Merry Maidens

What a cute logo!

Since I've been talking a lot about LIW on this blog, I thought it was high time I talked about the LIW I was involved in, Merry Maidens.

It's a modernized gender-bent adaption of Robin Hood. It was created by Anya Steiner, the same mind behind Northbound, an adaption of Northanger Abbey that I really liked. When Anya posted on tumblr that she had moved into the Chicago area and was looking for volunteers to help her with the show, I immediately sent her an email. I was so excited to be a part of this project.

#LadyCrew

That was in September. Soon, I met Anya (top right) and we talked scripts and our mutual love of the genre. She sent me a draft to look at. It wasn't long before I got to meet her other recruits, Jenna (bottom right) and Sarah (center). Sarah was a stage director looking to learn about film and webseries. I think the best way to describe Jenna is that she comes from fandom. She always seemed to be working on something for a convention.

Then casting happened.

While I was disappointed I couldn't be physically present at casting (long story), I was so excited to be involved. The first video audition I saw was Sissy Anne Quaranta's (below, left) audition for Robin. It was absolutely nothing like what I had imagined Robin being like-- it was a hundred times better.

Do you ship them yet?

I next watched her callback with Evey Reidy (right). A couple seconds in, I had to stop it. Was that-? No, it couldn't be. Maybe? After watching the rest of the video, I told Anya that I liked their chemistry, and asked if I should know Evey from somewhere. But of course. She was Nancy in Jules & Monty, based on Romeo & Juliet, another show that I adored.

After that, the audition videos became a bit of a blur. Some of the choices were obvious, others not so much.

I missed the table read and the first couple days of shooting. While I was happy to go on vacation, I had really wanted to be there and meet everyone. I shouldn't have worried. The filming process took longer than expected, so I had plenty of time to get to know the cast. It wasn't that we weren't filming everything that we planned on in a day. With a couple exceptions, we remained remarkably on schedule. It was that we had to work around peoples schedules so we only filmed a couple episodes a day, and we only usually filmed once a week, and there were a couple episodes Anya wasn't happy with so we re-shot, and some episodes that had to be filmed on multiple days, and a few episodes that Anya wrote between shoots and had to somehow schedule in, and the fact that we didn't start filming until January so we had to wait until it was warmish (read: not freezing) to film our outdoor scenes.

My Merry Maidens Family.

When we wrapped filming in early April, I didn't know what to do with myself. It had been such a big part of my life for so long. I didn't want to lose the new friends I had made. We had a premiere party at Justin's (left, in the mask) place before Merry Maidens aired. It was cool to see them all, but of course, it is really hard to get all of us in the same place at once. The only time it happened was for the last day of filming.

The show had been airing for a couple weeks now, and it is so fun to watch people react over twitter. I love seeing the hilarious things Marissa (center, back) and Cat (center, in the pirate's hat) caption the videos with when they share them on Facebook, and I love still feeling connected to the Merry Maidens family.