Felicia created a “Why I Do What I Do” video, as did Doug Luberts (The Guild Special Effects Crew). All of the videos have been collected on the IAWTV YouTube page via this playlist if you want to check them out.

Several of our fans made “Why I Watch The Guild” videos and we’ve embedded the playlist below. Thanks so much for making this! And even though the contest to make these videos have concluded, if you want to tell us why you watch, leave a comment below or connect with us on Google Plus, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr.

He played the keyboard and accordion for one of Felicia Day’s favorite bands, The Ditty Bops and one of the band’s photographers knew Felicia through fan events.

He’s friends with the parents of the children who play Clara’s kids.

His wife was in a World of Warcraft guild that Felicia used to raid with.

So if all of these connections didn’t result in his involvement, how did he finally get included?

When the idea for a barbershop quartet to open the costume contests came up, production coordinator TJ Rotell decided to ask his friend to help.  That friend? Greg Rutledge.

“I have been friends with Greg for many, many years and he’s a wildly talented musician.  We always talked about wanting to work together and as soon as producers Kim Evey and Felicia Day approached me about putting together the Mega-Game-O-Rama Con quartet, I immediately thought of him,” said TJ.

Once they had decided on the collaboration, it was time to change the concept into reality.

As the self proclaimed “poor man’s Seth McFarlane,” Greg said that he enjoys writing lyrics if they’re comedy.

While the barbershop quartet song was comedic, Greg said he didn’t feel comfortable writing convincing lyrics about a gaming convention because he is not a gamer.  So he whipped up a melody and sent it off to TJ for lyrics.

“Between [Felicia’s] ideas and my own love of the convention world, I was able to piece together the lyrics for the song.  It’s a love/hate song that often calls back some personal experiences I’ve had at conventions myself,” said TJ.

Working off of the lyrics, Greg made a new melody, orchestrated and arranged the song, recorded a demo (in which he sung all of the parts), and sent it off.   When it came to make the final version, they decided to keep Greg as the main vocalist.

“Everyone said it didn’t sound right without my voice.”

While not a gamer himself, Greg certainly understands the general mindset.  His wife is an avid gamer with multiple level 80 characters in WoW.

“When my band was touring, I’d have to choose hotels with internet.”

Greg works at part-time at Santa Monica College as a professor teaching theater and sound and video design.   He has a band that he tours with around Southern California and regularly appears at Treasure Island in Las Vegas.  He also has been writing music for a new musical web series as well as working on the production of  ‘Cesar and Ruben’ at Santa Monica College.

-Caitlyn Hardy

When we put the call out for cosplayers to come be extras for Season 5 of The Guild, there were so many amazing people who showed up with amazing costumes to help create the authentic look and feel of a convention. One of them was Holly Conrad, who’s known for her incredible female Commander Shepard costume (from Mass Effect). Holly is an experienced costumer, armorer and prop builder, as you can see from the many videos on her YouTube channel. Here’s an example of some animatronics from a Grunt (also from Mass Effect) that she built:

On set, Holly’s work caught the eye of celebrity guest Grant Imahara (Mythbusters). “One cosplayer that really stood out was Holly Conrad in her Commander Shepard armor,” said Imahara. “As a maker myself, I geeked out over the carbon-fiber look of her armor. When she told me it was a sticker that people put on their cars to imitate carbon-fiber, I couldn’t believe it! Holly’s a great builder and talented cosplayer.”

Holly’s work is showcased on her website, the YouTube channel for her company Crabcat Industries as well as all kinds of cosplay and video game sites and blogs. She’s also featured in the upcoming documentary Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope and even made it onto the film’s poster.

You can follow Holly on Twitter, and look for her in upcoming episodes of The Guild, where she appears in costume and in “civilian” clothes.

On Defective Geeks, Dianne blogged last year about meeting The Guild at Golden Apple Comics and recently wrote up her experiences on set of Season 5 in the post “I Was an Extra on The Guild.” Her first person account of several days of filming at the Long Beach Convention Center is a great read for any of you wondering what being an extra is like, at least on our set. And like a true geek, she went all out, including screen captures of where you can spot her in the episodes.

Watch for Dianne in the background of Season 5 of The Guild (on MSN and Xbox Live), check out her posts on Defective Geeks and her photos on Flickr, and follow her on Twitter @punkagogo.

Want to nominate someone for Fan Friday? Here’s where you can do just that.

Photos courtesy Defective Geeks

Melissa Greene‘s “Elusive Claracorn,” which came with the caption “The elusive Claracorn is caught daydreaming about her own immortality.” This was one of the very first entries and caused Felicia to proclaim “this one takes the cake for me!”

Robin remarked that she dug the futuristic vibe of Stewart Craig’s entry, which features clara in a zip up unicorn.  Check out his blog to see the initial sketch and the final version.

Animated GIFs must be as old as the web and some say they were the scourge of Myspace.  But Tumblr and Google+ have made them hip again, so when Anita submitted this and said “I hope gifs are ok” we said “of course!”

A lot of different media were used to create the Claracorns, and Lexi O’Dea’s rendering on canvas was a favorite of Robin, who said, “I know it’s not really a unicorn but it’s RAD.”

Kim Evey’s favorite was Matthieu Stone‘s sweet rendition of mother Claracorn dutifully watching over one of her Babycorns, who’s not in any danger at all:

Some of the entries included other cast, and quite a few used Clara’s Squid Hat in their Claracorn drawings. “Claracorn and Friends” from Adam Kuta used both:

And speaking of squids, Jennifer Tourtillott embellished her Claracorn with magical floaty squids and a squid tattoo:

We loved the entry from Tumblr user ItsAboutBunnies so much we decided to give it the prestigious (and just made up) Crafty Award, for being so, um, crafty:

Speaking of crafty, many of you let Claracorn leap off the page and computer screen by creating actual 3D objects… well done!  We particularly like Julie Douberly‘s plush Claracorn:

And last but not least, the clear fan favorite was Eddie Renner’s Claracorn, which caused one person we showed it to to ask “Why is John Boener riding Claracorn?” (Boehner is a US congressman from Ohio and our current Speaker of the House, for you international Guildies).  Of course, we all know that is actually George Beane, aka Mr. Wiggly, because the artist included the telltale cheese tray.  Props for including all three children, something even we don’t always do:

What caught our attention is the cool project she did, using The Guild characters for style inspiration, and she created a set for each of the six Guildies.  You can see all six clever style inspirations on her original post, Style Inspiration: The Guild.

Stephanie even took it further, realizing a Vork-inspired outfit that she modeled herself.  Who knew Vork could inspire such a fashionable look?  Stephanie has even inspired others to use The Guild for style inspiration. We’re huge fans of Stephanie, our first “Fan Friday” spotlight, and encourage you to vote for her in July’s Project Style contest, where she’s a finalist.

Do you want to nominate someone for Fan Friday?  Here’s where you can do that.

Connecting with the fans is always our top priority at Comic-Con, so the cast was busy every day with one or two signings at our booth.  Hundreds of fans came by daily to get autographed posters, DVDs and other merchandise, and get a few minutes and a photo with the cast.  Between our awesome intern Sophia and a crew of volunteers (most of whom were extras in Season 5), we kept the lines moving quickly and the cast full of coffee (or tea with honey, in Felicia’s case).

The cast and crew attended lots of parties and even made some additional appearances, such as Vork’s appearance at w00tstock, continuing his standup career.

We also try to talk with the press, and between The Guild, Eureka and Dragon Age: Redemption, Felicia was booked solid from morning to night doing interviews and appearances.  We also lined up interviews for other cast members, and will post those as they go live.  Here are a few of the great stories mentioning The Guild:

The Hollywood Reporter: “Felicia Day: How a Girl Geek Made It Big on Her Own”
Time Magazine: “Comic-Con Royalty, Part One: The Queen”
Daily Motion: “Felicia Day Interview at Comic-Con 2011″

On Saturday we had our panel in the jam-packed Indigo Ballroom and announced three new cast members for Season 5: Doug Jones, Erin Gray and Maurissa Tancharoen.  We announced some new licensing deals, which we’ll round up in another post over the weekend.  We screened a Season 4 recap along with episode 1 of Season 5. Marc Hustvedt has a great writeup of the guild panel (‘The Guild’ Season 5, Comic-Con, Honeybadger and Jones Soda) on Tubefilter, and you can watch the panel itself here or here.

Thanks fans for another great year at Comic-Con!

Photos by SnugEZ, Kipicat,

That’s where you come in! We’re asking for fan questions on the subject. You can submit your questions three ways:

1) Post a comment here (this post)

2) Tweet your question with the hashtag #guildquestion

3) Reply to the Facebook discussion thread that we’ve started.

Submit your questions no later than Oct. 4, 2009 and we’ll pick some to use.

Thanks,

Felicia, Kim & Sean

Remember to check out the Knights of the Guild podcast for some great interviews, updates from the cast and crew, and some great discussions.

Some of the loyal Guild fans from our community have hijacked Felicia’s personal blog to wish her a happy birthday.

Lastly, none of this could be possible without our venerable leader, who’s tireless efforts to entertain have been enjoyed by millions of viewers. We, at The Guild, find that working with Felicia has been blissful, and fun, and fulfilling because she inspires us all to work hard and make things happen even when its seemingly impossible.

From the cast and crew of The Guild, we would like to wish Felicia the happiest of birthdays.

Happy birthday, Red.

• Nick Williams (@kuroi_lion) Fake DVD extra for #theguild. Clara’s pole-dancing class! [view tweet]
• Will Wilkins (@netheadww) #theguild The Guild Second Season DVD Extra: Tink’s Guide to Handling Men: Use the Booty to get the Loot-y [view tweet]
• Joe Pierce (@JPierce) The Guild S2 DVD extra – Around the Outlands on 10 Gold a Day with your host Vork. #theguild [view tweet]
• Daniel Rouk (@DannyLR) Buy #theguild season 1 and 2 DVDs, now with Klingon language soundtrack. [view tweet]
• Megan Lynch (@may_gun) 2 DVD extra – IMDB entries for every spoof @Vork film title eg “Avorkalypse Now” #theguild [view tweet]

Winners all receive a Season 2 DVD and a signed cast photo (sorry, not the Jeff Carlisle poster–Kim made a mistake, the signed ones are the cast photo)!

And stay tuned (by following @TheGuild) because if you liked that contest, we’ve got a great one coming soon…

This New Episode include:

* Updates on Cast and Crew
* Their experience working on Season Two Episode Four: Heroic Encounters.
* Fan interview with Swedish Guildie Bel-Rand
* Their first crew Interview: Director and Editor of season two Sean Becker.

And lots of other goodies! Listen here or download through iTunes! Thanks as always Kenny and Jenni!!

We are so excited to have fans getting together and making a podcast about our show! The Knights of the Guild has just posted their first episode. You can download off of iTunes or at their website.

Features include:

Today’s show features:

* We discussion our background and talk about how we came to find ourselves working on the second season of The Guild.
* We give a brief description of what The Guild is and it’s characters.
* For our Fan interview we have diehard Guildie Dani from Brazil.
* We update you on the Cast and what they currently are up too.
* For our BTS segment we discuss our experience working on Episode Three (Jenni’s first episode).
* For our Cast Interview we talk with the lovely and very talented Michele Boyd, who plays Riley (Stupid Hot Tall Girl).
* Then we have our final words and say goodbye.

Thanks Kenny and Jenni, what a treat!

To top it off, Matthew Brackney, who redid our credits for season 2, designed them a kick butt logo! Very cool! We look forward to their first podcast launching February 15th on their website. Thanks Kenny and Jenni!

I’m sure you’re all aware of the low-budget nature of the show (even with our new-found funding) and how hard it was to get Season 2 off the ground initially with no producing help. To top it off, due to landlord issues over the summer, we had also lost one of our major locations: Codex’s apartment! Gah!

This was a HUGE problem as we needed to shoot extensively at her apartment for the season, and the old location was so unique, it became necessary to be worked into the storyline that she moved somehow (to justify it, we had Zaboo’s mom become a Real Estate lawyer )

Storywise we found a solution, but shooting-wise we still had a problem. We posted on this website in July/August asking for volunteers who owned/managed an apartment complex, duplex etc, but honestly it’s very hard to find a place to film in the LA area and we didn’t expect anyone to respond. Lucky for us, Andrew Gleason stepped up to the table!

Andrew’s father manages an apartment complex and they happened to have an empty unit available for our needs. This was literally the only reason we were able to start shooting Season 2 when we did. Andrew isn’t even a gamer (just the casual Wii) and came to the show through Felicia’s Dr. Horrible performance, but has proven to be one of the most supportive fans of the show. Truly, we are so grateful for his contribution. As a bonus, you can definitely see him in the background of a future Guild episode so stay tuned. Thanks Andrew!

Wildridge Robert Roy Created this masterpiece dedicated to our show called “I Wanna Be in Your Guild”, please watch and comment! Totally amazing, thank you SO MUCH! Rock on!

LYRICS:
I Wanna Be In Your Guild
by
Wildride Robert Roy

I can be your knight — your knight in shining armour
Or I can be the thief — the thief of your heart
And I can heal — heal where others have hurt you
Any role — I can play the part

I wanna be in your guild when you play
Can I be in your guild whaddya say?

You know I’ve always been a lone wolf
Hunting alone without a pack
Now that I’ve seen you guys in action
I know that’s the way to slash and hack

I wanna be in your guild when you play
Can I be in your guild whaddya say?

Just set any quest for me you want
Is there some initiation?
No task or labour to daunt
My desire for this vocation

I can be your knight in shining armour
Or I can be the thief of your heart
And I can heal where others have hurt you
Any role I can play the part

I wanna be in your guild when you play
Can I be in your guild whaddya say?

I wanna be in your guild when you play
Can I be in your guild Felicia Day?

Our latest language is Italian, kindly translated by uber fan Franceso Spreafico. Not only do we have an Italian YouTube Channel now with a truly impressive number of hits already on the Season 1 videos, but we also have Italian subtitles on our central YouTube Channel, all thanks to his hard work! We couldn’t be more grateful for your work and outreach, thank you so much Francesco!

In a strange coincidence just last week on Christmas Day, Corriere della sera, one of Italy’s biggest newspapers, featured an article on our show! We’re pretty sure the Yahoo Babelfish translation of the article was not that accurate (what does “whose screw virtual ends with finding outlets” even mean?!) but it seemed flattering from the general tone at least, and inspired by an article that was written up on us in The Guardian Newspaper, a leading paper in England. Very exciting to have the world as our audience!

Cool thing is, you will be able to catch Zack in episodes 9-12 as “Slacker” as well! Talented on and off-screen, thank you so much Zack for this wonderful piece of art, and your participation in our show!

• Joyent: Web hosting making it possible for…this page
• Elizabeth Hughes: UPM helping us coordinate all the production stuff behind the scenes
• Matthew Brackney: Fan-artist, now re-animating our credits!
• Elliot Peters: Lots of cool Photoshop stuff and other unnamable things
• Rebecca Safier: DVD Stuffer, phone caller, jill-of-all-trades
• Melody: Casting assistant, wunderbar.
• Andrew and Jonathan: Providing locations for us to shoot at!
• WooThemes: Donated WordPress skin, we’re working on a new webskin as we speak!
• Dani: Coordinating all of our translators for the new YouTube subtitles

If we forgot you, we’ll list you later, I promise. More crew to be thanked after we actually START shooting next weekend, new episodes mid-October! Heck yes!

Also, we couldn’t be more flattered to have TWO mashups of The Guild with our 2 favorite sitcoms! (Well, Felicia’s favorites at least )

Thank you 0KatieDurham0 and maxsummers (our diligent Portuguese translator) for editing us into great company!

We’re looking for an apartment building and apartment (interior and exterior), and an OLD House for Season 2. If you would be so kind as to let us shoot in your house/apartment, please email us at locations (at) watchtheguild.com with pictures of the exterior of your place, living room, kitchen and bedroom. This would be a location we would have to go back to in subsequent seasons, so we’re looking to avoid any landlord issues. We’re a very clean, small and friendly crew and we will also have location insurance. We would PREFER colored walls, so that would be a bonus. This would be a huge help for our show, so if you have any solid leads, please send us some pics!