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.