Television Production – WIL WHEATON dot NET

Early feedback from tonight's episode of Leverage is overwhelmingly positive, which delights me. I'm so happy to hear that so many people liked it.

If you've seen the show already, you may get a kick out of the pictures I took during production and just added to Flickr, but there are spoilers, so don't look if you don't want to see them. (And no fair complaining at me if you don't listen and get spoiled.)

I'm sure John will have a post at his blog in the very near future where you can ask him questions about the spin-off (with robots!) that I'm getting.*

If you have questions or comments for me about the show, feel free to leave them here and I'll do my best to respond in a timely manner. Seriously, I'll really appreciate the distraction.

*I'm not really getting a spin-off. That's my little joke. Ha! Ha! I am using the Internet!

Trying to think about something else for a moment …

When we shoot a TV show or a movie, we often have to cheat our looks closer or farther away from the camera during our closeups.
Most of the time, the place we're supposed to look is marked with a piece of tape, like an orange X, for example.

When we shot the "showdown" sequence on Leverage, Aldis and I both had to cheat our looks on most of the shots, so whoever was on camera played a lot of the scene looking at a piece of tape while the other actor stood behind the camera and delivered his lines. There was one set up, though, where I was able to stand just to the side of the camera for him and he could talk directly to me. We were feeling silly that day, so I grabbed some tape and put an orange X right on my forehead. You know, for continuity.

"Hi, I'm Wil, and I'll be playing the part of the Orange X," I told him.
We all laughed, and I spent several minutes describing the different choices I make for different colors of tape.

"Playing the Red X is very different from playing the Blue X, and though I've tried my best, I've never really been able to nail playing a Green X."

My episode of Leverage, The 2 Live Crew Job, airs tonight on TNT.

I did a whole bunch of interviews last week to support tonight's show. If you'd like to read them all, here is a huge list that TNT publicity just sent me. Some of these links include video, too.