have to deliver on a show, because it's rarely connected to anything in reality, and if we're talking about the inertial dampeners in a scene, we're pretty much infodumping to the audience, instead of doing something interesting with our characters.

…or so I thought until yesterday.

The thing about technobabble is that it isn't usually connected to reality. By that, I mean that though it does follow the logical rules of the show's universe, and references things the fans know about, for most actors, it's like being asked to perform in a foreign language that you barely understand (if you understand it at all.)

The other thing about technobabble is that the character delivering it is supposed to be an expert on the subject, and should have a point of view about it that stays alive through the whole scene. For example, maybe Doctor Hoobajoo is the leading expert in the galaxy on ion resonance within the subspace induction processor core, so when Doctor Hoobajoo talks about that subject, she's an expert. You can't ask her a single question about the subspace induction processor core that she can't answer. But for the actor playing Doctor Hoobajoo, she has to deliver a bunch of dialog based on something that doesn't even exist as if she's been studying it her whole life.

This is a tremendous challenge for the actor, because, unlike normal dialog that comes from an emotional place, technobabble comes from memories that don't exist. While the actor who plays Doctor Hoobajoo can draw on the emotional memory of being betrayed, or being afraid, or being in love to inform a scene, she can't draw on the memory of studying and mastering the twin fields of ion resonance and subspace induction. As an actor, it's easy to fall into the trap of delivering technobabble by rote, and for a lot of us, it's the only way we can remember those lines at all.

But sometimes, a scene is emotionally important, and is filled with technobabble. That's just the reality of working in science fiction. So when Doctor Hoobajoo is trapped in the power conduit with Commander Framitz, her former lover from her first deployment who left her for an android, and can only save them from certain depolarizaion by repairing a malfunction in the subspace induction processor core, the actor has a lot of work to do. Not only does the actor have to be an expert who can solve the problem and save their lives, she has to be emotionally connected to the scene and the history between the two characters. Oh, and she has to remember that the stakes in this case are pretty high. And she has to do this over and over again for several hours, during the master shot, the VFX shots, and all the coverage.

Boy, writing those three paragraphs just exhausted me. I'll be back in a little bit.

Okay, some coffee and steel cut oats seem to have revitalized me, so I can get to my point now, about what I realized yesterday:

I had a scene that was almost entirely technobabble. It sets up a lot of the action for the episode, tells the audience what's at stake, and gets them excited enough to sit through commercials for MegaSomething versus Giant Other Thing to find out what happens next. I drove the scene. Everyone else was reacting to me and the information I gave them, and I think I had one line in two pages that wasn't technobabble. It was challenging, and I knew from experience that I was going to have trouble remembering the jargon, so I did a lot of extra homework to make sure I was totally prepared.

As I did my preparation, I realized that while the technobabble is just a dump of information, it's information that Doctor Parrish has an opinion about. The function of the scene is to get the action going and give the audience some important information, but that doesn't mean it has to be an infodump. The way Doctor Parrish feels about the other characters affects the way he talks with them regardless of the words. It affects who he chooses to give certain bits of information to, and it affects how he delivers the information. So I found ways to be emotionally connected to the scene and the characters, while caring about the information I was giving them, so it wasn't an infodump. A scene that could have been tedious and boring became a scene that was a lot of fun to perform.

Still, it was really hard to remember all the technobabble I had, and at one point, when I blanked on a line, my Star Trek skills automatically sprung to life, went into failsafe mode, and made me say "blah blah emit blah pulse blah blah blah." (The fun of technobabble is that a lot of the words are interchangeable. The frustration of technobabble is that we can't paraphrase or use any of the interchangeable words, because a subspace matrix is different from a subspace array.)

It honestly could have been boring and exhausting to spend much of a day delivering technobabble, but when I realized that I could keep it interesting by endowing the technobabble with emotional resonance, the whole thing came to life in a surprising and unexpected way. It was like I'd detected anomalies in the starboard neutrino emitter, and instead of adjusting the warp plasma induction subroutine to compensate for multiadaptive fluctuations, like you'd usually do, I thought about it, and equalized the portable phase transmission with a self-sealing warp core transmuter.

I know, right? I bet you never thought to do it that way. Well, I did, and it worked.

in which my wife is nerd-adjacent and comedy ensues

Posted on 17 February, 2012 By Wil

I came across a bunch of posts that I'd marked as drafts, but never published. Most of them are ideas that never turned into actual posts, or things I wrote and decided not to post for some reason I've since forgotten.

This one was originally written in November of 2009. I'm not sure why I left it unpublished for over two years.

"Hey," I said to Anne while we stood in the kitchen last night, "remember that song from Avenue Q, 'The Internet is for Porn'?"

She made a gruff Muppet voice and sang, "The Internet is for porn, the Internet is for porn … porn, porn, porn." She stirred whatever was on the stove and said, "that song?"

"Yeah. That song."

I put my hands in my pockets, and leaned back on my heels, striking my famous I'm-so-proud-of-what-I'm-about-to-tell-you posture.

"I ordered a T-shirt last week, and it says 'The Holodeck is for porn' on it!" I smiled and waited for her to join me in laughter.

At first, all she did was blink. Then, she frowned, like she was trying to solve a puzzle. Finally, she just cocked her head to one side and looked at me like I had spoken in some foreign language, which I guess I had.

"You, um . . . you don't know what the holodeck is, do you?"

"I know that it's from Star Trek," she offered, helpfully.

I told her what the holodeck does, and how it works, doing my best not to speak in geek, which as it turns out is very difficult to do when you are describing the primary functions and inner workings of the freakin' holodeck.

"So, you see," I concluded, "if the holodeck was real, everyone would use it for porn, and that's why that T-shirt is so funny."

"…okay…"

We looked at each other for a few seconds.

I said, "I can't believe you've been married to me for ten years, and this is the first time we've ever talked about the holodeck."

"Yeah, I don't know how we managed that."

—

Sometime during the two years since we had this conversation, something changed for Anne. I honestly think it was when she got an iPhone, and was able to have quick and instant access to the sort of technology I've embraced since before we met. She's made friends who are into the same sort of sci-fi and fantasy that I'm into, and I guess she's just absorbed the things we love by being geek-adjacent all the time.

I don't think I'll be able to convince her to watch Game of Thrones or Doctor Who with me, and it's unlikely she'll want to read a stack of comic books every Wednesday like I do… but she knows what the holodeck is, and she agrees with me that it's for porn.

So… baby steps. Baby steps.