Felicia Day

How Felicia Day Recruited Millions for Her Guild

Felicia Day’s stardom wasn’t handed down to her from on high by Hollywood. She’s guest-starred on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and House, but most of her legions of fans still know her because of a show she wrote and produced herself that doesn’t air on any network.

Now in its third season, The Guild — Day’s microbudget comedic web series about a group of online gamers — enjoys financing from Microsoft as well as cushy placement on the Xbox 360 dashboard. But fans are still discovering Day and her nerdy ways online.

After landing a plum role in Joss Whedon’s Emmy-winning web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog last year, Day’s got a bona fide viral hit on her hands this year, thanks to a funny promo video for Season 3 of The Guild.

“Do You Wanna Date My Avatar,” embedded right, has racked up more than 4 million views on YouTube since its August debut.

On the occasion of Tuesday’s release of a new DVD collecting the first two seasons of The Guild, Wired.com spoke to Day about being a geek in Hollywood, experimenting with web video, and the funny feelings she gets from her fans.

Wired.com: You seem to have intimate knowledge of videogames as a powerful form of escape. How is it that you’re so in touch with that impulse and can also be an ambitious and productive creator?

Felicia Day: I have a little obsessive-compulsive personality. You can tell because I played online games for eight hours a day. I have a very focused personality. I spent years not doing anything because I was inhibited. I didn’t know if people would approve of what I was doing. So just the whole process of getting up the bravery to write something was a huge step for me. But once I got on board and I saw that this is my project — this is actually making a difference and people are enjoying it — I just get tunnel vision.

Wired.com: Does that mean there’s less time for World of Warcraft?

Day: There’s no resentment when I have to spend five hours online launching a new episode because that’s just what has to be done. I have a producer, Kim — she has as much passion for really taking the reins of our future and doing it ourselves. In Hollywood you’re so disempowered. You’re always waiting for somebody to green-light what you do. What we found is a place that, maybe we’re not recognizable. Maybe the whole cast is not recognizable on the street. But we have passionate people who care about what we’re making. And that’s enough. It makes it worth all the hard work that we’re not necessarily rolling around in money for.

Wired.com: Did the impetus for creating The Guild stem from being a struggling actress and writer in Hollywood?

Day: I’d been in Hollywood for five years before I started writing The Guild. I worked enough to pay all my bills. So I was very lucky in that respect. Most people don’t make a living acting. But being the kind of girl who is stereotyped as the secretary — or I’ve played a crazy cat lady five times, which is fine because I do that very well — but at a certain point you’re like, “I am more than this.” That’s why I wrote Codex (her character in The Guild). I sat down and was like, “What role would I have the most fun playing and would never be offered to me.” I think Codex, in a mainstream world, would have a perfect nose and great highlights, but that’s not reality. And I wanted to, somehow, infuse reality into what I was doing.

Wired.com: People respond fairly enthusiastically.

Day: When our music video hit the top 10 on iTunes over all the label stuff, I have to admit that I was definitely heartened. I do like breaking the common patterns of behavior. When we have a victory like that, it’s very fulfilling. We’re going to be in stores with the DVD right next to major TV shows. We shoot in my shed. So, I don’t know, that’s just a cool message. And when I have people come up and say, “Because of you I started composing again. Or, “I’m making my own website without waiting for funding.” That’s awesome.

Wired.com: Do you think geek culture gets a little bit watered down when it makes it to the mainstream? You were on Undeclared, which has really good geek credentials.

Day: I think there are some people out there who do get it. I think Big Bang Theory is actually a great show. And The Office — you could consider that a geeky, because they’re real people. You believe them. But in general, there’s nothing more frustrating than that stereotypical gamer — the teenager in the basement with his mom getting him Hot Pockets. That’s why I wrote the show as well; because that stereotype is not accurate. Every quirky girl doesn’t have to be the best-friend character. It’s a very limiting and self-fulfilling prophecy. People only write things that will get green-lit so they write to those stereotypes. And that’s why I think that the audience is crumbling. Because the things they perceive that the audience wants aren’t necessarily what the audience wants. I don’t identify with a lot of the things I see on TV nowadays. I’d probably rather be gaming, to be honest with you.

Wired.com: Has The Guild helped your acting career?

Day: It’s very funny. No. It’s a little frustrating. Having done this for two years, I’ve gotten used to the fact that it’s not going to cross over. Occasionally I’ll see a writer who knows about the show. I have fewer auditions now than before I started The Guild because I have less time to concentrate on my acting career. In an ideal world, people would be offering me roles or at least I’d get more appointments and so would my cast members.

Wired.com: How about the other cast members?

Day: I would love them to work more as actors. It’s very weird to live in two different worlds — where we’re very popular, almost celebrities. And then when I go in to audition, the people in the waiting room recognize me as Felicia Day, the person who does The Guild, but when I go, in very few of the people who could hire me to do the job recognize what I do. It’s a very interesting place to be and I’ve gotten over the fact that that might not change. I’m happy doing what I’m doing now and if, at a certain point, it lifts off, then that’s just a byproduct of all the hard work. Felicia Day on the set of The Guild.

Felicia Day on the set of The Guild.

Wired.com: It’s strange that you’re watched by millions but are completely off Hollywood’s radar.

Day: It would be nice to get a few guest stars here and there. They’re very busy making huge, multimillion-dollar shows. It really is two different worlds. That’s why there aren’t a million web series out there that are watched by millions of people. I think that’s changing. The fragmentation of the audience will encourage people to seek other forms of entertainment. But like I said, we still shoot in our garage. There’s no paradigm for it and I think Hollywood is reluctant to see things outside the normal way of doing things. Independent film is kind of on the wane and it used to be huge. Maybe the web series can be that place where new talents and voices can be found.

Wired.com: The YouTube generation is stepping up to fill the role of the film-school generation. The Guild is a bit like Clerks in the way. Can your success inform the future of web video the way Kevin Smith informed indie filmmakers?

Day: I would hope that. L.A. does have a thriving community of people who are doing web series. The funny thing is, with web series it’s not just that you need to be a filmmaker and a producer and get good content. The format of the web series is still being invented. There’s no, “This is how you do it.” I feel like there’s still a format issue — people are open to experiment, but at the same time the sheer power that you have to have on the internet to get the word out about something is something that even huge studios with millions of dollars in marketing have figured out.

Wired.com: That’s a problem everybody’s trying to sort out.

Day: Just because you have star power and a huge marketing budget, you can see from some professional web series, it doesn’t equal views. When Keyboard Cat can stomp the kind of professional spinoffs that they do, you know that nobody’s going to master the internet. An independent show like mine, yes we have funding from Xbox and a really nice DVD coming out, but it’s been completely built over two years by a fan base that just sent dollars in. I think it’s a cool story that, hopefully, inspires others to do things outside the system. Because there’s nothing worse than sitting around with a nice script in your hands that never will get made in Hollywood.

Wired.com: You have a particular talent for self-promotion — or more specifically using the internet to get the word out. Is this kind of strength a geek racial passive?

Day: I grew up on the internet. There’s no artifice. I am who I am, except I swear less on Twitter. I was home-schooled all my life, so everything I did I did on the internet because I didn’t have any friends. We moved around so much. I never went to school except for first grade. My friends came with me on CompuServe before there was a World Wide Web. I’ve been weaned on the evolution of the internet and because I understand it rather than think about what I’d like the audience to do, I think like the audience. Where are they going to want to get my show? And how is it going to be easiest? And who is going to enjoy my show? And who are those blogs? And who at that blog would like my show?

Wired.com: How they get to the content is just as important as what the content is about?

Day: Let’s just make it convenient for people. That’s the definition of the internet: It’s so huge you have to make it convenient. For me, I just do the things that are fun. I treat my Twitter account like an IM account to a million people. If I see a funny video and I want to share it, I’ll post it. I don’t think you can calculate that and I think that’s where marketing — the mainstream people — want to harness that. But there’s an authenticity you need on the internet or people are just gonna shut down. Hopefully I always maintain that. The DVD of The Guild collects Seasons 1 and 2 of the hit web series.

The DVD of The Guild collects Seasons 1 and 2 of the hit web series. Wired.com: The format for The Guild was very short. Episodes are minutes long, seasons the length of one episode of broadcast television. What was the thought process behind that?

Day: The thought process was that I only had money for camera and bagels. And I only had enough money to make five minutes. Essentially that’s it. Its both seasons combined on the new DVD, and they can all be played without credits back to back. If you do that, it’s 47 minutes for Season 1. And 74 minutes for Season 2 because we actually had funding and could pay people up front — which was great. We don’t have a huge budget, but it was enough to pay people up front and for us to produce more minutes of content. Every minute that you add adds a lot more money. And every location that you add adds a ridiculous amount of money — which I learned very hard when we were stealing shots in alleys.

Wired.com: And once funding was locked down?

Day: So for Season 3, on the budget we have, we’ve kind of reached the threshold of what we can do. It might be about 10 minutes longer than Season 2, but I’m not sure at this point because we’re still editing. It’s a question of economy. People ask, “Why don’t you make these episodes 22 minutes long like a real TV show?” Well, I’m just one girl writing and producing all of this. If I had a staff of seven and millions of dollars like a regular TV show, yes, we could totally do that. But web video is low-budget filmmaking. We do as much as we can because we have people who are willing to work for cut rates because they love the show. I’m very grateful for that.

Wired.com: Financial limitations made the first episodes feel really breezy. As you get money and add length, do you struggle with the ability to do more when perhaps you shouldn’t?

Day: It depends on how I tell the story. Nobody’s telling me what to do with this show. I always want to top the last season. The Season 3 episodes are five-and-a-half or six minutes. People are like, “These are too short. What happened this season?” Actually these are longer than ever. We’ve all see a web video that’s three minutes long and feels like 20. Some of these episodes now are almost eight minutes. People who have been following the show since Season 1 have experienced the web series format, but the millions of people, especially since the music video, who have come on board the show have experienced the show continuously — watching them all in a row. Web video always is living and breathing on the internet and people are finding it in different places and experiencing it completely different.

Wired.com: One of the unspoken rules of bootstrap filmmaking is, “Don’t promise money and don’t expect to get paid any.” When financing starts to happen, how does that complicate things?

Day: I would love to say that we’re having such a horrible problem and we’re rolling around in money but we aren’t. It’s a very funny place to be in that we’re so well known yet our budgets are so small. We’re still stealing shots in the alleys because it’s too expensive to buy a permit. The profit margins are so small. We’ve had a lot of opportunities to sell the show to mainstream venues and fancy, cool producers, but at the end of the day I felt it was very important for me to retain the rights to the show. That’s the cool thing about our Xbox deal.

Wired.com: Before Xbox was footing some of the bill, your early episodes relied on donors. What’s your relationship with those early angel investors?

Day: Whenever I can say it, I say that this show was made on these donors. We shot a couple episodes on our own dime but we couldn’t afford it. We’re all just struggling people here. We put up a PayPal button and people donated. Some people donated a dollar. Or $5. But if you think about the millions of hits that we have on our show and the number of people who wanted to support us, it’s such a small fraction. Each of those people will always have my eternal gratitude because the show would not be anywhere without them.

Wired.com: You make the convention rounds, hitting shows like BlizzCon and Dragon Con. What’s the general tenor of the moments you spend with your fans?

Day: I think the difference about our fans is they feel more invested in our show. Because we, basically, have been built on social networks getting the word out about the show. Because we don’t have PR. We don’t have marketing. It’s all, basically, me behind the computer. When you see an update on the Facebook page, its probably me or maybe a volunteer. Everything is done grass-roots because we’re on web video budgets, so we can’t afford to hire people to do stuff.

Sandeep Parikh, left, plays Zaboo, the character who initiates real-world contact with Codex (Felicia Day, right) in The Guild.

Sandeep Parikh, left, plays Zaboo, the character who initiates real-world contact with Codex (Felicia Day, right) in The Guild.

Wired.com: What are your fans communicating to you when they meet face to face?

Day: I hear a lot from women, “I love The Guild and I love that you have a geeky girl and that you’re representing that because that’s how I feel.” And: “I’m a girl gamer and I’ve never seen girl gamers that are authentic before.” I remember one guy at BlizzCon told me, “Thank you very much because now I tell my co-workers that I game without shame.” He really genuinely said that and I was so touched, because when I created the show I was just writing organically about my experience. I think that most people, if they were in Hollywood, they would never write something about a niche that wouldn’t please everybody. But the thing about the web is that you can make niche content and you can give a voice to people who wouldn’t feel like they have everything in common with what the mainstream is giving them.

Wired.com:Do you meet would-be Zaboos — suitors who’d like a date?

Day: I’ve never felt uncomfortable. I signed a woman’s boob once. I hate to say that, but I did. That made me feel a little, “eh.” Sometimes you get really strange picture requests — like somebody wants you to step on them. But other than that, I’ve never really encountered somebody who really made me feel uncomfortable. You do read some forum threads. They don’t know that I’m reading. People think that they have the anonymity of the internet, but with Felicia Day, who has every resource and is a little bit of an internet addict, I will read what you write about me. Sometimes it wounds and sometimes I’m complimented. It always keeps me humble.