‘My Gimpy Life’ Gets Funding for First Season

By 02/02/2012
‘My Gimpy Life’ Gets Funding for First Season

Fans of Felicia Day and The Guild (and fans of individuals Felicia Day is a fan of) will recognize Teal (technically like the duck, not like the color) Sherer from her role in the uber-popular original web series about what happens when gamers get off their computers and into the complicated world of real life. She plays Venom, who is part of the Axis of Anarchy (which is a rival guild led by Fawkes, who is played by Wil Wheaton) and a “total bitch on wheels.”

Online video enthusiasts may also recognize Sherer from the pilot and/or trailer of My Gimpy Life, a comedic web series produced by Sherer’s Rolling Person Productions, directed by The Guild’s Sean Becker, and written by Gabe Uhr that’s inspired by her own sometimes awkward adventures of being a driven actor navigating through Hollywood in a wheelchair.

But soon, consumers of online entertainment will also know Sherer from more than her role in The Guild and the pilot and/or trailer of her web series. That’s because the web series will soon be more than a pilot and trailer. Sherer is beaming and proud to announce her online original’s secured funding for a five-episode first season.

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The funding comes courtesy of Steven Dengler and his company Dracogen Strategic Investments. I caught up with Sherer over e-mail to ask her how the relationship with Dengler came about and what her expectations for My Gimpy Life are now that it’ll soon be a fully-fledged online show.

Tubefilter: How’d you hook up with Steven Dengler and Dragocen Strategic Investments?

Teal Sherer: We shot a pilot about a year ago and shared it with our friends and peers. Based on that, Steven Dengler and his company Dracogen decided to sponsor our first season. Dracogen also invests in a lot of other interesting artistic (Fallout: Nuka Break and the second season of The Jeff Lewis 5 Minute Comedy Hour) and charitable endeavors.

Steven and I met through Twitter (he followed me because of my work on The Guild). I tweeted about being at Niagara Falls with Jacob Drake and Steven offered to take us on a sightseeing flight over the falls in his plane. Unfortunately the timing didn’t work out but ever since then we’ve been friends.

TF: How many episodes of My Gimply Life are you making?

TS: We’ve already shot one, our “pilot,” which might not end up being our first episode, and we’re going to shoot four more episodes this spring. So five total or one shy of what the Brits call a “series.”

TF: Getting funding for a show is a great achievement! But what’s the ultimate goal here? Would you like to see My Gimpy Life get picked up by a distributor?

TS: Like all other web series, our goal is to find the audience that’s right for our show and tell them a story. Most web series have to build that slowly over time, but we’re in a unique position where we have Sean Becker, the director from the biggest web series out there, and lots of other talent and crew from that world.

We’re going to distribute ourselves on YouTube because it has the biggest potential audience for us and their reporting and accounting are completely transparent. For a long time, YouTube was kind of like this worldwide public access channel, and more and more, they’re becoming an on-demand destination to challenge the networks and cable. And I still own the show so there’s the potential to license to other outlets down the road. So, it would be great to get “picked up” by a cable channel or whatever, but it’s not like ten years ago where if you independently financed a pilot and none of the big guys wanted it, you had no outlet for it.

TF: Are there any advertisers on board?

TS: We’re open to partnering with sponsors that fit the show, but again, we’re in a unique position because this first season already has a main sponsor based on the pilot.

TF: I see Felicia Day makes a cameo appearance. Can we expect to see any more recognizable faces?

TS: Amy Okuda. We’re still breaking our stories and writing scripts, but we’ll most likely have at least one more familiar face from The Guild, and hopefully some people you’d recognize from TV.

Stay up to speed with My Gimpy Life on Facebook and tune into updates, episodes and other video whatnot (that’s most definitely worth watching) pertaining to Sherer and the series over at YouTube.

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