Felicia Day is a darling of the geek community, but she has had a hard time not being social about her new media venture.
Emily Dyan Ibarra
Web star Felicia Day launches her Geek & Sundry channel today on YouTube.
Today, though, the actress/video-gamer/comics writer/Internet star becomes a true Web entrepreneur with the launch of Geek & Sundry, a brand-new YouTube channel built to entertain and educate Day's legion of fans.
"The channel is about people sharing their passions for things and learning from each other and growing because they found somebody who loves something just as much as they did," she says.
Day produces and/or stars in series of Web videos for Geek & Sundry, including the one that helped make her a sensation in the first place: the gamer-centric The Guild, now in its fifth season.
She also runs her own weekly video-blogging show The Flog that airs online Mondays, and reached out to fellow geek icon Wil Wheaton (of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame) to host Tabletop, where he plays role-playing and other board games with fellow celebrities every other Friday.
That Friday slot is shared with Sword & Laser, a show devoted to sci-fi and fantasy literature that's hosted by popular podcasters Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt. And Wednesdays bring a new episode of Dark Horse Motion Comics, which adapts Dark Horse classics such as The Secret, The Goon, Hellboy and Umbrella Academy using high-tech graphics.
Two shows will debut later in the year: Starting July 18, Written by a Kid showcases children reading stories set to short films by various directors on Wednesdays, and nerdtastic duo Paul & Storm debut their musical series Learning Town in the fall. (Expect hipsters, ghosts and puppets, among other things.)
Pulling all this together over the past several months was just as hard for Day as staying mum about it to her nearly 2 million Twitter followers until the big announcement at WonderCon last month.
She compares the overwhelmingly raucous response to unveiling the (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar music video at Comic-Con three years ago. It was like giving them a great birthday gift."
Before then, the 32-year-old Web star says, "finding interesting things to say that didn't spoil anything we were working on and working on the shows 18 hours a day was kind of a challenge. I had to cover my tracks really well, like a detective novel."
Day had always wanted to expand what she was able to do with The Guild, which first premiered on YouTube in June 2007. But it was important to her and her producing partner, Kim Evey, to find shows to fit a niche and design things that someone else on the Web wasn't doing better.
Also integral to Day's mission was to foster a sense of community with all these shows, such as creating a communal, Internet-wide book club with Sword & Laser, as well as having a robust community site for interactions plus a forum for more permanent posts.
Engaging people online and offline — which Day plans on doing both with the Geek and Sundry website and with live events at conventions — wasn't important to her until she started creating Web videos. Before then, she admits she wasn't a particularly outgoing or social person, and having a comfy home on the Internet is the main reason why she hasn't jumped to TV or into writing for movies.
"Having the people who like what I do and the people who directly support what I do one click away and being able to impact their lives as much as they impact mine is so incredibly gratifying," says Day, an actress who started making waves in the geek community with a recurring role on Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and later in his Internet musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog).
"There is a misnomer in that being online and interacting with other people is antisocial in a way," she adds. "If we can take that a step further and make it real interaction, whether you're to typing them or meeting them in person, then I think we're improving people's lives vs. just feeding them things to consume."
Day is also using Geek & Sundry as a way to expand her own horizons while entertaining her fan base. She'd been doing little videos here and there on her personal YouTube channel, but breaks out in a big way with The Flog.
Wanting to "take that idea of a vlogging show and put it a little bit on steroids," she will be answering fan questions via webcam, highlighting independent and creative people and their projects, and doing an offsite segment where she makes a music video, works a crane, feeds a goat or flies through the air, trapeze style. (Her first Flog features her hanging out with a real blacksmith.)
With that wish-fulfillment aspect, Day wants to encourage the idea that, as an adult, you don't have to be the same person.
"As kids, we go to lesson after lesson to try to explore what we like and try to be better at things, and unfortunately as adults we stop learning and stop exploring ourselves," she explains. "That sells us short and you might not find what you're passionate about if you don't keep trying things."
Being a part of a startup company has also led to learning less fun things such as accounting, assurance and other aspects of business infrastructure. In addition to Evey, Day also brought in Sheri Bryant to help run Geek & Sundry and bolster it to the point where they can add more shows and bring in more like-minded content creators.
And they're putting everything on your screen, Day says. The company doesn't even have an actual office.
"We're still the scrappy underdog of these premium channels, but it's really important for us as a smaller entity to prove that our audience can respond just as much as other people with bigger resources."
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.
No comments:
Post a Comment