Filmmaking – WIL WHEATON dot NET

A few months ago, Felicia Day asked me if I'd like to play a character in Season 3 of The Guild.

The conversation went something like this:

Felicia: So, I wrote this character for Season 3 of The Guild and I wondered if y—

Me: YES YES A THOUSAND TIMES YES YOU HAD ME AT "THE GUILD!"

Rob Reiner's Mother: I'll have what he's having.

Felicia told me that she and the other producers wanted to keep my involvement in the show and the the details of my character a secret, because they planned a big reveal at Comic-Con.

So all those times I told Twitter some variation of, "Holy crap if I could tell you what I'm working on right now, you'd be all 'OMG NO WAI' and I'd be all 'WAI' and you'd be all 'awesome!' and then I'd be all, 'I know, right?'" Now you know one of the things I was talking about.

We started shooting a few weeks later, and after some 31-hour shooting days, my work on the show was done. I still can't get into specifics about my character or the story, but I think it's safe (and totally unsurprising) to tell you that working on The Guild was as fun and wonderful as you would expect, and every single person on the cast and crew was an absolute joy to work with.

As I said on The Guild panel at Comic-Con, I've known, written, and performed with a lot of these guys for years, and I'm not surprised in the least that everyone loves them so much. It rules to see so many people in the world (millions per episode, I guess) finding out for themselves what I've known for years.

Season 3 is going to kick thirteen different kinds of ass, and I'm thrilled to be a small part of part of it. I'll talk about each episode a little more after it's released.

I took a few minutes away from working on Leverage and writing my short stories to turn in an End User column that’s all about some of the stuff that’s been on my mind since I started working on Leverage:

I’m in Portland, Oregon, shooting an episode of TNT’s prime time drama, Leverage.

Just about every night after we wrap I meet up with my friend John Rogers, who is the co-executive producer and head writer for the show, to have a beer and decompress after a long day on the set. Whether we talk about filmmaking, comic books, nerdy geeky gaming stuff, or technology, a common thread runs through our conversations: it’s pretty awesome to live here in the future, we sure are lucky to get paid to make stuff up and entertain people, and holy crap has the industry changed since we first entered it.

Leverage is totally shot in the future. We use the Red One digital camera, we watch takes right after we finish them to make sure nothing went wrong, and we get our dailies via secure internet connection anywhere we have computers and WiFi. John told me that at least once, they realized they didn’t shoot a single or needed a tighter angle to make something work, and were able to create coverage in post-production, which is done entirely on Final Cut Pro. During production, we could send pictures and updates from the set to Twitter and our blogs, and engage the audience in a direct and intimate way that is unlike anything I’ve ever done before.

I’m not going to lie to you, Marge, the future’s pretty cool.