I have caught a number of episodes of The Guild, a web-based video series since it first appeared a year or so ago. Imagine a soap opera based on the web-camera confessions of a young woman geek who is a member of a massively multiplayer online game guild, and you have the basic idea.
Recently The Guild has started going a bit “big time”, with announcements that Wil Wheaton is going to be appearing in some episodes of this upcoming season and now… a music video.
I kind of have a little crush now on Felicia Day… shhh, don’t tell Irene.
Is it just me, or are there more kewl / hot chicks that are gamers than there were back in our time?
And considering the amount of time it takes to shoot and edit even a short video of that quality… how do all these very talented independent web video producers manage to find time to work and therefore, eat?
Re: hot geek chicks- I’m not sure. I think maybe it is the fact that attractive women who are gamers/geeks feel like they can admit it now? Felicia seems to be the “real deal”, though: if you check out her blog and her Wikipedia page, she’s extremely smart, plays D&D and video games and has for years, and is genuinely funny.
As for production… Felicia Day has a team working with her (i.e.: it’s not Felica alone), and is connected to very talented and likewise “connected” people like Joss Whedon. What I can’t figure out is how these talented people who produce these quality videos get funded. There must be sponsors and advertising involved, but does that really pay the bills? I hope so, as I keep stumbling across various web video series that I’d like to succeed well enough to continue producing episodes.
With regard to the talent… the amount of talented people on the web astounds me ( though it shouldn’t.) Even though intellectually I know better, emotionally I had bought into the Hollywood / Music industry line that talent was exceedingly rare and hard to find ( thus justifying them charging a fortune for “developing” the talent.)
And although I am very glad these folks are finding a stage upon which to demonstrate their talent, and am pleased that the corporate myth that talent is rare is being eroded away …
It makes me feel pretty damn inadequate. Can’t sing, can’t play an instrument, can’t write, hell I can’t even hold my videocamera steady!
Is being boring a talent? I’m good at that 😉
Boring? I’ve got that down- that’s definitely my talent too 😉
I still think talent is pretty rare. Maybe only one or two percent of the population has some special gift: a few million in North America. But I’m sure that something like 99 out of 100 talented people are overlooked by the movie and recording industries. If only 10% of the remainder find a path to get their creativity to an audience as a result of the “democratization” factors provided by technology, that means ten times as many talented people become visible. Tens or hundreds of thousands instead of a few thousand.
It is interesting to imagine where this “expansion” of the visible talent pool might take us in a few decades. TV sets and set top boxes will expand the reach of things like Youtube more fully into the living room, that’s for sure. Advertisers will find their already highly fragmented audiences becoming harder and harder to reach via a single program.
It definitely will make it difficult for lowest common denominator advertising … on the other hand, I can see us gong back to shows that feature product placement and certainly shows that are sponsored by products and companies. Soap operas, after all, were originally so named because they were sponsored by soap companies.
And when you think about it, $100K might get you a few network ads, a couple of full pages in a major paper … or an entire web series.
With a time scale of a couple of decades I’m more concerned about what happens to society when our online environment plays a bigger and bigger part of our lives, and we don’t have to share anything in common unless we want to.
Will we want to? Or will become utterly fragmented, with little loyalty or in common with our co workers and next door neighbours, and absolutely nothing in common with the person in the next car or next block? Can a nation function that way? Can a society? *shrug*