Craig Frank accepts his Indie Soap Award for Best Actor

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. 

As for the awards itself, I was happy to see that the voting committee took the process very seriously in declaring their winners. For example, before watching the awards (which you can re-watch here) I was sure that Tatyana Ali would take the Lead Female Actress award for Buppies simply off of the number of total nominations for the show (13) and that she’s probably the highest profile actress in the field. (note: I am not taking anything away from her performance. I’ve watched several episodes of Buppies and she’s great in it.) Thus, seeing Rachael Hip-Flores take the win for her angst driven, conflict heavy teen aged character in Anything But Me was pretty awesome and definitely well deserved.

As for our awards, saying that I am thrilled about them would be an understatement. It’s exciting for a writer to see his/her own characters lead to award winning performances. So even though I technically lost in my category, I felt richly rewarded seeing Craig Frank and Taryn O’Neill take home big wins. It was very validating and it gave me a great sense of pride in my craft. At the very least, I must be doing something right.

Fun facts: This is actually the 2nd time I’ve written Craig into an acting award, and the 2nd actress named Taryn that I’ve written into one… so I guess I need to reach out to Taryn Manning.

Anyway let’s not take anything away from the actors. Earlier in the week one person commented to me about how “gripping” the series is. Going into our series, it was pretty evident that the Mark(Craig) x Sara (Taryn) x Adam (Seth Caskey) dynamic would really make or break the tension of the show. To see it executed so well by the three of them as well as being supported so well by our entire crew behind them was definitely rewarding at the very least.  In a later blog post I’ll showcase several of the performances specifically.

For our technical awards winners, Tom Boykin (Sound Design) and Michael Darrow (Editing), I’m thrilled to see them both being recognized for outstanding bodies of work on both fronts. I really encourage film/web series makers out there to reach out to either of these two. They’re both talented (award winning) and reasonable technical experts that are great to work with. Tom can be reached through his website http://www.tomboykin.com, Michael can be reached via twitter (@darkxavier666) or Facebook. You can also email contact at compulsions dot tv and get other contact information.

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

Mark Sandler (Craig Frank) use a “patience” approach to manipulate the information he’s seeking as Sara Flannery (Taryn O’Neill) speaks to her partner Adam Creedy (Seth Caskey). Meanwhile, Mark is pushed by his enthusiastic co-worker Randy (Sean Spence) into speaking with Lacey (Elizabeth Tsing)

Mark Sandler (Craig Frank) begins to interrogate the formidable Sara Flannery (Taryn O’Neill) while juggling a technical problem at work. He proceeds to seek out the help of IT Tech Cassandra Morrissey (Annemarie Pazmino) and gives Sara a devastating revelation.
Also starring: Seth Caskey, and Sean Spence

Previous – Episode 3: Fairy Tale

Mark Sandler (Craig Frank) finally breaks Adam Creedy (Seth Caskey) into revealing what he’s been keeping hidden. Mark shares his new information with Justine (Janna Bossier) while trying to go maintain his day job.

Also starring Sean Spence and Elizabeth Tsing