Behind The Kickstarter Curtain: An Interview With ‘Fake Geek Girls’ Creator Sara Clarke
Kickstarter can be a magical place of dreams coming true, thanks to the combination of the world’s creativity and generosity. One of the best parts is how you get to connect and share an experience with the creator, and the other backers. But I figured it couldn’t hurt to take that one step closer, and really get into the grit of some of the Kickstarters that peak my geek interest. During my explorations, I came across ‘Fake Geek Girls‘, a webseries project about a video-game designer and her booth babe friend, both trying to scrape along in the world of geeky femininity. Sara Clarke, creator and geek girl herself, graciously agreed to answer some of my questions about her web series project ‘Fake Geek Girls‘:
Let’s start at the very beginning: where were you born? No, okay. How about: where did the idea for Fake Geek Girls come from? Are there certain geek aspects of your life that you feed from?
About a year ago, I got really into the idea of writing about women in tech. I wrote a full length sitcom pilot about a young woman who gets a job as Employee Number One for a tech startup. While I was working on that, I’d hear my downstairs neighbors, who are actors, shooting their own videos and uploading them to the web and using them for their reels. The thing about spec sitcom pilots written by unknown screenwriters is that there is very little chance of them ever being produced. So I was sitting alone in my apartment tapping away at something I knew nobody would ever see, overhearing my neighbors actually make their own movies. Which is when it hit me — why not go down there and collaborate with them? Julie-Joy Voss, who plays Jessa in Fake Geek Girls, is one of those downstairs neighbors. I adapted my sitcom about startups into a web series about video games and geek culture in general, she called up a bunch of actor friends, we busted out the camera, and Fake Geek Girls was born.
Regarding geek aspects of my own life: I am a dyed in the wool sci fi TV/movie geek. Doctor Who, Star Trek, Firefly, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica. Buffy and Game Of Thrones, too, though they’re more fantasy. Anytime there’s a new SF series or franchise on the horizon my geek alarm goes off. Right now I’m really excited to see the Tomorrow People reboot the CW is doing. Unfortunately, it’s not really that interesting to make a web series about people who are really into a particular TV show, so I needed to pick a different aspect of geekdom for my characters to be obsessed with. Which is how video games happened. I’m a gamer, but not a very serious one. Luckily, Julie (the actress who plays Jessa and the producer of the show) has a serious Left For Dead habit, so we’ve got our console gamer bases covered. I’m also really into tabletop gaming and hope we can incorporate that into some future episodes.
Obviously, even from the title, you are commenting on the culture and stereotypes of the girl in geekdom. What do you feel these stereotypes are, and how do females perpetuate or fight against them?
It is really hard to be a girl geek. From both angles, actually, which I think is something that isn’t as talked about. There’s the issues that are being discussed a lot right now, of the way women get treated within geek culture, and inclusiveness, and needing women within the industries and franchises that make up geekdom (more female game designers, filmmakers, etc), and the fact that there’s no such thing as a “fake” geek. But from the other angle, as a female geek there’s also backlash from the “girl” side of the equation. I got made fun of constantly by other girls in school for being a Trekkie. Reading sci fi novels, playing Dungeons & Dragons, making video games, collecting comics, and activities like that aren’t really seen as appropriate hobbies for a girl. I think that’s why female geeks are in such an uproar about all this stuff. It’s like, we get excluded from mainstream culture just like male geeks do — if not more-so, as geeky stuff becomes more mainstream — and THEN we also get excluded from geek culture. So where do we go? I see a lot of the conversation about “geek girls” as being about women trying to carve out a space where we can be ourselves. It’s not so much about combating stereotypes as it is about just existing as we are.
With that in mind, what was the inspiration for the main characters?
I wanted to make kind of an “odd couple” comedy duo of geeky ladies. So you’ve got Jessa, the stereotypical nerd, a game designer, socially awkward, the person who you’d immediately recognize as a geek. Her foil is Kat, a booth babe, who at first you’d assume wasn’t a geek at all. But she’s just as into it as Jessa is, and in fact it’s Jessa who wants to go out on a Friday night while Kat wants to stay in and play video games. I was kind of envisioning Eddie and Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, but into geeky stuff instead of fashion.
Did you always have Kickstarter in mind as a method of continuing the project?
Yes and no. I definitely wanted to make sure that we had an audience for the show, and Kickstarter is a great way of finding that out. You know people really want to see more when they’re willing to put in a little bit of cash. On the other hand, I didn’t think “Oooh, I know, let’s make a Kickstarter for a webseries!” The Kickstarter campaign came out of wanting to make sure there was really an audience for something like Fake Geek Girls. And we’re finding out that, yes, there sure is.
Where do you see Fake Geek Girls going from here?
Prime time! Just kidding. Fake Geek Girls was conceived very modestly. Our main goal with the first episode was to actually DO what Julie and I came to Los Angeles to do. In her case acting, and in my case writing. So in that sense, the show is already a huge success. Now that we’re finding an audience and gearing up to make more episodes, I’d like to get a little more ambitious in terms of the production value onscreen. We’d like to shoot some episodes on location, and we’d also like to have a better costume and prop budget so we can show off a little more of geek culture on the show. Cosplay isn’t cheap, unfortunately. I mean, I guess everyone hopes their webseries is going to make them famous, but personally I just want to keep making the show, and making it better.
What’s a dream location or gag you want to try with the show?
I’m trying to shoot an upcoming episode entirely on location in a comic shop. I won’t reveal which one, but it’s probably the coolest one in Los Angeles. I would also LOVE to shoot at a con but so far I haven’t found one nearby that would work in terms of our schedule. I would love to have the Season 2 finale be at Comic-Con, assuming we get a Season 2.
Let’s hear a funny story about filming the first episode.
We planned for Kat to have a bunch of really cool nerdy tattoos. I bought this expensive tattoo printing paper and spent an afternoon designing some stuff. Then, the morning of the shoot, when we were doing everyone’s costumes and makeup and all, it turned out that I hadn’t read the instructions for the tattoo paper and didn’t have one of the tools we needed. But we printed them anyway, put them on as best we could. And they looked great! That hour of hacking the fake tattoo process totally paid off! … But you can’t actually see them on camera, just due to a fluke of the angles we used. Whoops. Just know that Kat has some extremely bitchin’ tattoos, which hopefully you will see in an upcoming episode. It was a bonding experience, crammed into the bathroom in Julie’s apartment, sticking things to different parts of Katie, hoping it would look OK. And I learned that I am an extremely talented seat-of-your-pants improvisational makeup artist. Also, always read the directions BEFORE you’re actually on set!
Who would win in a fight: Altair or the Prince of Persia?
Hm. Assassin’s Creed is the first video game to make me REALLY wish I was a more serious gamer, so I’m going to have to say Altair. I love the whole aesthetic of the Assassins and the parkour stuff and basically I wish I could live inside that game. Also, I feel like in a fight Altair could probably sneak up on just about anyone and kick their ass before anyone knew he was there. That said, I bet Governor Elaine Marley from Monkey Island could teach him a thing or two. The Assassins don’t seem to have the wordplay angle happening much.
Thanks for this glimpse behind the Kickstarter curtain, Sara! You can find ‘Fake Geek Girls’ at their Kickstarter page, or you can even watch the whole pilot episode here. Personally, it’s a deliciously cute glimpse into two geeky lives, and you’ll probably feel quite accomplished when you’re done watching. See what I mean.
Also, donate. Please. Because she made a reference to Monkey Island and, how appropriate, you fight like a cow. (omg, why isn’t that up there in the fight question!)
