The tabletop world is all about stories, told every way imaginable. And somehow when you trace this storytelling back far enough, someone always seem to pop up: Felicia Day. Her resume spans every corner of fandom: movies, video games, webseries, tv shows, and stage performances. She’s even dabbled in comic writing. Everything she does is on her terms, and she has the unapologetic pride of a woman who’s survived two decades online and has no intention of stopping. Her latest project, The Guild: Ren Fair’d, is much a milestone for Day as it is for The Guild itself. What started as a Youtube series (and, to show how long ago it was, a series also available on the Zune Webstore) spun into comics, music videos (Do You Wanna Date My Avatar most famously), and now a reunion movie that’s broken the record for the most funding of a movie in Kickstarter history.
At Gen Con, where Day made appearances on panels and live play in between undercover hall shopping in a big hat and sunglasses (Felicia Day obviously can’t just walk Gen Con without getting mobbed), Dan and Panda got a chance to sit down with her. In between geeking out over getting to talk about her work (mostly from Dan) we looked back at how online content creations has changed since 2007, the realities of film production in LA, and Day’s commitment to creativity without compromising your vision. And Dan even got to toss her muffin.
FM: One of the things we wanted to talk about was how things have shifted, especially thinking back to the start of The Guild. How do you view creation now vs. in 2007?
Felicia: I was always very transparent about the process and how we were doing things. I love making it accessible for people to imagine themselves doing what I’m doing. For me, the barriers between people are arbitrary. We’re all the same. Especially when you’re creative, I think it’s so healing and important for your self-care to express yourself creatively in whatever format you decide.
Everything I’ve always done has tried to open a door for people. I’m very grateful that The Guild inspired a lot of people, especially women, to do web series. It inspired people to get into gaming when they weren’t involved in it before. There are a lot of entry points that I inadvertently created because I certainly didn’t set out to change anyone’s mind. I was just making something that reflected who I was when I wasn’t understood where I was.
FM: When The Guild came out, it was tied to the World of Warcraft fandom, but in many ways it presaged a new art form. We were talking about you as a “godmother” of the Actual Play scene. Is that an accurate place to put you?
Felicia: Well, yeah. Was it my idea to stream D&D, I may have been the first one. It came out of my relationship with D&D, which was from playing with improvisers. So really, it came from a performance aspect. When everybody told me, “This is not a good investment. It won’t work,” I was like, “No, it will work,” because I knew how entertaining it could be. I’d experienced it.
The happy accident was that I happened to pick voice-over actors because they were in town, and they just happened to be brilliant. [EN: The actors in question are the cast of Critical Role, which started on Day’s Geek & Sundry]. The fact that we made a performance out of it was inherently important. I knew Ashley [Johnson], she knew some people, and I thought, “Let’s just get them.” They were in LA, they didn’t travel a lot because they were voice actors. It could have been a different group that just tanked it.
The fact that so many people have flocked to it and look at it as an expression of themselves, as performance and improvisation, is really everything as a performer wrapped up in a little bit of structure. People can really enjoy the ride of it, and I just love it. To see how far it’s come is kind of awe-inspiring.
FM: Will The Guild reflect the change in the culture now?
Felicia: We’re setting the movie at a Ren Faire, so…yes. Everybody wanted them to play D&D together, but I said “No, that was five years ago. Why would I do that?” It would be funny, but it wouldn’t be the movie that I want to make. I’m highlighting something I love. I think it’s very well appreciated among nerds but the mainstream populace probably doesn’t understand what a Ren Faire is. If I can create a show that embodies something I love, gives some insight to the people who love it so they feel seen, and also represents something I love to people who might not know it exists and makes them interested in it, that’s the sweet spot of everything I do.
FM: I’m curious what it’s been like getting everything back together, getting back into The Guild and all these characters.
Felicia: They never leave you. Getting the gang back together, the actual actors, has been just a treat. They’re so funny, and it’s like no time passed when we sat down and did a table read. Literally nothing. We were just bickering immediately in a funny way, making fun of each other, but in a loving way; it’s fantastic. I love writing the characters now. I was burned out on them for a very long time because it was so hard back then to do what we did. Then adding a company on top of it just broke me.
Nobody would fund web series at the level we were shooting them anymore. A lot of different things happened at once, and I was burned out. As time went on, I hung out with my castmates on Twitch and we played Fortnite, and we got to know each other that way. I was like, “Oh, wait. This is The Guild. We are The Guild now.”
We’ve also been developing a Guild musical for six years. Having other people spearhead it creatively and approach the characters in different ways, all those things combined really inspired me to get back and write the script that I wrote, which is really good.
FM: You had a really crazy round of fundraising, how’s that feel?
Felicia: Our initial goal was $1.5 million, and in four hours we got that. Then I think we beat the 24-hour record. Veronica Mars is the movie that has set the bar for so many years, since 2013. Of course, that’s a huge mainstream title, so to even be within striking distance of that record, which is the most ever raised, is pretty freaking cool. [EN: Since this interview the Kickstarter has raised $5.79 million from 37,000+ backers, the largest in Kickstarter history]
It’s going to be a very low-budget movie. It’s going to be hard on every level, but we’re going to do our best. An hour of television is $3 to $8 million, depending on what show you’re doing. If you’re talking Game of Thrones or something, you’re talking $25 to $30 million an episode. So for you to potentially have a $3 to $4 million budget is quite small for a movie, especially with a big cast and building a Ren Faire and things like that.
“We’re going to have to be scrappy, and we’re going to do our best.”
I’d rather work on those terms and at that level than try to get outside financing and have people tell me something won’t work and have to change it because the money people tell me I need to change it.
FM: Funding for web series back then was difficult. Do you think it’s just as hard now, or worse?
Felicia: I can’t imagine anyone getting anywhere near our budget for digital. I never got huge, huge budgets, but they were mid-six figures, and people at the time thought, “Well, we don’t need to advertise. We don’t need to spend money on that because we advertise against a hamster. Why would we spend money on web content?”
Now the vertical thing is taking off and the algorithm does not allow people to really congregate around content in the way that creates community. There’s nobody meeting another person on Instagram and forming a relationship because they love something together. It’s just not happening. Any creator trying to get the word out about their creation through the algorithm, it’s useless. I have way more people backing me from the smaller communities that I’ve built, like Discord and Twitch and my newsletter. That’s where the people are.
I’ve pitched so many things to Hollywood over the years and gone through development hell, rejection after rejection, and I get it. I’m not everybody’s flavor. But at this point in my life, I’m like, “You know what? I think I’m pretty cool. I’m just going to keep making stuff at the level I can make it.” I don’t need them to like me. If I’m changing my stories to try to please them, I’m not pleasing them or me, so it’s not working. It’s been a liberating thing to go through as a person who wants to make cool stuff for the people who like my stuff.
FM: Crowdfunding has really opened the door to projects like this, especially in recent years. Is that a big change?
Felicia: We had a PayPal button on The Guild website in 2007 to raise money to finish Season One. We raised several thousand dollars, maybe $5,000 to $10,000, and were able to finish the season. We were crowdfunding before Kickstarter was invented. It was always fundamental to me that the relationship with my audience was important.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I kept the rights to my show all these years. The fans showed up, and they enabled us to keep going. Other companies wanted to buy us up and maybe tell us what to do with it, put it behind a paywall, do all these things. I said, “Well, actually, our fans are here and they’re willing to support us. Why would I sell to you?”
It’s because of the fans that I can do this movie now, because I never sold the rights to it. That’s a really rare thing in Hollywood.
You have to have faith in yourself at whatever level you can work on. Make stuff because work begets work. Creativity begets creativity.
FM: I think there’s starting to be people looking for that in Actual Play. Is that kind of scrappy quality part of why it’s been successful?
Felicia: Here’s the thing about that: it doesn’t cost any money to put a livestream camera on some people to improvise. You could show up every week to do consistent content. There’s sort of a magical formula there where you have access to the performers you love on a consistent basis, and when they want to do something bigger, they can. It was just a perfect storm.
You can’t make a $3 million or $4 million movie every year. You just can’t. You cannot finance that with fans. The fans will be fatigued and wonder, “Why does it cost this much?” I even wonder that myself when I’m looking at the budget.
But where we’re starting out today, the fact that you can shoot a movie on an iPhone and make really high-quality stuff, and now these shorts are getting picked up from the internet, I do believe the potential that The Guild had 20 years ago, setting the bar for indie film coming from web creators and going into the mainstream, is actually happening now. If you can get together with your friends and make a cool short film and put it on the web and make another one, that’s really a path to mainstream acceptance, maybe, but also to being a creator full-time. That’s something that never would have happened even 20 years ago.
FM: We know some people who work in production in Hollywood, and it’s definitely changed. It used to be 50, 60, 70 movies were all being shot at the same time, but now it feels like less than twenty.
Felicia: My goal is to keep the show in LA as much as possible. That was really important to me because it is a movie town that has been gutted, it’s a tragedy. We’re going to be able to shoot all of it there, but the price is astronomical compared to if we were going to go to Vancouver or Georgia. It’s a fundamental problem, and I don’t think it’s going to be solved anytime soon. We’re hoping that we qualify for tax credits, but we won’t know until the end of August. But we’ll be filming some of it in LA no matter what.
FM: Even Georgia is losing people now because of the same thing. Everybody’s going to the UK.
Felicia: Those actors make no money. That’s why British actors would come to LA to work, because they barely make a living there even if they’re on a series. Now everything’s shifting over there. It’s just the cheapening of all the labor, and then you get AI on top of that, replacing people. It’s like, “Well, where is the art gone? Where is it going to go? Where are we finding it?”
FM: You’re seeing a lot of actors now. They’re fans of it, but they’re getting into these more digital spaces than they used to. They’re all working in Critical Role, and Dropout has so many people doing shows.
Felicia: Dropout is doing so much interesting stuff and it’s really cool seeing that crossover happening. I just think about where exciting things are happening versus television. My kid in 10 years is not going to watch a lot of TV. She’s going to be playing games. She’s going to be looking at content online that caters more to what she likes, and whatever that means for entertainment.
FM: We grew up with pay-per-view and television, and everything was on it. But streaming has changed that.
Felicia: I get what they were trying to do. If you put the capitalism cap on, they were trying to make everybody pay for all these individual services. They’ve just degraded everything and I think now it’s actually biting them in the butt. People say “Well, I don’t have to pay for this if I can just go to YouTube and Twitch.” I think people are finding different ways to entertain themselves, and they’re looking for something more organic. The more commercialized, AI-ified and overworked the stories and visuals are, the more I think people crave just a real person on their screen.
For better or worse, I want stories to last. I want stories to impact people on a long-term basis. But the way that it’s being done now on a greater level in Hollywood is not working.
You can continue to back The Guild: Ren Faire’d on Kickstarter.
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