FAQs

Who Are You?

I'm Gina Femia.  I'm a playwright, producer, educator, collaborator, bookworm, geek.  

I noticed that you talk weird 
funny 
in an interesting manner.  From where is that charming accent?

I'm so glad you noticed!
I'm a Brooklyn native, born, raised and currently residing within, so some words get extra special loving from my tongue. 

What is this project?

Here's the short n sweet version:

The Project Project is a social experiment where I follow the progress of 25 projects through following up with those working on them over the course of the next three years. 

Interviews are turned into podcasts while the blog provides extra insight into the person or people involved. 

Everybody has a project.  What's yours?

Is there more? 

Sure is! You can read my blogpost about its conception, hopes and dreams here!

Who are you doing this project for/What company is associated with it/Who's paying you do to this project?

This project is a direct product of my head

...aka it's an independent project that I'm producing solo.

It came out of a discussion I was having with a friend and collaborator, Hazen Cuyler.  He's a brilliant and wonderful actor and deep thinker about life and performance.  He and I were talking about New York theatre what a shame it is that there's more emphasis on getting the show ready to present rather than being able to truly focus on a rehearsal process.  He (semi)-jokingly said something like 

"How cool would it be to be rehearsing something for three years?  One negative would be that you'd only be working on one thing for three years, but could you imagine how great it would be?  Telling people 'Yeah, I have something coming up in a couple of years, you should check it out', getting to work on a piece in a deeper, stronger way?"

His main point was that the process of rehearsal is the key to unlocking the play, but it is often rushed and put limitations on for the sake of presenting a finished product for an audience to see.  

His point made me think about how many projects in our lives get rushed and thus this popped out of my head and into reality and here we are, answering FAQs on a blog.

So, do you know what you're doing?

Not really

Define "know"

As long as I have Google, I know exactly what I'm doing!

I know that sounds glib (because it is!), but I really mean it.  In this day and age, nobody really has an excuse to not at least attempt to do something they have absolutely no background in.  As long as you know how to ask a question (or at least come up with a couple of keywords) and plug it into Google, you can't allow lack of knowledge to be the obstacle that stops you.

For example, I bought an audio recorder at the Radio Shack the same way I buy wine - finding the least expensive recorder and buying the one right above it in price.  I decided to do this based on the research I did by comparing customer reviews on Amazon.  They emphasized that a recorder under $100 would be, for these purposes, fine.  The lady at Radio Shack reassured me of the same and, not wanting to be completely cheap, my purchase was made.

I am doing all the audio editing in Audacity, a free (FREE) audio editing software that I downloaded (for free) off of the internet.  It's pretty user friendly, but for those tricky editing spots, I just use Google to ask my question and thousands of strangers answer.

I'm hosting the podcasts on a free (superfree) sound hosting website called Mixcloud, which gives you unlimited space for free (no money!).

And you're reading all this information off of a free(bee) blogging service.  Am I a blogging expert? Not even slightly am I that!  Am I putting together a cohesive blog?  Yes, I am.

Do I know what I'm doing?  Not really, so please excuse any little glitches you may encounter, but I am learning and improving.   And all I really know is that if I wasn't doing all this, then not only would I not know what I was doing, but I would never know how to do any of it.  And what's the point of that?