Felicia Day

I had a lot of requests for information on producing “The Guild” and since I’m in the thick of it for the next week, I thought I’d go ahead and invite you guys into the process!

There are several factors in determining when we shoot an episode. Number one, of course, is money. We are lucky to have generous donors that fund us, so the minute we accumulate enough budget, we shoot. The producers and I take no money personally, and almost everyone works for free or close to it, so expenses are equipment, location fees, props, food and miscellaneous things that pop up, and they always do, believe me. Long-term, we really need to get a regular source of financing, to be able to write and shoot many episodes at once. This story arc has 4 more episodes and we will reevaluate our strategy from there. Hopefully the strike will be over in a few months, so we can find a means to film and get everyone paid appropriately. But that’s not today!

Next is schedule. If you’ve ever had to coordinate the schedules of a bunch of people, without financial incentive to show up, you know it’s like herding cats. This is how producing “The Guild” is. Not only are there 6 actors that HAVE to be there or we have no show, but there are at least four to eight crew members and the director and the producers. It’s a lot to coordinate. And that’s just coming up with shoot dates. We always have to shoot on the weekends due to people’s work/school, and this shoot was complicated by a few actors not being available for a month starting late Jan, so we had to rush our plans a little. On top of that, our director, Jane, is off shooting a real commercial (yay Jane, but sad for us!) so we have someone else directing (who we’re very happy to have on board) and one less producer for this shoot. Yikes! So we came up with next weekend, and with that looming date on our heads, we have to pray personal stuff doesn’t pop up and interfere like jobs and stuff, and get 10,000,000 other things set up in less than a week. Fun times!
After we get dates down, then comes the equipment. effin’ funny, Sandeep’s(Zaboo’s) stand-up comedy website, lets us use it’s cameras, which is a BIG financial help, but sometimes those camera aren’t available. Luckily, it’s not an issue this shoot, our producer Kim has a camera that we’re using, but the DP (camera-holder person) still needs some equipment like lights, and flags and other movie-making stuff, that we make a list of and rent for her/him. Minimum for a shoot we have the DP, a sound person and a person to help make the sets look pretty so the harried producers don’t have to be slinging props and breaking things. Ideally there is another person there to help out with the camera and lighting, but we learned on the first shoot that the fewer people on set the better for breaking things/annoying landlords and neighbors and, of course, hungry mouths to feed, LOL.

Every shoot has it’s individual challenges. Last shoot was filming on location at a restaurant with noisy traffic and getting extras to fill the seats and make it look like a real restaurant. That was a lot to bite off on so small a budget. This one is scheduling and casting a role that we don’t know an actor for personally. Casting is very difficult for a free webisode. You have to bank on the actor liking the material and needing a piece of film on them for their acting demo reel, and enjoying the work. We have been very luck thus far to get great actors, mostly due to my friend Helen Geier who is a casting director, but she is off working on a movie, so that’s another thing me and Kim Evey, the producer, are having to deal with.

Oh, yes. And the script. That old thing. It all starts with the script. Without a script, there is no show. A lot of the script is already written, from the 1/2 hour version I did initially, but by no means is it the complete webisode episode version. Another storyline had to be added, and believe me, I am not facile when it comes to putting words on the page. I have to go through serious angst with every piece of dialogue. Luckily, I have great people who give good notes, so I was able to come up with something that made me laugh, and at the end of the day, that’s all I can do to make the show I want to make.

So, we have our tasks laid out for us, but having these elements in place is a green light to shoot: Until something unexpected shows up.

I guess I’m doing a lot of these tech list items because the strike puts a real damper on the more creative endeavors. Plus, they’re easy and a fantastic procrastination tool.

I have been a Gmail addict from very early on. My brother invited me years ago during the beta phase. It’s amazing, it’s an efficiency machine and the best way to do email. Google Reader is a part of my daily internet habit as well. So, you can imagine how happy I was when Google Reader opened up a “sharing” feature to enable sharing RSS stories with my contacts. Er, ALL my contacts.

That’s right. The sharing feature is all or nothing. So if I want to share a weird, fringe story with my brother, I have to share it with every Gmail contact in my contact list, or share it with no one. And the lovely part is that Gmail’s programmed to automatically add every email correspondence to my contact list. Every email. There’s no way to turn that feature off either! So I have hundreds and hundreds of emails, from my grandpa to info@furniturecompany.com in my contact list. Every mail from every friend of a friend’s mass mail list even! And if I don’t want them to be able to read my RSS shared items, I have to remove their email TOTALLY from my Gmail contact list, losing their info forever! Google, why??!!

I decided to go through and clean out a few letters a day from the contact list, removing the random ones, and adding the other ones to mailing lists, so I can form some mailing lists for The Guild and such. It was horrible. The interface is slow, awful, I can’t say worse things about this contact list thing. You can’t choose to add contacts to a Group from an email, so you physically have to go into the contact list after an email and search for the email contact, THEN click on it and add it to a mailing list. OMG. So, in reality, the cleaning out was kind of a waste of time, because every email from now on will be added, unless I go in and REMOVE it after I email some random info@joeblow.com, which is torture considering the delay in response when you’re actually in the contact list. I’m begging Google, get something better, please!

The thing is, I was hoping to transfer a lot of info to Google contacts and use it as an address manager. I have been using Palm Desktop for years. Considering the fact I haven’t owned a Palm Pilot or Treo for over 4 years, it’s pathetic I still store stuff in that 1990′s interface. But, I haven’t looked into transferring until now.

What address managers do you guys use? Ah well, cross off #26.

Vote for the Sexiest Geeks of 2007

Hey, someone submitted me for the “Sexiest Geek” award on Wired.  If that person is here, thanks much!

List #28 – Cancel extra s.n.s. (social networking sites)

After I created The Guild, I put my toe into the waters of web as a PERSON. Before that, I’d remained mostly anonymous and private. I’m really glad I decided to be more social with the internet, because it has created this blog, as well as connected me with old friends and new. BUT when you say “yes” to everything, you become a slave to maintaining all those connections. I’ve felt overwhelmed a lot, scattered, and this is partially because I have a lot of “internet homework” to do. Things slip through the cracks, and I feel guilty when I neglect things, like the forums for the Flog, or stray email that accidentally gets archived.

Also, I realized my problem with social networking sites. Early on, I decided to accept whatever friend request came through, because I could use the service to message/bulletin about The Guild or other acting things. I don’t use it as a social resource, which prevents me from checking out other people’s pages, as I would if I only had 25 close friends.

With #28 I put my foot down! Arg! I canceled the following services today:

• Friendster (Pics of my friend with her ex-husband indicate NO ONE is still on this service)
• Pownce (Twitter won because of blog plug-in and sheer # of contacts)
• Hi5 (What?! When did I join this?!)
• NetLog (Best place to get hit on by skeevy italian teens)

The company who makes it possible to consolidate all the services into one place will win my heart. For now, I just bookmarked all the sites I need to check in one folder, and twice a week I will make the rounds, hopefully having time to check out a few friends’ pages on the way.

Then, I was on a roll. Oh boy. I went through my email trash and unsubscribed to every catalogue and newsletter that I auto delete upon sight. I will make this a habit to nip wanton emails like this in the bud. Bottom line, my time is valuable, and I’d rather spend it doing a point and click game than wasting it on things that make me go “Ugh, THAT?!” when they land with a dirty thud in my inbox. I have all but my yahoo mail being filtered to my gmail account, so I have maximum efficiency on the email front.

I guess you could say that this list item morphed into:

• #28 – Internet Manifesto: I will rule my net life, not let it rule me.

Good things happened because of this mission as well! Stumbling around, I happened to find the perfect resource that, just a month ago, I said to myself, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could…” Well, wish fulfilled! Thanks to Google Alerts I set up a search on “The Guild” and now can have an email delivered daily on people’s links, mentions etc. about my show to my inbox. No more hand-Google once a week and searching through already clicked links to read about press, thank people in blog mentions etc…it’s great!

If anyone has any other efficiency tips about consolidating services, streamlining and centralizing, post them here! For now, strikeout item #28!  (edit because that was confusing before, lolz)