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.

Thanks for voting…

Here’s an updated lists of the prizes.

- One – $50 iTunes Gift Card – Donated by Hollywood Mac Guru

- One – Safety Pin-Up Calendar featuring Brittney Powell – From the Hit Online Comedy Safety Geeks: SVI Donated by Dave and Tom

- Five – iPhone 3G / 3GS ID Credit Card Cases in Silver or Green

- Two – True Blood x American Apparel T-Shirts – Large

The Compulsions Crew shoots the final scene of Season 1, Episode 8: Promise Kept

It pleases me to be basically forced to answer this question. Our Season 1 Finale Episode 8: Promise Kept was not 4 days ago, and everyone I’ve come across since that day (strangers, friends, fans) ask me the same common question “When is Season 2?” Or let me try this in another more accurate way… “WHEN IS SEASON 2?!?!”

Honestly, I don’t know… I wish I did but so goes the world of Independent Online Web Series. We can only do so much by ourselves, and we need some big help. Those of you who know film production can tell that this is not a cheap series to make. This was a multi-person passion project over months and honestly we can’t “passion project” it again without sending all of us into poverty (which several of us are already teetering on). So we have to wait for a deal, production company, studio, advertiser (most likely multiple), to come in and cover the costs of the production for future seasons. Do we want to do another season? – Hell Yes!… Early in  Pre-Production I gave Nathan Atkinson, and Michael Tohl a 5 season – 60/70 episode story. So we’d love to be able to tell it. Heck, our original season 1 was a 14 episode season, so yes there are episodes just waiting to be shot.  -  Have people been blowing our phones off the hook with interest? No… but honestly that doesn’t phase me. It’s the middle of December and the show JUST finished its run. Though I’ll say that I can’t remember when I’ve looked so forward to a new year like 2010 though.

A lot of you have asked how you can help. Well it’s pretty simple, you can help us get the word out on our show. Yes Dailymotion has done a ton, probably more than any other partner I’ve ever seen in the Web TV space, but there is more to be done. I’ve always been a part of the “tell one to tell many” belief. So tell your friends, especially those of you that have blogs, or know bloggers, or whatever, just tell them about Compulsions. Have them post about it, and have them give their honest opinion. A great way to introduce people to Compulsions is to check out our new Season 1 page here you can watch the entire season in one sitting!

As far as immediate help you can tell people or help by donating to our “Send Compulsions to the Webby’s Campaign” – We’ve already got some great prizes for donors and have received a few generous donations (and prizes) thus far. We have more prizes than donors at this point, so if you were to even donate $10, you’d be receiving a prize that retails for at least double that. Are you a bad fan for not donating? Of course not. Times are tough, it’s the Holidays, we get it. We appreciate you just watching the show and spreading the word. We feel guilty enough just asking for donations, which is why we’re so adamant about giving prizes back to the donors.

Finally again, thank you everyone for watching the series. The public response has been absolutely tremendous. One of the donors said this to me in an email “I think you’ve created something simply groundbreaking with Compulsions and I’m happy to do my bit in support of future seasons”.  – Words like that give me faith that high quality content like this can exist on the web, so onward we trek.

Since the show is done for now, I’ll be blogging a lot more so if you have any questions or wish to hear about or read from one of the other members of the team please let us know and I’ll do my best to make it happen.

Be sure to sign up on our EMAIL LIST, fan us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter

The Webby Deadline is December 18th, so this (like our series) is going to be lean and efficient. All you have to do is push the donate button above (or below) and donate what you can.

Of course we aren’t just asking you to donate for nothing. We’re willing to give back too, so we’ve begun to wrangle up some prizes for some of our top donors.

Here are the first two prizes (first being first announced, there will be more and better prizes)

Two True Blood x American Apparel T-Shirts – Large

True Blood x American Apparenl T-Shirts - White one says "Friend's Don't Let Friends Drink Friends"

We’ll update this page as more prizes are announced… thank your for your support!

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook or sign up for our EMAIL LIST to keep up to date.

Disclaimers:
We’ll do our best to cover shipping costs, thus we can only really ship within the U.S. – unless you want to chip in for shipping.