Felicia: I'm a professional actor, I've lived in LA for almost 8 years now. I went to the University of Texas at Austin and majored in Violin and Mathematics, and naturally after college I moved to pursue acting as a career :) I've worked in many movies, television shows and national commercials. I've always been a gamer and a general geek, and I created The Guild after kicking a World of Warcraft addiction. With Kim's it came to the Internet! Oh, and I love cats and fantasy novels. :)

Kim: I have a background in improv and sketch comedy and I moved to LA to pursue a career in acting. I started working enough to make a living but there was still a lot of the proverbial sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. My husband is also an actor and an extremely funny person. He started doing comedy shorts and I persuaded him to post them on YouTube. We had success with a short called "Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show" and that made me realize that I could be doing something with my time other than sitting around worrying about how I wasn't doing anything with my time. Now I produce GTCMS, The Guild and 2 Hot Girls in the Shower in addition to commercial and TV acting.

Felicia: Yes, like I said I was addicted to World of Warcraft for almost 2 years. Big time. I got to the point where I would wake up in the middle of the night and farm Dreamfoil. And fish. It was a bad addiction. Previously I had been addicted to Diablo in college and after that Puzzle Pirates. I obviously have a video game addiction problem, LOL. I still play a lot of video games, but I'm trying to avoid getting "hooked" again.

Kim: I've never played an MMORPG because I knew that if I started there would be no turning back. The last RPG I played was Legend of Zelda on Nintendo 64 and I was ridiculous about it. I went through a number of years where I wouldn't allow myself to play any type of video game because I would just go until I was exhausted. Even, like, playing online spades on MSN, I would play for hours. I would forget to eat. Felicia just gave me her DS and I played Phantom Hourglass like a fiend on the last Guild shoot. At one point Felicia ran across the room to move a glass out of a shot and I realized I was completely neglecting the shoot in order to play Zelda. Bad. It's bad.

Felicia: I wrote The Guild as a 1/2 hour pilot for television after some friends (including producers Kim and Jane) helped me shake my WOW habit. Everyone I showed the script to thought it was funny, but said it was too "niche". Since Kim and her husband had so much success shortly before with their Internet projects, she helped me realize that the best place to put the show was where gamers hung out: On the web. After Kim, Jane and I decided to work together to do a pilot episode, it was phenomenal how quickly it came together. Sheer will. And a touch of naivety, haha.
To get to this point now, 6 million views later, it has taken (and continues to take) hours a day of marketing, publicity and fan interaction. These things do not just happen overnight, even though we have a build-in fanbase of gamers and Buffy fans (which I was on the last year of). Lots of webisodes garner only a few thousand hits upon release. The true work takes place between shooting.

Kim: The challenge that we didn't think about with The Guild when we began our gung-ho efforts to put it together was that it's pretty much a full-on production to mount. My other shows take place in one location so it turns out we were a little bit naive about just how much work it would take in the long run to consistently schedule all the cast, crew and locations that go into making The Guild. We've scaled down considerably since our first shoot just to try and make things move faster but it's a delicate balance to get the right amount of people. You don't want too many extra people but you also don't want your lead actress to be the one running across the room to move the glass out of the shot. You should have seen our craft service table for the first shoot though. It was an awesome sight to behold.

Felicia: Uh...everything? :) Besides the comfy trailer, the custom built sets, the enormous crews the...paycheck... Yes, it's night and day. We shoot with minimal crew and minimal equipment. We can't shoot consistently because we can only do it as donations come in (for now). And as stressful as it is wearing 10 different hats on set, I totally love the process because of our crew and our fans. It makes it all worth it. And I get to write stuff that makes people laugh. What's better than that?

Kim: On a major series you get to just be an actor. On The Guild you have to do everything. And the craft services on a major series don't start awesome and then shrink by the final episode of the season to the point where you're inadvertently starving your cast because you didn't buy bagels. On a TV series there are always plenty of bagels.

Felicia: Absolutely not. I mean, yes, there are addiction problems that can get out of hand with certain personalities with gaming or anything else (I include myself in that) and having friends and family help you realize when you cross the line is key. But I think that the social aspect of gaming is really fantastic. I'm much closer to my brother after playing World of Warcraft with him for a few years. We talked more than we ever had before over Vent.

Felicia: Well, I think the best shows, especially comedies, are about people "making a family" whether it deals with an office, an actual family or a group of friends. I try to write my characters as fully as I can, so even non-gamers can enjoy the foibles of a set of quirky characters. It's a strange time in TV and film because the network model isn't working as well as it used to, and it may be that launching from a more specific point of view can become more universal for audience members, if that makes sense.

Kim: There's absolutely room for it in the mainstream. People love character driven comedies and the trick is, how do you bring those characters together? Sitcoms are just a bunch of unique and endearingly flawed people with a central thing in common whether it's hanging out at a bar or working in the same office or playing an online video game. The game lingo is in there because that's part of a gamers life but the focus of the show is the relationships and the characters. And Felicia's just getting started. The whole point of The Guild is watching these people who have poor or odd social skills develop them with each other and that's universally appealing--that's just standard sitcom.

Felicia: I think the idea of having girl characters who game was really our biggest hurdle at first before we began shooting. People didn't believe that girls game, especially three totally different KIND of women characters. It's amazing now that so many letters we get are from women who game, thanking us for giving them a voice. Half our donors who help us film through Paypal donations are women. So I like to go "Nyah nyah" to those people who said they didn't exist. I knew they existed because I'm a gamer myself :)

Kim: New media is changing the landscape of entertainment at such a rapid pace right now, it's no longer a matter of people telling us it won't work--it's now a matter of "how is it going to work" and "what's the best way to work this thing?" We have so many viewers and yet so many of those 10 million that you mentioned still aren't aware of the show. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive. Now it's just a matter figuring out the best way to get it to more people.

Felicia: Well, the shooting process is like herding cats. Getting a weekend where we can shoot a few episodes in a row, coordinating 15 people's schedules (for free) is hard enough. There's equipment rental, locations (that are personal houses in general) and food to buy as well as phone calls confirming everyone etc... We shoot very quickly and I write too long to shoot on our schedule :) So we're always rushing to get things in the camera. It's quite a relief to realize at the end of the shoot we got everything that was on the page :) Afterwards the hard work comes, maintaining the website, all the social networking pages, emailing fans, commenting on all the blogs that mention the show, thanking donors for their donations, adding people to mailing lists. And then there's the email that we get in 15 different places on 15 different sites. We try to answer everything personally but it gets tough. Also, I do all the graphics stuff, most of the website programming (although thank goodness for fans to help me out of sticky Wordpress situations :) ). I'm constantly looking to improve the site, to link the show places, to get press articles done on it, because the internet is so vast, it's hard for an indie project to get ANY press at all. Summarize it up: Lots of sitting. :)

Kim: Felicia is a mad woman when it comes to the Internet. She's one of the savviest people I know when it comes to the web, which either means she's good or I'm just old and don't know that many people that use it the way most kids use it these days. Either way, so much of post production time is web-based. It's a really good thing we're both fast typists. The Guild has the audience it has because Felicia sits in front of her computer 8, 9, 10 hours a day and posts things and answers email and makes sure the website looks great and everything is up to date. I help but she's really the main one who does all that stuff. Aside from that, pre-production is all about scheduling and wrangling props. Felicia has been known to drive across town to borrow potted plants from studio lots for the weekend. Our directors tend to be in charge of assembling their crews, which helps. But there are always a million little details that would just bore you to tears if I listed them. It's definitely a full-time job though.

Felicia: When Zaboo squeezed my face and said "I gotta drop my kids off at the pool". That was so hard to get on film, we kept breaking the tighter he squeezed my face. Also, the awkward silence at the end of episode 4 was almost impossible to film. I told Jeff Lewis (Vork) to start clearing his throat and groaning a little bit in the silence. It was so freaky no one could keep a straight face. I bit my cheeks and thought of dead puppies to get through the take.

Kim: There is a bit in the unreleased second gag reel where Jeff Lewis (Vork) is supposed to say "our 2 p.m. raid" but he kept saying "2 a.m." in take after take. And the brilliant part was that each time he was completely unaware that he'd gotten it wrong until the director would yell from behind the camera. The hard thing about our show is that we're always on such a tight schedule so we don't really have the luxury of reveling in stuff like that. Once Jeff got it right it was just like "OK on to the next thing" rather than the traditional group laugh and applause that one might expect in a situation like that. It's rather genius all strung together though.

Felicia: We'd love to be able to sell the show on itunes, but that will have to wait until we partner with a big company. We are preparing a DVD of the first season now for release this summer, and for the next season we'll definitely be shooting on HD to provide a great viewing experience on other platforms. One of the reason we're talking with people about funding partnerships is the distribution arm, which is near impossible to do independently on any large scale. And it's an area in which we could use help and expertise.

Felicia: Well, the season finale is coming out in a few weeks, hopefully people will enjoy that. I will only say that The Guild will continue to play online together, but relationships will form/grow and other unexpected outside characters will invade their lives, online and offline.

Felicia: Haha. We have a lot of offers for people wanting to be in The Guild, but that character..oh wait, Kim's trying to tell me something.

Kim: *whispers to Felicia* Tell him we've already got one.