Working at GeekBeat.TV

Cali Lewis recently launched new show and company called GeekBeat.TV. I’m excited to announce that I’ll be working with her and her amazing team! The GeekBeat.TV team is a wonderful group of people and I’m thrilled to be part of it! See GeekBeat.TV/15 as she introduces all of us!

Interview with Traci Toguchi from Lockergnome

It was such an honor to be interviewed by the lovely Traci Toguchi at the It Won’t Stay in Vegas CES Party. We met earlier this year in Hawaii at the [re]think: Hawaii conference! It’s always nice running into her at these geek events. ;)

The original blog post by Chris Pirillo made me blush! Thanks so much for the kind words.

I do have one correction to make. The AR.Drone actually runs on the wifi network, not bluetooth as I previously thought. And this is the Hello Kitty iPhone game that I enjoy!

This video was created using the very cute easy-to-keep-in-your-purse Creative Labs Vado HD Pocket Video Camcorder, 3rd Gen and the always useful Joby Gorillapod Tripod!

Many thanks to Albertech.net for the video and photo!

Google Wave Demo on TWIT.tv

Yesterday, Leo Laporte mentioned that fan video archives were on Odtv.me, so I searched and found my clip!

Here is a short clip of the Google Wave demo that I did with Leo Laporte on Twit.TV on June 3rd, 2009. Thanks for archiving this ODTV!

In the demo, I showed Leo how to navigate around in Google Wave. Note, I only had the account for about two hours before giving the demo, and only tested it for about 30 minutes. :)

Interview with Natali Del Conte

I sent some “twestions” for Global Townhall to ask Natali Del Conte, and they were picked for her interview! She’s one of my favorite geek girls and I love watching her on Loaded. You can read the interview below:

Natali Del Conte is the tech savvy, sweet as apple pie, gorgeous correspondent for The CBS Early Show, WCBS, host of “Loaded” on CNETTV and co-host of the daily podcast “Buzz Out Loud.” I did forget to mention her most notable attributes though… she is intelligent, warm and fearless. Del Conte is also a regular contributor on about every major media outlet from BBC to Fox.

Lucky for us, Natali has stopped in for an interview. Our feature Twitter, “Webdev Geekette” Daynah, has also asked Natali some “twestions.” Actually, Daynah sent so many great twestions I let her take over my interview!

Daynah: What is your process of gathering technology news every morning?

Natali Del Conte: It isn’t limited to the morning. I pretty much have my email and RSS reader fed to me intravenously. I pour through thousands of blogs and news sites but I also have news sent to me based on relationships I have with companies that send me their news under embargo. Still, every morning I wake up early and plop my laptop down on my lap Indian style, and crawl through headlines to make sure Loaded isn’t missing anything.

Daynah: When did you first have interest in reporting technology news?

Natali Del Conte: I was always interested in technology but I let it get away from me while I was in graduate school. When I was done with graduate school and came back to the Bay Area, I just wanted to write. Tech was an easy target because there is such a rich field of resources there.

Daynah: You review a lot of gadgets, but what are the favorite ones you use personally?

Natali Del Conte: I hate this question because I feel so trite. I would love to say that I love all gadgets equally but really I’m a closeted Mac fangirl. I use a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, a BlackBerry Curve, a Kindle 2, and a Flip HD. I also have the new Zune, which I love, but it doesn’t work with my Mac so syncing it can be a pain. I wish I had some cool gadget that nobody has but I’m pretty conventional.

Daynah: What do you miss most about San Francisco, and what do you like best about NYC?

Natali Del Conte: My family. I miss my family every single day. I also miss the beauty. San Francisco is picturesque in a way no other city in the world really is. It is also a place where people respect each other and respect healthy living. New York pushes you. You learn what you’re made of here. I love that too but I miss the balance of my San Francisco life. It took me a good 6 months to stop crying for San Francisco and be grateful for New York but I am grateful for it now. Most of the time. I wasn’t so grateful when I saw the first cockroach in my apartment. That never happened in San Francisco.

Daynah: You are a role model to many aspiring young girls. What advice could you give them about getting their careers started in the world of technology?

Natali Del Conte: Be flexible. If I hadn’t been flexible, I wouldn’t have considered podcasting as a real career. I wouldn’t have been willing to move to New York. I wouldn’t have been willing to do my first broadcast reports on national TV instead of some small local station in a small town. I don’t know to be nervous until it is too late so I just leap before I look.

Please go to Global Townhall to read the rest of this article.

Interview with Felicia Day

Felicia Day was on the road to stardom shortly after she moved to Los Angeles. She landed roles in TV series like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “House,” and “Dollhouse.” She also starred in web series like “The Legend of Neil” and the Emmy-winning “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” But one of her greatest achievements was when she went from actress to script writer and producer, creating what millions of fans know today as “The Guild.

The Guild is a comedy web series about the online and offline lives of a group of gamers. It’s a must-see, as you will find yourself laughing at all the characters and the storyline. The characters are like exaggerated versions of your friends or better yet, you!

As The Guild enters its third season, many extra surprises were revealed to the fans at the last Comic-Con. The first of the surprises was the addition of a “Guild” comic book written by Day and published by Dark Horse Comics. The second was the exquisitely funny bonus music video called “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar.” The song topped the charts in a matter of hours on Amazon and iTunes, surpassing mainstream music! And lastly, the addition of Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation) to the cast!

With the recent release of a new DVD package containing the two seasons of The Guild, I got to speak to Felicia Day about her show, new comic project, and more.

How did it all start? What inspired you to create the Guild?
We started over 2 years ago. I’m an actress in Hollywood who has been acting for 5 years. But I got bored with the opportunities I was being offered because I’m not really a standard Hollywood girl — I don’t look like everybody else, I’m not perfect, and I’m definitely a little awkward sometimes. I worked consistently, but I wasn’t working all the time, so I had a lot of free time on my hands. I ended up getting a bad addiction to online gaming. In the downtown of acting, I filled it with a lot of gaming. It was not the most productive use of my time. And at one point, my friends and people close to me intervened and said you should probably fill time up with something else.

So I sat down to write something and that was The Guild. Because they always say, write what you know, especially on your first project. I wrote the Guild as a half-hour pilot. It wasn’t practically something that would get traction in Hollywood because it’s a very specific audience. And Hollywood content tries to reach everyone at once. So when my co-producer, Kim Evey, came on board, she suggested that we should do this as a web series. It wasn’t particularly popular at the time, but I thought hey, this sounds like fun. So we just shot it in our houses, and that’s how the show started.

What is your process when writing an episode of The Guild?
Web video doesn’t really have a template, like a half-hour comedy does, or a page count. We don’t have to conform to standards of broadcast because there are no standards of broadcast on the internet. Dr. Horrible episodes were 15 minutes each. In the beginning, the Guild had shorter episodes because we didn’t have enough money to shoot more. But now, they’re a little bit longer, and episodes are up to 5-8 minutes. At any rate, it’s very short pieces of content, and no one has really defined what a 5-minute episode of a web series is. It varies which I think is great, it’s a creative ground for people to invent things.

For all 3 seasons, I always sat down and wrote them as a whole season. The first season was a half hour pilot that I rewrote to make it longer to fulfill the 5 minute episodes and get 10 episodes. For seasons 2 and 3, they were essentially feature-length scripts. I write them like a feature, but the format of a feature length script is different from what a movie would be.

What was the craziest place you had to film the show?
When we started doing the show, we established a lot of our sets in rooms in our own houses. Four of the characters, Clara, Bladez, Vork, Tink, were based only in my house. Ironically, my character (Codex) was the only one we didn’t shoot in my house. One of the reasons why Codex moved at a certain point in the show was because we lost our location.

One of the craziest places we shot was in my shed. For one, it’s really hot and uncomfortable. And then for Season 3, we couldn’t afford permits, so sometimes we just had to go out in an alley and be paranoid someone was going to see us shooting. Even now, we still have to steal shots and things like that.

What challenges do you face when writing the comic? How is it different from writing a video series?
The comic is very challenging and I’m in the middle of developing that right now. It’s a much more truncated sort of story-telling. I’m very verbose when I write and my shows have been dialog-heavy. So I have to reconfigure that for the comic, and there’s not a lot of space for dialog. Additionally, I don’t think particularly visually when I’m writing. I’m very much into the characters and how they’re communicating with each other and I leave it to the director and DP to define the look. In comic-writing, the writer has to be a DP, director, and a writer all at once. So you have to be able to tell the story in a much more visual way — which is a great exercise for me but it’s much different. The cool thing about this comic is that I can go outside of people’s houses more because we don’t have budgetary restraints. I’m particularly excited about them having a whole life in game, and following their adventures in game because we don’t define the game they play in the show because of copyright purposes, and I basically want to concentrate on the characters. But here, I can invent a whole world and see why they have so much fun together in the game.

What inspired you to do a Guild Music Video?
It was a combination of things. We have a fan who’s a professional artist, Jeff Carlisle, and he had done some fan art for us to sell at conventions. And it had our faces on our avatar bodies and the fans loved it. It was our best selling item. So, I always thought, “Hey wouldn’t it be cool for us to be in our avatar outfits?” But you know, it’s very expensive to get things made like that.

But while writing Season 3, we usually have an additional video that we turn into Xbox for our order — we do 12 episodes a season, and we have a bonus video. And I knew I needed to come up with an idea for that, and I’ve been listening to a lot of 90′s dance music while writing. So I crowdsourced a playlist on Twitter. And since Dr. Horrible, everyone has been asking me to sing, but it’s hard to figure out venues for that.

So those three things combined led to the idea of the title “Do You Want to Date My Avatar.” And I emailed Jed Whedon, who’s the director and co-writer of the song, and I said, “Hey, I have this idea for a bad 90′s dance music video and song where we sing in our avatar costumes, and here’s the title..” and he said, “I’m on board!” So I sent him lyrics, and within hours he sent me something back. The song went back and forth, until we finally came up with the track. I wanted him to direct, because I just had this feeling that he would be fantastic at it, even though he’s not necessary a director. But now he is because he did such a fantastic job with the video.

How did you ask Wil Wheaton to be in the Guild and how did he react?
Wil has known my co-producer, Kim Evey, for years. They did comedy together in ACME, a comedy theatre in LA. I would always see him at social functions and I knew him from online. I always knew I wanted to use Wil at some capacity because it’s just so much fun to be around him. I felt that he would really fit in the show very well. But I didn’t just want to put him in just because of who he is and his experience. I wanted to find a great character for him.

I was at a convention and one of the guys who was helping us at the booth was wearing a kilt. So I was obsessed with making a character who wore a kilt. When I came up with the idea of a rival guild, I was like, “Oh, Wil can play the rival guild leader and he’ll wear a kilt! Now let’s just find a character for him and ask him to be in it.” So I came up with the idea of the character that I thought he would be fantastic playing, and I took him out for coffee, and the minute it came out of my mouth, he was like, “yes, yes, and yes.” So he was very excited to be involved. And we’re really lucky to have him because he’s such a good actor and having so much experience working, he just centered the whole new guild in a way we would not have had with anybody else. He’s just really funny and subtle and he really just fills the character out. I’m excited for people to see what else he does in this season.

The Guild seasons 1 and 2 have just been released on DVD. Learn more about The Guild at WatchTheGuild.com. Learn more about Felicia Day at FeliciaDay.com

This article was originally published on iProng Magazine, 50th Issue!

Related Posts and Articles

• Comic-Con 2009 On-Site Report
• The Guild Seasons 1 & 2 Dvds
• Do You Wanna Date My Avatar Music Video
• My Discovery of The Guild
• iProng Magazine: 50th Issue
• Felicia Day Interview on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
• Buy The Guild: Seasons 1 & 2
• Buy Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
• (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar (feat. Felicia Day)

Leo Laporte’s Speech at ONA

I really enjoyed Leo Laporte’s keynote at ONA (Online News Association). He’s the founder and host of the techy netcasts called TWIT (This Week in Tech). It’s a great presentation about how TWIT started, how media and technology have changed through the years, and the evolving form of journalism.

Quick Question.. do you think Leo would hire me as his fashion consultant? Surely I’d pick out a better tie. Kidding Leo! I love you and the Twit Army, even if your tie reminds me of a roll of livesavers. :)
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Disqus Featured Friday

I’m very thankful that Giannii from DISQUS asked me to do a short interview with him. Thanks for this opportunity! You can also read the original interview at DISQUS’ blog.

Daynah. A tech geek who loves programming, designing, and digital photography.

So what do you do for a living?

I’m a Programmer Analyst at the University of California, Riverside, doing mainly LAMP development, help desk, as well as staff training on various software. LAMP development means linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or another programming language). In my case, it’s PHP.

Outside of programming, what are you passionate about?

I’m very passionate about new technologies, especially in social media, gadgets, apps, and new ways of gaming. Another one of interests is scrap booking! I take a ton of photos, so I need a creative way to display them all.

Have you always been involved with technology?

Not always. Not until I got my first computer in my junior year of high school. But even then, it wasn’t apparent that my life would take the technology route. I went off to college and majored in Computer Science, and that’s when I my love for web design flourished.

How did you find Disqus?

I found Disqus through FriendFeed.

What do you find appealing about Disqus?

It’s familiar and very easy to use!

What was the first computer you owned?

It was a Packard Bell, running Windows 3.1. I later got a Windows 95 upgrade CD about 2 weeks after.

If you could add one feature to Disqus, what would it be?

That’s such a hard question. I like software that keeps it simple, and that’s what Disqus does. The addition of multiple logins is great, as well as the “like” feature. I can’t think of anything else that would make it better. But if I do, I’ll definitely let you know.

If you would like to learn more about Daynah check out her website, twitter, or Disqus Profile.

Cheers,