Web Series Ready to Break Out, Predicts The Guild’s Felicia Day

Felicia Day thinks that 2011 will be a tipping point for web-distributed video productions.

“There are some really high profile web series that are going to come out that are either financed by studios or through tech companies,” she said in a recent interview with CinemaSpy. “I truly believe this year will be a tipping point.”

Currently shooting season five of The Guild, the web series about gamers she created in 2007, Day is also putting the final touches on Dragon Age: Redemption, another series for the web based on the video game from Electronic Arts and BioWare.

No stranger to traditionally-produced television, Day was one of the many slayers in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and has been regularly traveling to Vancouver recently where she is acting in the fifth season of SyFy’s Eureka.

But it was her role as Penny in Joss Whedon’s 2008 web series, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, that sparked her rise to prominence.

Day said that she’s surprised it’s taken so long for web productions to gain acceptance.

“I thought it would happen faster,” she admitted, calling Dr. Horrible‘s success a “phenomenon”. The fact that Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion were involved made web video very high profile, she said, but that momentum seemed to sputter.

“I assumed that filmmakers would come in and say, ‘Hey, I want to make this kind of content,’ but for some reason it didn’t attract that large scope,” she said on the phone from Los Angeles.

“Dr. Horrible was just way ahead of its time,” she added.

Budgets for web productions increasing

Because the financial stakes for web productions are lower, Day said the Internet is a perfect place for experimentation. But she thinks that budgets are trending upwards.

“As more people stay online, I think budgets will get higher because of necessity,” she surmised.

Day said that some 30-second television commercials cost more than what it costs to produce a season of a web series. “If you put that into narrative fiction on the web you’re going to get a lot higher return as far as reaching your audience,” she said. “At least that’s my theory.”