It’s been a great week for us over here at the Compulsions camp. I’d like to lead off by thanking all of our friends and fans for the immense support for the wins. It was definitely very exciting on Monday night watching the Twitter and Facebook streams pop off  in support of our winners as they were announced. Second, a big thanks goes off to  We Love Soaps for putting together a great Inaugural Indie Soap Awards show and for doing a stellar job in raising awareness of Indie Dramatic content across the web. It’s also great to see an “awards season” start to unfold for the web space as a whole. Starting with the Clicker award, and now moving through the Indie Soap Awards and on to the Streamys and Webbys.

A great benefit to web content fans is that it gives us another outlet to discover content across the internet. It also proves how difficult it is to really be on top of what’s going on in WebTV. Going through the nomination process I had only heard of about half of the shows on the list, so even from my perspective it pushed me to sample several shows that were previously completely unknown to me.  (continue reading…)

Compulsions received 11 nominations in the 1st Annual Indie Soap Awards

The winners of the 1st Annual Indie Soap Awards were announced in a ceremony on Monday night from Shetler Studios in New York City. 13 web series were honored with various awards. Compulsions tied the most total wins of any show (with Anyone But Me) – The total list of winners can be found here.

Compulsions won the following Indie Soap Awards.

Best Performance by a Lead Actor-
Craig Frank as Mark Sandler

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress
Taryn O’Neill as Sara Flannery

Best Editing
Michael Darrow

Best Sound Design
Tom Boykin

The 1st Annual Indie Soap Awards were developed to honor the efforts of creative forces in the world of independent web series production, specifically those who produce continuing drama series.

One stand out episodes that showcase all four winners is Episode 4

The Indie Soap Awards wins adds to its previous Clicker Best Original Web Drama Win.

Watch the 1st Annual Indie Soap Awards below or at http://welovesoaps.net

The 1st Annual Indie Soap Awards were developed to honor the efforts of creative forces in the world of independent web series production, specifically those who produce continuing drama series.

Compulsions received 11 nominations

With the Epic Fu Tubefilter event tonight (if you’re in the LA area you should go) I thought it’d be good to get back to some of the roots of the show and how it came to be.

Annemarie Pazmino in the IT Room set.

One of the big phases of Pre-Production is settling your locations, and one of the first knee jerk reactions is to go with the cheapest (read: FREE) available. Looking at our Season 1, you can see an array of locales but two that really stand out as challenging finds were the Warehouse and the Computer Repair Room. Early on in our pooling of resources we found two such locations that would have cost us nothing… “Great!” we thought, but we soon realized how they were both “Traps.”

The term “Traps”, was spoken often by Producer Robert Grand in Pre-production. In his vast experience in line producing (and it is VAST) he’s come across many such experiences and warned us about falling into them. He described them as Traps because on the surface they appeared great, economical, the easy path, but in reality crossing them would result in more problems and more money in the long run.

Trap #1: The Computer Repair Room – From Day 1, Producer Michael Tohl  spoke about a Computer Repair shop that he was friendly with. Quickly into planning we managed to secure a deal with them to shoot at their working storefront for free but with one big restriction; we could only shoot there at night when they were closed for business.

So what’s wrong with only shooting at night? Well for one you’re doing 7pm to 7am shoot days, and those of you who have been on shoots like these know they are NOT FUN. They are draining for everyone, people move slower, and they are tough to recover from. Also specific to us, we’d have to shoot night for day, which meant not only slowing us down but also we would have to o rent more lighting gear. Thus in reality shooting at the “free” location would have in reality ballooned our budget with extra gear and extra crew time. Thus… a trap.

The Compulsions Crew onset at the Warehouse Location

Trap #2: The Warehouse – Let’s take away from the fact that this was the make or break location of our series, we were willing to put some money into this. The story here starts similar to the IT room, we found a serviceable empty commercial space right away. By commercial space I mean like a store front.  You see a space in a mini-mall open it and it’s just bare, plenty of room to stick poor Seth Caskey in a chair and mess him up right? Sure, but again there was big caveat, it’s a mini-mall store front.

Many of us go to mini-malls every day, they’re great, but are they great to film at? This particular mini-mall is busy; you have a gym upstairs and dry cleaners adjacent. Add the fact that the mall faced a major Hollywood street and you have sound issues all day and pretty much all night.  Plus with big storefront windows it meant lighting problems as well.  Thus again, blocking out all the windows with light and sound would mean more needed gear and a slower pace for our crew so again it would mean more money and again… a Trap.

As a result in both cases we ended up with other locations that we sunk some money into. Both locations were better, easier to work with, required less gear, and thus cheaper in the long run. In indie Web Production nothing is ever truly “free”, so beware of traps.

as always be sure to sign up on our EMAIL LIST, fan us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter

Happy Martin Luther King Day everyone.

Incidentally this day also is the last day for the public to submit their Streamy Nominations and in relation to both I’m reminded of our amazing and diverse cast.

Early in our casting process we as a team were adamant about having a racially diverse cast. Did we cast on race? No… we just wanted to be diverse to feel real. The real world isn’t predominantly one race, and as such our world in the show isn’t either.

One of the exciting results for our cast is how well they’ve come together as an ensemble. One of the most consistent complements we get for our series is in our performances. NewTeeVee said that we have  ”some of the best acting in web series last year.” A praise that really goes out to the cast and our director Nathan Atkinson

If you’re reading this you’ve probably already seen our Season 1,  so I’m sure you have your own opinions. If not please watch and see for yourself. – Watch Season 1

I encourage you to send some submissions votes for show and cast today for the Streamys. Don’t submit because I’m telling you to, submit/vote because you believe in the strength of the performances on screen.

Best Male Actor in a Drama – Craig Frank

Best Female Actor in a Drama – Janna Bossier

Best Female Actor in a Drama – Annemarie Pazmino

Best Guest Star in a Web Series – Seth Caskey

Best Guest Star in a Web Series – Taryn O’Neill

Best Guest Star in a Web Series – Sean Spence

Best Directing for a Dramatic Web Series – Nathan Atkinson

Best Ensemble Cast in a Web Series – Compulsions

Best Drama Web Series – Compulsions