Help me Codex, you’re my only hope!

Today I read a Paste Mag­a­zine inter­view with Feli­cia Day.  She is quickly becom­ing one of my favorite actresses. She’s uncon­ven­tional — beau­ti­ful, smart, witty and has gor­geous eyes and red hair!  Yay!  She’s a gamer nerd chick, with smooth pale lumi­nes­cent skin glow­ing from lack of pig­ment and too much com­puter time.  She’s got freck­les!  She was born in Huntsville.  She was home schooled and then went on to col­lege and dou­ble majored in math­e­mat­ics and vio­lin per­for­mance.  After she grad­u­ated, she moved to Cal­i­for­nia… to become an actress.  What’s not to love?

Feli­cia has been here and there, most rec­og­niz­ably play­ing Vi on Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer. But I became really famil­iar with her through her online work, par­tic­u­larly Penny in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Dr. Hor­ri­ble is Joss Whedon’s hilar­i­ous and won­der­ful online musi­cal, cre­ated dur­ing the writer’s strike last year.  Did you ever see the Buffy musi­cal episode?  Dr. Hor­ri­ble is def­i­nitely a close rel­a­tive.  It chron­i­cles a young hopeful’s rise to star­dom in the world of super vil­lains.  It’s only 43 min­utes all told. I was a  big evan­ge­list when the episodes orig­i­nally debuted.  I’ve mem­o­rized it by now, because I have watched it at least a dozen times.

As I began research­ing the actress who played the lovely Penny, I dis­cov­ered that Feli­cia Day actu­ally was brought to Dr. Hor­ri­ble largely because of her expe­ri­ence with her own online project, The Guild. The first sea­son of The Guild was very easy to find Youtube.  I imme­di­ately watched them all, enjoy­ing the instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. Before you click “play,” I should warn you there is some strong language.

There, the first one’s free. Actu­ally all of them are. Just travel over to the Guild’s web­site.  There are only two sea­sons so far, so catch­ing up won’t be hard.  It’s very dif­fer­ent than Dr. Hor­ri­ble, which cre­ated for mass appeal.  Obvi­ously, it’s very much a niche ori­ented video, with jokes geared toward online gamers.  World of War­craft play­ers will espe­cially enjoy it.

Feli­cia had tried to sell The Guild as a more tra­di­tional show, but it was too much of a niche mar­ket.  Too many peo­ple didn’t under­stand the jokes.  So she turned to where the audi­ence that would appre­ci­ate her work hangs out all day every day, and began mak­ing Youtube shorts.  By the end of the first sea­son, the dona­tions that were pour­ing in actu­ally made it pos­si­ble to pay the actors.  For the sec­ond sea­son, after much woo­ing from many angles, the per­fect solu­tion to return to her pet project and actu­ally make money while retain­ing her cre­ative auton­omy.  From the Paste interview:

Then, Xbox and Microsoft came in and were like, “We love the show, we want you to do what you do with it, we just want to help you pro­duce it and make it and roll it out really fast.” They cre­ated a rev­o­lu­tion­ary busi­ness model, because not only did they get a spon­sor on board, but they dis­trib­uted it over all the Microsoft plat­forms so you can down­load it for free off of Xbox live and HD which is basi­cally like down­load­ing a TV show. So our lit­tle inde­pen­dent, shot-in-my-shed show is essen­tially one click away from 30 Rock.

How cool is that?  She had the idea for a nifty show about gam­ing, got rejected every­where, and decided to go ahead and do it.  And now she’s enjoy­ing incred­i­ble suc­cess by turn­ing a small inde­pen­dent ven­ture into some­thing that is reach­ing the whole world because niche mar­ket­ing actu­ally works so well on the inter­net.  Joss Whe­don was right to seek her sim­ply for her skills as an inter­net guru for Dr. Hor­ri­ble.  The fact that she can actu­ally sing and act was sim­ply a bonus.