Felicia Day

Edgar alerted me to this posting of the fancier color version of my commercial, thanks Edgar! I’ve been totally swamped by things this week, and my stress level is so high I accidentally posted a “poop twitter”, that I promptly removed shortly thereafter

Suffice it to say, I’m relieved that the strike is over, although how good it is for the writers remains to be seen. I, for one, see it as somewhat of a dubious deal as far as residuals for online content go, but who knows, I glaze over at percentages and all the technical jargon (which is great for accounting :O). I’m a “someone blog it in simple terms for me so I can be outraged” kind of girl. Interestingly, by their new definition a WGA-qualifying webisode has a budget of 15k a minute, so “The Guild” is so safe from that it’s hilarious People who are doing webisodes for that budget, please contact me for acting or writing work, I’m available for that price!

This week will be swamped with Guild stuff, as well as my role in Zaboo/Sandeep’s webisode, and prepping for a sketch show benefit at The Empty Stage, my improv theatre that’s closing. Anyone in town is invited to come!

Also, Lisa Shearin, author of Magic Lost Trouble Found (The book I pretty much gushed all over last month), alerted me to fantastic pre-reviews of her sequel, Armed and Magical. Check out the link to it on her great blog, a lovely place to go for writer inspiration. Her email inspired me to prepare a post on all the pre-order stuff I have in my Amazon cart, the books I’m drooling to get my hands on, mostly sequels to great series. When I love it, I have to shove it in the cart or I’ll forget to read it the first day it comes out! Now, if I could only figure out a way to sell all the already-read books in my garage being eaten by crickets…

I don’t mean to rant, but I’m going to do a small tiny rant. So…I guess I mean to rant.

I get on a lot of email lists for classes, performances, etc. Everything you do nowadays requires you to get on an email list to stay in touch. Recently I was put on a list for a writing class and an improv class so that we students could communicate about class stuff. IMMEDIATELY I got 4 or 5 mass emails from individuals on this list for their webisodes or YouTube videos or any number of other performances/stand-up/plays, who I don’t know because I’ve only met them once in class! Also, I got several emails today from people I didn’t recognize, again for YouTube/web shows GOD HELP ME, so I searched for their name in my Gmail, and they came up as a person who was on another mass email that another friend had sent out, but otherwise we had no connection. Friend of a friend of an acquaintance. So they ninjaed my email from that non-BCC mass email! GAH!

I try to be really careful who I put on my mailing lists, and I would NEVER just wantonly add new email addresses to my mailing list if I’d never even MET the person. And taking them off a CC: list is just plain tacky, am I right? Or am I the dumb one not to use every email that comes my way to send out notices?

With everyone and their uncle doing web videos and whatnot, I guess I just have more of this to look forward to. If I were ballsy enough, I’d email them and tell them to take me off their list, but if it’s a tangential acquaintance or even a friend, doesn’t that seem bitchy? I would get my feelings hurt if I received one of those. But as email becomes the primary way to get in touch with people, I feel like there needs to be some sort of standard with regards to contacting people. I mean, if you wouldn’t call them on the phone, why would you feel free to email them?

Rant over.

Can’t help it, gotta link the whole screenshot, thanks Mike from Chicago! So exciting! I also like the fact that after I posted on The Guild website about the iTunes upload, we got a lot of five dollar donations from people who downloaded for free but wanted to contribute. The Guild fans are fantastic

It’s been a crazy week for me, I did some ADR for “Prairie Fever” (Where you go to a studio and re-record lines from a movie that aren’t useable from the original production sound. Basically watching your face speaking a word and re-recording the word to fit your lips, weird stuff!) I had a bunch of commercial auditions (Thank goodness for commercials) and I had tons of Guild stuff. After being featured on YouTube, the correspondence flooded in and it falls on me to deal with it. I don’t mind most of it, but it’s the weird racist and offensive comments that I have to remove from the videos that really make me chuckle. I chuckle only because it’s the only thing I can do. I have a laughing reflex that is really inconvenient. It’s like when I hear a horrible story where someone’s falling off a roof or getting hit by a car (not fatally of course), It’s my “go-to” for uncomfortable situations. Awkward.

Back to the YouTube comments though. Some of the things people post…why in the world would this stuff ever occur to someone?! What’s the motivation? And I hate to generalize, but when I click on their profiles…a lot of them are 20-somethings from Norway. SERIOUS! Is flaming people a Norwegian thing or is it some joke that people do when they create a profile to flame videos? Who knows. Suffice it to say, most the day of the feature I was refreshing and removing. We got a lot of hits though!

I’m kind of sad this week because my improv theatre, The Empty Stage is shutting down due to rent increases. It’s been my “funny” home for 8 years, it was the first place I ever though “gee, I like comedy!” Also the place where Vork and Zaboo (Jeff and Sandeep) and I met. There are so many talented people there, and the atmosphere is so unlike LA; Very supportive and non-competitive. I really found my joy there. Hopefully the theatre will open somewhere else later this year, but for the interum, after the theatre closes at the end of Feb, the improv group I’m in “Being Humans” is going to try to find another place to perform. I’ll let everyone know!

I think everyone should study improv. No matter what your career, what your goals, learning to trust yourself and free your subconscious in a “playground” atmosphere is the greatest gift you can give yourself. A lot of you have expressed interest in hearing from me about acting as a profession, as an art form, as a lifestyle in Hollywood, etc. I can honestly say that I found my love of acting through improv. Before that, I was locked into what I was “supposed to do” with a line, completely in my head about what I was planning. Studying improv gave me the freedom to explore the “WHY” of the lines, and gave my subconscious a say in what I was doing; it lets me become spontaneous and helps me “own” the material.

There is nothing more wonderful than relaxing enough that you surprise yourself in improv. Something comes out of your mouth that takes YOU by surprise, and everyone around you laughs. Like last night, we created a whole scenario around something I said about “mouth-babies.” You had to be there, but it was really funny, and just a total random thing that came out of my mouth. And my fellow improvisers took it and ran with it, made it into something hysterical. It’s an incredible feeling, when you’re working right, focusing off yourself, and onto your partner. Improv teaches you on many levels to trust yourself and others. Tell me a career that wouldn’t come in handy!

And you don’t have to be funny to do it (or think you’re funny). It’s what we did as children, there’s no reason we can’t keep doing it now. I urge you, if you ever had the impulse to act, to go check it out one of your local improv theaters. Or check out my favorite group anywhere, Improv Everywhere where they do spontaneous improv “stunts” like freeze in place for 5 minutes in the middle of Grand Central Station. Makes me wish I lived in NYC!