Felicia Day: The Guild

Yeah. Or I just feel like I can’t put it down unless that’s the way it should be performed. (laughs) It’s always challenging. You don’t want to repeat yourself. You want to outdo yourself. Sometimes there’s external pressures like thinking about how people are going to receive something, how it’s going to come out of somebody’s mouth. All these things that have nothing to do with the writing can get in the way.

Not particularly. I mean, it has gotten easier in that you have deadlines and you have to meet them, but the longer you live with characters, the more you feel like you need to challenge yourself. You can’t rehash what you’ve already done before. You always want to present something that’s a little bit different than what anybody has seen. It almost gets harder to be reinventing the characters in a way and not be predictable.

I definitely take a different approach with the comics.

The learning curve for that was pretty high. I mean I’ve read comics, but writing it was a completely different challenge. Not only being the writer, but being the director and adding the visual elements, was definitely different from what I’ve been used to in screenplays. You put down words for a screenplay and then the director is the one to bring it to life. I didn’t even know this signing up. That it was the writer’s job to work with the artist, but really it comes to the writer to be as specific as possible as to what we visually want to see in the panels. That was the biggest challenge. Figuring out how to tell a story and let it flow and be able to surprise myself while I’m writing.

I don’t know how other people work. Writing it as a screenplay and then going back and figuring out what can fit in the panels turned out to be a much better process for me. Now I’m doing five issues with Dark Horse that feature each of the other Guild characters and that’s been a lot easier process. I’m also co-writing several of them with other people, which has also been a learning curve, but fun. I’m able to be a little bit more surprised about these characters that I’ve lived with for over three years now.

Yeah I’m doing the first one with Jeff Lewis, who plays Vork, and I’m doing the last one with Sandeep Parikh, who plays Zaboo. That’s fun because the origin of The Guild is them playing those characters. We were doing improv together and I wrote those characters specifically for them. I thought they were the funniest guys I ever knew so when I sat down to write The Guild[/I, I tried to feature those two parts so that they could play them. And they’re writers themselves. Jeff does a lot of writing. He’s actually more of a writer than an actor. Sandeep writes The Legend of Neil, which is his webseries.

Also the actors always come in with different ideas about the characters. It was a fun process with Jeff, doing the Vork character in a way that I hadn’t thought about before. The same thing with Sandeep when we started working on that issue. I did Tink by myself when I was doing Eureka in Vancouver and the one I’m working on now, Bladezz, I’m co-writing with Sean Becker who’s the director and editor of Seasons 2, 3, and 4 of The Guild. That’s really fun because he’s a huge comic book fan and he’s a director so he comes at it from a more visual standpoint.

The Guild is so dialogue based because, you’re right, we can only shoot in our houses, basically. (laughs) We have to keep it to a bare minimum. We tend to keep our locations as small as we can and as few as we can each season, so it’s much more dialogue heavy and joke heavy. With the comics you can open up the whole world. You can go anywhere you want. You can have people do fantastic things and the production value, in a sense, is whatever your imagination is limited to. The real estate, as far as how much dialogue you can put in, is something I’ve constantly been struggling with. I’ll get notes back from the editor Scott Allie and he’ll be like, you have to cut three words from this bubble. (laughs) I’m like, no! It’s such a challenge. I can write dialogue all day, but being able to be precise and concise is a challenge. When I wrote season four after doing the comics, I found that it made me a lot more cogent of the fact that I needed to be a little more sparse with my dialogue. I think the jokes sometimes hit better if you’re more concise.

We haven’t gotten picked up for Season five. I have ideas floating around, so as soon as we get that pickup, I’ll start writing. I’m in the middle of writing the comics. Then I have two other webseries that I’m working on that’s still unannounced. It’s been fun to design other characters, but it’s actually making me more excited to go back to season five of The Guild. At the end of season four, they’re all maybe going to a convention. Or there’s a convention involved somehow. (laughs) That’ll be fun to delve into. And at the same time I just finished doing eight episodes of Eureka, so it’s been quite a juggle the last couple months to be doing so many awesome things. I’m just thankful that I’m doing what I really love every day and I’m excited about all the things I’m working on.

It’s totally different. It’s almost like Sundance when independent films just came to the forefront. When they were smaller and it wasn’t so cast-dependent and there wasn’t big money involved. I think that trajectory can be pretty comparable but independent films even now are pretty separate from mainstream Hollywood films. Some of them have such big casts and become Oscar contenders, but if you look at ten years ago even, there was a huge separation between independent film and the mainstream. I think that’s going to be a similar situation for web video. We don’t have budgets to be able to make episodes every single week. That would require a huge crew and a writing staff and constant production facilities. It’s a scale that you can’t do, but at the same time, we’re moving to a world where people are unplugging their cable.

I think we’re becoming an on demand society and the place where people interact with their content is online. People aren’t just consuming, they want to consumer and share. That’s definitely a testament to where content is going. I love working in the venue that I do and I want to keep pushing web content to be more accepted. The viewers are there, it’s just that the money and the support and the production are not there yet. There’s some great really funny indie things, but people are doing them in their house or doing them on a very low budget scale, so you don’t have the production value, you don’t have the scale, you don’t have the consistency in content that you do in the big Hollywood machine. But those are millions of dollars an episode. It’s two different worlds.

It’s not where anybody would want it to be. We’re slowly but surely getting there. I am most gratified that I’m part of that, rather than just jumping back into the machine even though I make a lot more money there. I’m hopefully inspiring other people to do what I’m doing.

To be honest with you, I’ve been so out of the machine in a sense. I think all the roles that I’ve gotten in the past two years have been [because] people who are writers, who know who I am, have written me parts. I don’t know if casting directors would necessarily watch the web for talent. I think that producers and writers are looking to the web. Production is very precarious. Even in L.A., production is moving to Canada and out of state. There are some weaknesses in the armor of Hollywood and the smart people are looking to the web to see what’s going on there. That’s what I’m encountering. Writers and producers are familiar with my work and that seems to be the way I’m going to work as an actor or collaborate with people in the future. Rather than going through a casting director and getting approved by the network.

Like you said, it’s two different parallel worlds, and until the money is there, until the power is there, it’s not going to get the mainstream attention. I don’t care about that. I’m just honored that on a show like Eureka, the show runner and the writers see what I’m doing on the web, think it’s funny and wrote a part for me. That’s a much cooler way to get a part than just knocking on doors and trying to make my hair look pretty so I can be one of ten girls to pick from.

I don’t when it’s going to air, but I play a really quirky scientist named Holly Martin. She comes to Eureka on a secret project and immediately has a lot of clashing of wills with Fargo. Wil Wheaton is also part of that relationship triangle. It was such a fun time. I actually miss the time on set because we had such fun just hanging around. It’s such a nice set and such a welcoming cast and crew. I can’t wait for people to see the episodes. I think they’ll be really, really funny.

I might be one of those first or second generation of people who have grown up more wired to people who I don’t know than in real life. I think that kids nowadays I don’t know if they will really understand how cable works (laughs) or just not knowing where everyone is at all times. My parents are very tech savvy and that’s how I became tech savvy. My family’s always been a little more tech savvy and on the cutting edge, but the scale and quickness with which people’s social interactions have changed is just is phenomenal. I hope I don’t get left behind, but if you’re raised with an ipad that you can touch and move things around with and you can press a button and watch whatever show you want, that’s a different life perspective you’ve grown up with. It’s going to change how they invent things for future generations and it’s happening very very quickly. I’ve always been online. I was on dial-up before people were on the internet with prodigy and compuserve trying to get King’s Quest clues. (laughs) To me, that was always a cool way to connect with people. I might have been one of the first, but I think it’s definitely going to define all of our future generations.

It was definitely a dream come true. All the people who offered to buy the show before that were traditional studios. Yeah, it would be awesome to work with you, you’re really fancy, but how are you going to get me millions of people who haven’t already seen the show on youtube? They can’t offer that. The fact that Microsoft was able to feature us on their portals and get millions of people watching the show, was really the deciding factor. The fact that I was able to retain the rights to the show is an absolute dream come true. Sprint has also been a partner. It’s definitely rare. That’s my goal in the next year or so. To prove that you can do that again. There’s some really great shows out there like Riese, but there still hasn’t been that one to have as many views as a cable show.

Oh yeah. I just finished Fallout: New Vegas last night. (laughs) I played with my own character, which was creepy, but whatever. I was a good character. And that was really fun. I’m really excited about the new WoW changes. I haven’t been able to play in months, and to see they’re totally reinventing their game but being friendly to the people who know the game. I think they’ve done it in a really smart way and I can’t wait to play that. I don’t watch enough TV and I really need to write more, but if I have three hours, I definitely want to be gaming.