You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (22 page)

Laugh if you will; I’ve never had a spinout. Or had an actor die of a web-series aneurysm.

[
 5: Making Things with Friends Is Awesome 
]

Even though every single second of filming was stressful and panicked and done completely illegally and the very hardest way, I’d never felt more alive doing anything in my life. There was a joy that I’d never felt before, because I was PLAYING with my friends. Many times during shooting, my fellow cast members were so funny I had to chant,
Dead kittens, dead kittens, dead kittens
for twenty seconds in my brain to get through a scene without giggling. Those were the moments I’ll never forget. (Partially because of the traumatic visuals, partially because of the fun.)

We filmed for four days in the summer of 2007 and completed everything we aimed to do with the first few episodes of the script. There were complications, of course, like when I discovered that most of the cast had never played a video game before, but I just put on the hat of “gamer consultant” (in addition to lead actress, show runner, and co-caterer) and plowed ahead.

“What does this term mean?”

“You won’t understand. Just think, ‘He has a Marc Jacobs purse and I want it.’ ”

“Got it!”

Looking back at those first episodes now, I see all the rough edges in the acting and the writing and the editing I never noticed at the time. But the fun we had making it blasts away the imperfections. Kim, Jane, the cast and crew, and I created something together that didn’t exist before. Without permission. Without regrets. Hell, yeah.

- 8 -

WE MADE SOMETHING! #lookit

The fine art of grassroots “getting all up in people’s faces” with
The Guild.
Tweetin’ and pioneerin’ and awards! Oh my!

When I was in music school in college, everyone had to perform a senior recital in order to complete their degree. But it was a serious pain to get anyone to ATTEND the events. Enduring a classical saxophone concert for more than fifteen minutes is a private hell NO ONE wants to live through if you’re not dating the person, believe me.

As the tiny prodigy of the building, I entered my recital semester with an ego the size of a Mack Truck. There was no way I was playing to an empty house! Did I put eight months of work into learning a Henryk Wieniawski showpiece with twelve million notes packed into three minutes for nothing? Hell, no!
People were gonna show up.
They had no mother-frakkin’ choice!

Ahem.

I did all the regular things you were supposed to do to get attendance. I ordered tons of food and picked out a skanky dress that my professor gave two thumbs-up to, but I knew I needed
something extra. Something special. Maybe something to do with the fliers everyone posted around campus to advertise their events? I asked myself,
What can I make that stands out from the boring “John Smith plays an evening of Brahms at 7 p.m. Tuesday” kind of thing?

Hmm, what could I do . . . ?

Yup, that’ll work. That’s me as “Xena, Princess Violinist.” I whipped it up in the computer lab one evening, and, MAN, was I happy when I figured out how to engulf that violin in flames. An evil genius “muhahaha” kind of joy!

I printed up about a hundred of the fliers and blanketed the music building at 11:00 p.m., right before the place locked up. I couldn’t wait to see what people thought when I got to school the next day.

Good news: THEY PAID ATTENTION.

Bad news: I got pulled into the dean’s office and was forced to
take the fliers down due to “questionable taste level.” But at that point there weren’t many left anyway. People had stolen them. All the stoner percussionist majors tracked me down to say, “Badass, man, I’ll be there!”

For once in my weirdo too-young-for-collegiate-life . . . I felt cool.

And yes, I sold out the venue.

People ask me if I have a marketing or PR background, since that’s what helped catapult
The Guild
into situational internet fame against all odds. Answer? Nope, I have no qualifications in those areas. But I’ve always had a flair for showmanship. I love adding a bit of “VOILÀ!” to life, like secretly slipping a turd into the pool and watching people react REALLY strongly. Um, except it’s a turd everyone gets excited about, not grossed out by. One made of gold or diamonds or something . . . I dunno where this analogy is going.

Kim, Jane, and I had a meeting right after we finished filming to figure out what we were going to do with the show. We knew the episodes were going to be great, but any plans after that? Not so much.

I tried to be organized and take charge. I even brought a clipboard to the meeting. “So we have a show to release . . .”

Kim nodded. “And?”

“Uh, that’s all I got. What do we do with it?” I dropped my clipboard next to me in the booth, because I suddenly felt stupid for bringing a clipboard into a coffee shop. Or owning a clipboard at all.

Jane said, “We need a plan to get people to see the show before we upload it next week. Kim, how did your video do so well?”

“It’s quirky. And it was linked by a TV show,” said Kim.

“And it has a character named Lick Poop.”

I frowned. “I don’t think we can count on the viral thing happening like that with this show.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. Episode two has great poop jokes.”

“Meh. They’re okay.” I was always the gloomy Darth Vader of the group. I could even see the dark side of poop jokes.

“We could use help in the PR department. Does anyone know anyone?”

“For free? I already called in every favor for dog, cat, house-, or baby-sitting during filming. Every single sitting favor I had. Tapped out.”

Jane sighed. “Well, someone has to be in charge of outreach. Or no one will ever see what we’ve made.”

There was a long pause where we sipped our lattes together, knowing someone needed to step up to the plate, but no one wanting to fall on this particular sword.

At last, I raised my hand. Like I was in English class. What a dork. “Uh, I’ll do it. Because I know the internet best? Kinda?”

With that overconfident hubris, I went home and tried to conquer the fantastic world of online marketing! My only starting point was, “People. Want to make them watch things. How do I corral them?” Since the internet is part egalitarian democracy, part vengeful cat worshipers, it was a daunting task. Because I knew that making something discoverable on the web is like sending someone on a scavenger hunt into the universe’s biggest flea market. There’s anything and everything available you can imagine, with an infinite number of stalls to browse and no emergency exits in sight. (That sentence flashed me back to a trip I took to Ikea recently. Major panic attack in the cutlery section.)

But it was actually the perfect time to dive in, because 2007 was when social startups were popping up online like acne on a teenager’s face. It’s hard to imagine with babies practically born with hashtags tattooed
on their foreheads today, but social media back then was not mainstream. Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr, most of those sites were brand spanking new. They were super nerdy, super fringe, and super small. (The trending topics were like Drupal and the latest version of Linux. So yeah. That nerdy.) And I had a secret power in this new world: I was used to trolling the internet desperately for friends. (In 2002, I had a Friendster account, yo.) So all the experience I’d had hanging out online and creating bitchin’ recital fliers was about to pay off!

I sat down and scoured the web for every single social network startup that was able to reach new people for free and jumped on them to claim the usernames /felicia and /theguild. Ever go into a gas station and browse the souvenir section for a key chain or a coffee cup with your name on it, only to discover your parents were horrible human beings and named you too weird to be part of the rest of civilization? That’s what I experienced every time I had to settle for /feliciaday and /watchtheguild instead. (To the girl who has /felicia on Twitter: Damn you, ma’am. Damn you to hell.)

I also taught myself how to program a website. In the most rudimentary, janky, kid-with-crayons way. I’ve always taken my art seriously, even when I was terrible at it. From ages eight to twelve, I would spend months making everyone in my family handmade gifts for Christmas:

“Mom, get in the car, let’s go! I need more blue construction paper.”

“You have a ton of paper there.”

“But I’m out of royal blue. Santa is flying through the night sky to deliver presents, it’s 2:42 a.m. GMT in this piece, I need blue!”

“Can’t you use black?”

“He’s flying through
Norway
. Notice the fjords I created with hundreds of individually cut-out gray mosaic pieces? It’s daylight there in the winter, it would be untruthful to have the night sky be so dark. GIVE ME THE TOOLS FOR GRANDMA’S PRESENT, MOM! DON’T NEUTER MY VISION!”

With that kind of intensity, I binged fifty hours of online video tutorials and used my “skills” to make something that turned out one step above GeoCities level.

I was so proud. I printed out a screenshot and taped it on the fridge. Then I sent this email to the ladies after I uploaded the design files. Quote:

We’re ready to release! The website’s up. AND I made us a Myspace!

XOXO

Felicia

Unquote.

Unironic.

And as my marketing coup d’état, the day we released the first episode of
The Guild
I sat in my computer chair for eighteen hours using all the accounts I’d created to bother people all across the internet. In the most inefficient way possible.

I wrote messages to hundreds of bloggers at gaming-related websites and linked them to the first episode of
The Guild
. But instead of using a form letter (cut and paste was too sophisticated for me at that point), I typed each email individually. Because I didn’t want to come across as “fake.” (Even though I essentially wrote the same thing to each person.)

I also went overboard on the hard sell. Just a little.

“Dear sir/ma’am, My name is Felicia Day, I have been an actress on such TV shows as
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and have recently written a show based on the game World of Warcraft. Here is a link and another five paragraphs about how great it is. Plus, I tailored this email to your specific tastes because I researched every single one of your blog posts on the internet and have files of screenshots from your personal Facebook. Please spread word about my show because I know everything about you and have a general idea of where you live. That’s not creepy, right?”

It sounds counterintuitive (and illegal), but my spamming worked. And not just in a “restraining order” way! More and more people started watching and linking the video. Bloggers who must have had a high “creep” tolerance posted about it, and that led to more views, and the cycle kept repeating itself. So I just sat there and kept emailing. And emailing. The process morphed into a game for
me. With my WoW addiction dead and buried, I’d finally found a legitimate reason to sit at the computer for hours. I even bought a pair of those compression socks. You know, to prevent blood clots from sitting too long.