by Felicia Day
I looked at Kim and Jane for a long beat, then a strange sunrise crested through the two hemispheres of my brain. Could it, indeed, be that simple?! . . .
Yes, it could.
It felt like for the first time in my life, I had the power to decide something this big and make it happen. Without anyone’s approval, without permission, without any external motivation like getting an A in a math class. I could do this because I WANTED to, even if it was scary and might go up in flames.
In that moment, I realized that I had been missing an amazing truth:
No matter what you feel is holding you back in life . . .
Repeat that motivational cup sentence until it gets in your gut and doesn’t sound like something stupid on a Hallmark card, because it is the basis for anything that will make you happy in this world. This is something I truly believe.
I looked at Kim and Jane across the booth and nodded, feeling warm and fuzzy, like I was having the best stroke EVER. I had the power to film my script. I wasn’t alone; we could do this.
We were going to MAKE SOMETHING!
[ Makin’ It! ]
I’m going to share a dirty secret with you . . .
Actually it’s not that dirty. I was trying to inject some suspense here. I’ll stop.
I love crafting. Knitting, decoupage, scrapbooking, any “lady-ish” art form, I’m a fan. For about six months each. Then I shove all the supplies in a closet, alongside the skeletons of long dead New Year’s resolutions, like saber fencing, playing the ukulele, and Japanese brush painting.
During my bored-actor years, I recruited lady friends to join me in doing crafting “Projects!” to relieve said boredom. (Note the exclamation mark. That was part of the vibe. Say “PROJECTS!” like a stereotypical gay character on television and you have it.) A little before Christmas and Valentine’s Day, I threw parties to make holiday cards from scratch. I would buy CARTLOADS of supplies: pipe cleaners, decorative paper, gold filigree, dot matrix pictures of Bea Arthur . . . it was a bacchanal of glitter and glue sticks. I would cater tea-time foodstuffs (sandwiches without crusts and heart-shaped tarts with yuppie-berries) and serve them on flower-embossed ceramic plates.
It’s strange to remember I was so vaginal at a certain point.
The same enthusiasm that motivated me to create dozens of handmade Christmas cards every year—and some for Hanukkah, because I tried to be inclusive but I didn’t really understand when it was appropriate to send them to people, so I ended up shoving them in the closet—drove me to take the script I wrote for The Guild and turn it into a web series. From scratch. With my friends.
But through that process, I learned the hard way that making a film is not the same as throwing a Sunday afternoon tea party. It’s actually . . . nothing like it at all. So I’d like to share my top five tips for anyone who decides to film a television-like show in their garage for almost no money!
[ 1: Befriend a Hoarder or Become One ]
When Kim, Jane, and I started breaking down how we would shoot the first ten pages of my TV script for a grand total of $1,500, we realized, “Gee, we need a lot of stuff. For free. Why did I throw anything in my life away, ever?”
So while Jane pulled favors to get pro-bono crew members and Kim worked on the icky producing logistics, I concentrated on gathering the props and superficial stuff we needed, because in my mind, being able to put together a cute outfit equaled “Fabulous at film decoration!” natch.
There was no length I wouldn’t go to get the perfect object. I raided my friends’ houses for props we needed, even doing the “Look over there!” trick to steal a stuffed animal from a two-year-old’s hands. (She never noticed, babies are so dumb in those first few years after they’re born.) Without asking, I borrowed a large, fake house plant from the set of How I Met Your Mother to decorate the background of one of my shots, promising my friend who was an actor on the show, “I’ll have this back Monday!”
For some reason, it was incredibly important to me that each character’s room be well-decorated. This was a LADY production and I was obsessed with Trading Spaces and other renovation shows on TV that I watched alone on Saturday nights, no WAY were any of my characters living in a hovel! Unfortunately, my exacting standards often butted up against the practicality of having no budget. “Sorry, Kim, your aunt’s bedspread will NEVER do for Tink. Her palette is pinks and oranges. Let me show you the paint chips I collected from Home Depot. Can you search the old folks’ home for something in this color range? No? Fine! I’ll find it myself!” With zero dollars and incredibly high standards, I had to look in creative places for set decorations.
Thus began my obsession with trash.
I started trolling up and down alleys, putting anything colorful and not covered in feces into my trunk. Yes, that might sound gross and hobo-y, but it’s amazing what people throw away. I found a few things, like a hot dog cookbook and a 3-D picture of Jesus, that I still have in my home. (Wiped them off with Windex, promise.)
And it wasn’t only post-apocalyptic scavenging that decorated The Guild. I used technology to find trash, too. Since Craigslist was out of our price range, costing actual dollar amounts, I found an online service called Freecycle where people give things away, provided you immediately race to come get them. I’d click on the site dozens of times a day, like an obsessive day trader, so I could jump on a posting first.
“Broken electronics on curb near Glenoaks Ave and Hubbard St in Sylmar, come before 6pm.” Perfect set dressing for Bladezz’s gaming space? BAM! GET YOUR FAST AND FURIOUS ON, FELICIA! Sylmar was about an hour away from my house but the grainy flip phone picture of stacked microwaves and VCRs spoke to me, artistically, so I drove ninety miles an hour to beat whoever else might be vying to grab the precious treasure. Someone else could have used that DVD player for entertaining sick children, but I had a vision to bring to life. I needed that trash!
The scavenging process was satisfying, like acting out my favorite part of a video game in real life. I was smashing barrels and getting rewards! Except I didn’t find gold or weapons, I found actual garbage. And LOVED it. Maybe too much.
The tipping point came three weeks into pre-production when I dragged home a stand-up hair dryer that was probably made in the 1960s. It was huge, dirty, and my boyfriend was at his wit’s end. Justifiably so. Our place was turning into a dump.
He met me on the porch, and I could tell it was gonna be a THING. I tried to deflect with chipperness. “Hey, honey! Huge super awesome find today, huh?”
“Did you rob a salon?”
“No! I found it on the sidewalk with a ‘Take Me!’ sign attached. It was fate!”
“Is there a reason for this ‘fate’? Like, do you have a place for it in your script?”
“No, but it screams comedy to me!”
“That’s what you said about all the free yoga balls, and now my office looks like a gigantic Chuck E. Cheese.” He moved closer and examined the hair dryer. “There’s still hair on this thing! Don’t bring it into the house. Or anything else you find on the streets. Please?”
“Fine, I’ll leave it in the driveway, gawd!” What a hypochondriac.
After that, I stored trash in my car or in Kim’s garage. Life compromises, sigh.
[ 2: “Favor” Is a Four-Letter Word ]
There’s merit in having the plucky attitude, “No problem is insurmountable if you’re willing to be creative and bat your eyelashes a little!” (Not sexist, guys have eyelashes, too.)
The problems start when plucky morphs into desperation. “Please help me. Look how friendly I’m smiling, yet my eyes say I want to enslave you!”
Kim, Jane, and I recruited anyone we knew to help us bring The Guild to life. Literally anyone. Conversations like, “We need a baby. Who do we know who’s bred recently?” peppered our prep meetings. Guilt, blackmail, you name it, we muscled it.
“Hey, I drove my hairdresser to the airport that one time when her uncle died. I’ll call her up,
she owes me!”
When we fell short on personnel, we put an ad on Craigslist for people looking for experience on film sets and said yes to anyone who didn’t seem like they were a parolee.
“Here’s a student from Santa Monica Community College who wants to do sound for us.”
“Does he have his own equipment?”
“He might be able to bring a boom mic held together by duct tape.”
“Invite him aboard!”
We ended up with a camera assistant who was a recent émigré from Hungary, and couldn’t spatially place the clapboard in the actual film frame. Her ONLY job.
“No, Veronique, lower. LOWER! The general area the camera is pointed would be good! Ugh, close enough. Action.”
The trouble is, when you’re asking people to work for free, you can’t be an exacting perfectionist.
“I know you’re doing this as a favor, late at night and on weekends, but I hate what you did. Can you revise it fifteen times until it’s perfect? Cool?”
I ended up having to use my own craft party skills to make our show logo for the opening credits after Kim’s neighbor’s cousin fell through in the graphic design department. Because she was busy “going into labor.” Psh.
Yes, I used MS Paint and a mouse. No, I was not drunk.
I’ll admit that some of the production problems we ran into were my fault. I am bossy and arrogant enough to think I have a “vision,” so we needed a much bigger crew than an average web video warranted. Many times during filming, I’d start to cry in frustration at myself. “Why didn’t I just write something that could be shot with one person and a phone camera?” Five minutes later, I’d run up to Kim. “Hey, let’s fully CGI animate the opening credits! We can do motion capture like Gollum! It’ll be great!”
In terms of free labor, you’d think that the actors would be the easiest to recruit. I mean, we were shooting in Los Angeles; that’s like asking in Vegas, “Where can I find a glass of alcohol as tall as my torso?”
And things looked promising initially. We posted an acting listing for “The Guild. Web Series. Zero Pay. (Seriously, there’s no pay for this thing.)” And got about 500 applications. For each part. We weren’t special, that’s just what happens when you put out a notice for actors in Los Angeles. Good thing I went through the process AFTER I’d been an actor for a while, or I’d have immediately moved back to Texas to play “I Will Always Love You” on the violin at church weddings for the rest of my life.
But as we started going through the applications, not to insult my own profession or anything, we realized that releasing a “free actor” posting is like sending out a virtual birdcall, “Whackadoodle! Whackadoodle!” into the Los Angeles jungle. Ninety-eight percent of applicants were “swipe left” immediately. For instance, when you post this character description:
TINKERBALLA: early 20s, Asian. A sweet, doll-like face belies her acrid tongue.
You KIND of assume the photos submitted will be, at a minimum:
A) Asian
B) Under 30
C) Female
But when you allow just ANYONE to submit themselves, which we did, we got some, shall we say, “out of the box” head shots. Like a fifty-year-old Hawaiian man standing butt naked on a surfboard. Or a “current” head shot for a woman clearly taken back in the 1970s, accompanied by halter dress and Vaseline filter. Or a cheerful blonde who, for some unknown reason, posed with a cooking ladle.
(Oops, that was actually one of the actors we hired for a part who was amazing. Love you, Robin!)
The process gave me a lot of empathy for those on the OTHER side of the camera. For so many years as an actor, I’d enter a casting room and assume the people inside were thinking, Wow, she’s ugly. This girl’s going to suck. She messed up a word on the page? AMATEUR! But as a producer, I sat there day after day, watching dozens of people read the words I wrote aloud, and all I could think about was . . . uh, me.
Oh God, she can’t pronounce the words. My script is unshootable, what was I thinking?!
That joke didn’t work. We probably should change this to a video game drama. I’m in tears myself right now, should be an easy fix.
She’s okay for the role. But why is her hair so much thicker than mine? I’m taking those biotin pills, do I maybe have cancer or something?
I wish I could say my experience casting The Guild helped me audition better myself—put the process in perspective as an artist and rid me of the burden to be perfect. But nah. I still enter every casting room and freeze up like a basket case.
Eventually we did find amazing people who looked adorable together and actually showed up on time, rounding out our cast in a totally balanced, free-costing kind of way. They were wonderful. I love them and will never say anything bad about them.
And I certainly won’t EVER admit that I asked my friend Sandeep to play the character of Zaboo partially because he owned two cameras we needed for filming. Nope.
[ 3: Never Let a Film Crew Shoot in Your Home ]
The most expensive part of filmmaking is getting locations to film in legally. That’s why we “chose” to shoot everything in our own homes. (Choice had nothing to do with it, of course. I was just being cutesy with the air quotes.)
My house is painted like a clown car, with each room a different QUIRKY! color, so we shot the majority of the show there. For three days straight. And even though it wasn’t a big crew, having ten to fifteen people invade my private space was close to walking on the beach in a bikini without remembering to shave all the way on the anxiety scale. As an introverted person who likes everything around her to stay in its place and who personally likes to go to open houses with the express goal of sneaking a look into strangers’ medicine cabinets, I knew that every inch of my home was destined to be violated.
A lot of the stress couldn’t be avoided because we were working in such tight quarters. There’s a reason regular film stages are as big as Sam’s Club and not a small Los Angeles bungalow. One of the main character’s locations was a shed in my yard, about six feet by six feet large, with a sign “Daddy’s Doghouse” on the door. (Previous owner’s touch, promise.) Shoving cameras, lights, actors, crew members, and an active bacon griddle into an area the size of a Fiat was not optimal. I mean, the crew was mostly comprised of ladies, but even then, the BO became stronger than the San Antonio Spurs’ locker room.
I tried to preempt problems by making a calm announcement every morning, “This is my house, guys! Please treat it like your own!” But months after we wrapped, I was still finding Diet Coke cans stuck under my couch cushions and half-sandwiches ferreted in my towel closet. I’m sure no one DELIBERATELY tried to trash my home, but no matter how many times I’d say, “Please don’t give my dog any scraps; he’s gluten allergic,” he would mysteriously get diarrhea. EVERY NIGHT. I won’t even mention my frustration with male people not being able to hit the toilet while peeing. I couldn’t enter my own bathrooms without wanting to wear a hazmat suit. We never could have completed filming without opening our homes to the crew, but to this day, I still have rings on my dining room table that I gaze at with bitterness. “I put out coasters. All the time. No one used them.”
Despite the personal-boundaries issues, the set was a casual place that made it feel like we were kids playing dress-up in our homes. (Because we WERE in our own homes. Four feet away from where we slept.) That informality gave us the freedom to do things that would never happen on a professional set. Mainly because of OSHA regulations and child labor laws.
There’s a scene in the first episode where the neglectful mother character, Clara, puts her newborn baby down on the floor as she’s talking to the other guild members online. We needed to cut to the baby doing something hilarious while Clara was ignoring him. There were a ton of baby toys on set, but we couldn’t find anything that made the scene EXTRA funny. Jane tried everything. “Give him that penguin. No, it looks too cute. What about his shoe?” Kid was saccharine adorable with any object, but
I knew we needed to find something extra special to make the gamer crowd laugh. STEP IT UP, BABY! GIVE US THE FUNNY!
About ten minutes in, the baby started getting cranky, and we got to the point of “It’s good enough.” I hate that point. It’s either perfect, or it’s the worst thing ever made and everyone is an artistic failure, including myself. (Yay, emotional extremes!) I started running through my house, yelling back to the crew, “Give me two minutes, feed him, tickle him, stick a boobie in him! I’ll be right back!”
After rifling through my office drawers like a madwoman, I found something perfect for the shot.
And no, it wasn’t plugged in. I’m not a monster.
[ 4: Disaster Is Your Low-Budget Best Friend! ]
The reason real television shows have hundreds of people working on them is pretty much for “disaster mitigation overhead.” Also: it takes a village to make people look pretty. In our case, there were only the three of us to deal with everything that could go wrong during our shoot. And tons of things did. And bonus: I am plagued with the kind of anxiety that makes me dart my head around like a meth-addicted hamster! So . . . not the best combo.
When a light fell over outside one of the windows of my director Jane’s house, it started a VERY minor brushfire. I immediately thought, Oh God, the City of Los Angeles is going to arrest me for arson. And we don’t have a permit to shoot here. We’re all going to be arrested, then sued in The People’s Court. Must scout overpasses for future homesteads on the way home tonight.
Of course, none of that happened, but the landlord did find out about it and forbade us to shoot at that location again (forever and ever for the rest of eternity). So we all had to sneak in separately the next day to finish one last scene, with a plan that was so intricate, it could have been taken out of Mission: Impossible.