Author Archives: Eddy

Let’s Clarify

I’d like to thank everyone for the encouraging words regarding our announcement about the end of TLW after this season (and an awesome movie). We’ve been suspecting that this might go down for a couple of months, but it only became set in stone recently. It’s good to have it out in the open, and even better when nobody goes ballistic and throws things at us. You know, like e-rocks.

Since the questions are rolling in, I wanted to clarify a few things:

Daniel is not leaving yet. He actually won’t be gone for about 5 months or so. In that time our goal is to finish the season, party like man-imals, and then make a sweet movie. We don’t know how long the movie will be, minutes-wise.
The show is not over yet. We’re still going to do the second half of the season. For those of you wondering, it will be just a bit shorter than last season.
Without Daniel, we won’t be continuing Web Zeroes regularly. Since he’s kind of in it and also the director, there’s no way it could happen. We’d still like to do an episode or two before he goes, and there might be an occasional episode if he comes in town for a weekend, but that’s it.
Nick and I will keep making stuff after TLW is over, but we’re not replacing one crazy big workload for another crazy big workload. Whatever we work on next (be it G.R.I.E.F. or one of our other ideas), it won’t be as regular or as big as The Leet World.

Anything not answered there is something we don’t know the answers to or can’t really address at this point. There’s a lot that we still don’t know, but I thought I’d do my best to answer the things we could.

Episode 8 will be out at some point this week. I’m excited to start this half of the season. It’s seriously going to be wild.

The Curtain Closes

curtain Ever tried to take a band-aid off, and you know it’s really going to suck when you do it, but you’ve got to just get it over with? Well, there’s no really easy way to say this, so…

Season 2 will be the last season of The Leet World.

I know this comes as a shock to a few of you, but there are quite a few good reasons that the show we all know and love will draw to a close over the next few months. And amidst all of that, there is even some good news that I think you can all be extremely excited about, but more on that later.

We started working on The Leet World back in May of 2007. To be honest, we thought we would only ever make a couple of episodes of it and then we’d give up on the thing altogether. We’ve been called a lot of things over the course of our lives, and motivated typically wasn’t one of them. But then something really awesome and shocking happened — people wanted more of it.

So around Episode 3 or 4 of the first season, we mapped out where we wanted the show to go. Over the course of a few weeks, we brainstormed, hashed some things out, and then came up with a really exciting story that would cover three full seasons worth of episodes. From that point on, we have been committed to that idea for the entire show.

So why is Season 2 the last, then? Read on for the text wall explanation, as well as a really awesome announcement.
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Somewhere Over the Outtakes

mic2 That’s where the lulz live.

Here are the audio outtakes from Episodes 5 and 6 of Season 2. I was going to include 7, but to be honest, there was plenty of goofy material for me to use, so Episodes 7 and 8 will be lumped together in a couple of weeks.

As always, lots of us goofing around in our absurd character voices, some movie quotes, and even some singing numbers to boot. In particular, I’m a fan of Ben discovering the “investigating each other’s privates” line as he’s reading it, and instantly cracking up. Many of you don’t know this, but the dude actually delivers his lines cold, with no prior knowledge of the script, which makes his voice work doubly impressive if you ask me.

Anyways, here are the outtakes. Right click and select “save as” to download.

http://www.smoothfewfilms.com/extras/tlw205206outtakes.mp3

In other news, Episode 8 is coming out next week. Wewt.

Ocho-Pics

eight Production on Season 2, Episode 8 is rolling along pretty smoothly. It’s always funny when we do a big monster episode like Tempest and then things settle down a bit, making the episode much easier to film. The episode itself is going to be a shorter one, but that doesn’t mean it’s not chock full of goodness.

Sometime in the next few days you should expect some outtakes from Episodes 5-7. They will contain a couple of rofls, I hope. While we have gotten better about recording our stuff without many goof-ups, it’s three episodes worth of content, so it should balance out.

Also, here are some screenshots from Episode 8 for you to chew on.

Enjoy!

Birthdays and Battles

daniel Today is a very special day for Daniel, director, and voice of Ellis and Adam Sizzler in The Leet World. He turns 28 years of age. Yikes. I hope he doesn’t break a hip or something. Wish him a good one, he deserves it.

Production has started again on the show as of this weekend, and we are slicing that thing up like raptors in Jurassic Park. That is to say, the attack will come from the side, from the raptor you didn’t even know was there. The second half of this season is kind of awesome, so we’re looking forward to getting on with it. I’ll have some screenshots for you dudes later on in the week, I hope.

I randomly watched a lot of Season 1 yesterday, for the first time in several months. While watching some battle sequences, it came upon me to ask you dudes which gunfight/battle you’ve liked best so far in The Leet World. So, answer away. What’s your favorite?

Holy Hiatus, Batman

halo-wars Making a series like TLW takes a crap-ton of time. So whenever we get a reprieve from the insanity of this absurd Counter-Strike: Source machinima, we tend to live it up. I’ve been playing a stupid amount of video games, particularly Halo Wars, Resident Evil 5, and some Killzone 2 for good measure. We even started up a game of D&D with some friends, which I’ve never done before. Nick is a Dwarven Paladin named John Smotetrain, Daniel is an Avenger named Cortez Cardinal, and I’m a Wizard named Tom Shanks. We are questers of the most badass sort.

However, all that free time is gone as of this coming weekend, as we kick up production on Episode 8. We’ll hopefully have a camera there filming the process as we move through some of the episode, and hope to release our “making of” video at some point in the next month or so.

Speaking of, do you guys have any particular piece of the TLW production process that you’re most interested in hearing about? Besides whether or not Nick’s Beard (it must be capitalized out of honor) hinders our ability to puppeteer. Let us know!

The Rabbit Hole

matrix Owned.

Sorry, I just had to say it. We’ve been waiting to drop some of the plot bombs seen in Episode 7 for quite awhile now. As a writer, I tend to geek out over those things. Nick and Daniel always tease me that I would end every episode “Lost” style with the resounding thud coupled with the TLW logo. It’s true. There would also be yetis with gatling guns. Damn Source engine and its limitations.

While today is April Fool’s, we don’t have any plans lined up. We thought about it a couple of times, but time working on these fake projects would detract from our break, which is going awesomely at the moment.

Interestingly enough, yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the Matrix. Kind of odd to think about. Doesn’t feel like 10 years at all. That’s one of those movies that I could watch over and over, without really caring. There’s a few of those on my list. Serenity, The Last Crusade, Fellowship of the Ring, Apollo 13, etc. What about you guys? What movie can you watch again and again?

Game Changers

storm We now present to you dudes Season 2, Episode 7 of The Leet World, Tempest. As we’ve said for several weeks, this episode is a game changer, in more ways than one.

It also officially marks the halfway point of Season 2, in terms of the story we’re telling. Does that mean the whole season is going to be 14 episodes? Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see how it unfolds.

But just like Episode 8 was a big mile marker last season, this episode is serving the same function. And just like last year, we’re taking a few weeks off to get ready for the back half of this epic season. We need it!

Remember, you can watch a higher res version at the TLW premiere page, or just watch it after the jump!
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The Question of Rock

electric-guitar Episode 7 is nearing the final stages. We feel like we have scaled some kind of beastly machinima mountain. No, this doesn’t mean the episode is coming any minute now, because there’s quite a bit that has to get done to it before it’s ready for your calloused videogamer paws, but it’s close, and I’m excited.

One of the coolest parts of doing The Leet World is getting to hear the awesome stuff that Mr. Jace Ford, aka Damn Dangerous, pumps out for us every new episode. To watch the process go from a script to a final cut with his music put into it for the first time really is something special. The dude works hard to score each episode, and usually only does so in about a week’s time.

Anywho, over the course of the show we’ve seen tons of great comments regarding the music, so I wanted to know- which episode of The Leet World has your favorite music? I couldn’t quite put that in a poll since there would be way too many options, so feel free to respond in the comments.

Even Darker Nights

hype-train1 Episode 7 should be gracing your monitors at some point next week, and we couldn’t be more excited. I’m not trying to get the hype train going overboard or anything, but I’ll admit that I’ve been looking forward to this episode since we started working on the season. When you’re working on a long term project like this, it takes a Herculean effort to not get ahead of yourself when you’ve got cool things down the road. I think we’ve done a decent job of it so far.

Anywho, some surprises are in store for the cast (and you dudes) in Episode 7, to say the least. You might pick up on one or two through the screenshots, or maybe there’s nothing there at all and I just want to make your brains hurt. Both of these things are possible.