Will Arnett is a busy man these days. The father of two is involved with a his NBC TV series, Up All Night, and a long-awaited new season of Arrested Development for Netflix. But a project that he’s been secretly involved with for the past few years is finally seeing the light of day. However, you won’t find it on network TV, or even on Netflix.
Arnett is a big gamer. There’s a reason his character plays, Chris Brinkley, Xbox Live in Up All Night. Arnett is often up all night on Xbox Live playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. He became such a fan of the game franchise that he developed friendships with the Los Angeles developer, Infinity Ward, and publisher, Activision. Arnett and his friend and fellow Arrested Development star Jason Bateman’s production company, DumbDumb, have been developing two original series that will live exclusively on Call of Duty Elite TV, the online service that has over 10 million registered users.
DumbDumb is producing Noob Tube and Cocked Hammers, a pair of short format shows that are made by gamers and catered to gamers. Noob Tube will select user-created videos featuring gameplay from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and provide comedic voice-over “smack talk” commentary from Arnett and Bateman. Cocked Hammers is an original computer animated series that combines Call of Duty game technology with original performances by Arnett, Bateman and some friends.
Arnett plays a lot of Call of Duty, so he understands the gaming culture. He also happens to be a funny, creative guy. He’s blending his two passions into shows that he hopes will make fellow gamers laugh. Arnett talks about entering the “Wild West” of online production in this exclusive interview.
IGN: We’ve seen an explosion of Call of Duty videos on YouTube. Where did your idea for Noob Tube come from?
Will Arnett: Noob Tube really came from one of the people that we work with, Rob Neder. We kept looking at different clips on YouTube and marveling or laughing at this stuff. We went to Activision and said we want to curate some of this stuff that’s out there because some of those videos had so many views. We created a show where every week users can send in their best kill, their best jump, their best frag grenade, their best whatever and we’ll decide what deserves to be seen and what doesn’t. We thought there’s such an appetite for this clearly just looking at the hard data, so that’s how that came about.
IGN: What’s Cocked Hammers all about?
Arnett: Tom Chambers was playing Call of Duty with us and the s**t we said to each other when we would play was so stupid that we thought maybe there’s a way that we can get with some of the guys that we play with and capture that. There are various examples out in the world of people who try to create original content with gameplay footage and we started working with the animators and with the guys over at Infinity Ward and Activision to try to do it in a new way, a little bit more refined, using better graphics, etc. And even since we’ve started the process, which was a couple of years ago, trying to get this thing off the ground, the ease with which we can use original animation, has just gotten better and better. So once we get going, we can really start cranking out episodes.
IGN: What are your thoughts on how far the visuals in the Call of Duty games have evolved?
Arnett: I’ll tell you what, they’ve come so far that, to be honest -- we’ve wanted the passes that we got back in working with Ant Farm and we get all sorts of facial recognition and in this performance capturing and all the other stuff over at Activision’s headquarters where they do all that sort of stuff -- some of the stuff that we got back was so good, it was so strikingly real, that it almost took away from what we were trying to do. It was creepily real, and it was distracting, it was so GOOD, they are so good at it, that I thought, I am going to spend most of my time marveling at that and not being able to get into it, because I certainly was.
IGN: What actors are you working with on Cocked Hammers?
Arnett: The main players, as of right now, who make up this rag-tag company of Cocked Hammers is myself, Jason Bateman, Justin Theroux and Peter Giles. I am sure you know Justin as an actor, writer, extraordinaire, all around hilarious dude. And Peter Giles is a fantastic actor, also voice actor, who is sort of becoming one of the “go to” guys in animation, especially for comedy. He’s an improv genius. It’s four fairly solid guys…well, three solid guys…and Bateman.
IGN: You’ve done voice work in the past for licensed games, but what’s it like being part of the creative process in doing this new form of entertainment?
Arnett: I think it’s really fun. I don’t think anybody’s really done this before, created a series like this of little shorts. It’s exciting. What’s funny is that we have to keep reminding ourselves what we are doing and not try to get too hung up on the convention that we’ve become accustomed to in other kinds of formats. Meaning that, we can do whatever the f**k we want. And we keep going, “No, we shouldn’t do that” and get hung up in the story and all that bulls**t..and it’s like “No, screw it, who cares? Let’s just go for it and have fun.” Honestly, that’s the biggest challenge to me, is to remember to not get stuck. I think with the pilot episode, of course we’re trying to capture what it is, but being totally honest, we probably fell victim to trying to stay within the boundaries of what we think an animated show is or whatever. And my hope is that going forward we can continue to push that out and really disregard what’s been done before and just allow ourselves to totally have fun and screw around.
IGN: As someone who has a hit TV show, and a wife with a hit TV show, also on NBC, what do you think of the explosion of viewers we’re seeing online with things like Call of Duty Elite TV?
Arnett: Look, it’s exciting to be a part of something that’s new and that you truly are reminded on a daily basis of how it is just the Wild West out there in the online world, whether it’s on Xbox or any platform. People are producing shows all over and we’re going to be doing the “Arrested Development” series exclusively on Netflix. There are new ways that people want to get entertainment and there are a million ways to serve it to them.
Source : ign[dot]com
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