For Your Consideration: Sound Engineer Tom Boykin.

This Post is in a series of posts that is directed at the members of the IAWTV/Streamy Awards. The content will highlight different members of the Compulsions team. These are meant for both awareness and as a guide to showcase what each individual brought to the project.

Tom Boykin is an experienced sound designer  who holds quality at the highest of levels. Last month he won an Indie Soap Award for Sound Design for his work in Compulsions.

Tom has a strong set of beliefs when it comes to sound. He prefers to lean toward “natural” sounds. He believes that “sound should serve to AMPLIFY what is going on with the picture. It shouldn’t be expected to make up for any faults and should never, ever, detract from the visuals.”

From Director Nathan Atkinson: Here’s the truth, I didn’t find Tom. Michael Tohl did. I only wish I had – then at least I could take some kind of credit. Tom really is not only “that good,” he might just be the single nicest, easy to work with, most innovative, complete professional I have ever met. I met him for a coffee, called the Producers as I was walking out the door and told them to offer him the job. Initially, we only used him for Production Sound – but it quickly became evident to me that the man has the ear of a master musician, I was right. As soon as we found out that he did Post Sound/Sound Design, we fell over ourselves to work with him again. An amazing experience.

From Creator Bernie Su: They say that Sound is half your film, for a series like ours I feel that holds especially true. Going into pre-production, Producer Michael Tohl preached how vital the sound design would be to our show. He spoke of how the picture quality would take it to one level, and the Sound would take it to another. We needed to have some elite sound to make this series work, and for that we have Tom.

I’d like to highlight a couple of scenes below to showcase what Tom brought. (These clips are set to play at a certain timecode in each episode)

Episode 1: 0:00 – We start this episode with a long shot of  Mark circling Adam. In reality all this is, is one character walking around a still/bound 2nd character, but I encourage you to turn up the volume and listen to the details in this 30 second scene. What you’re hearing is 100% Sound Design, it’s meant to be subtle yet eerie, and it’s there to set the mood of our entire series. Throughout the episodes featuring the Interrogation room, Tom continued to keep this consistent feel through the space, this gave the set a distinction of almost being it’s own character.

Episode 2: 0:45 – In this sequence we cut rapidly back and forth between the Office and Interrogation scenes.  Here you have two scenes with two completely opposite moods and tones. Watch and listen for the swipes, strikes, and screams that were so expertly engineered into the sequence. If you want to really feel how much Tom’s work added, try watching the sequence again but with the volume off. You still may get the scene, but you lose so much of that added power that the sound design provides.

From a personal level I always like to remember the direct moments while working with various members of our team so I’ll add one more note. During the Episode 1 Sound Mix Session Tom paused the playback after our iconic “lemon on the pliers” scene and said to us, “You know that squirt sound… it’s a real lemon, I squeezed it myself.” – Awesome.

So please consider Tom Boykin in Compulsions for Best Sound Design in the 2010 Streamys.

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.

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.

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

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. Spurred by it’s ensemble of character and drama heavy storyline Compulsions was rewarded with 11 nominations.

The Indie Soaps Awards are sponsored by We Love Soaps and the nominees were selected from a first round of judging from a panel of entertainment critics that cover the industry.

We Love Soaps is a high traffic website and podcast dedicated to the world of soap operas, and has recently begun covering Independent Dramatic Content with it’s Indie Soap Beat

Compulsions is also up for the Fan’s Choice Award at the Indie Soaps – Poll Embedded below