AMENIA — A low-budget storytelling podcast created by Amenia resident Jane Watson and documentary filmmaker Frank Donnelly, and their joint venture Spiked Eggs Productions has been nominated in three categories for a Signal Award.
Watson was notified on Tuesday, Oct. 2, that the Spiked Eggs podcast titled “Who’s the Ass?” had been nominated for the national award in categories including Shows: Best Sound Design and Shows: Best Scripted (Fiction). Another Spiked Eggs podcast, “Bingo After Dark,” has also been nominated in the category of Shows: Best Editing.
Signal Awards, the Oscars of podcasts, is in its third year, seeking to uplift the podcast medium by recognizing strong, meaningful and novel audio projects. The 2024 awards are focusing on recognizing podcasts that define modern culture.
Competition for Signal Awards is stiff, with competing nominations this year going to Saturday Night Live cast entries, Wanda Sykes and more.
Produced on Watson’s kitchen table in Amenia, “Who’s the Ass?” is described as dark comedy fiction with one foot in the present world of social media and the other in an imagined past.
Commenting on the nomination and the production process on Thursday, Oct. 4, Watson said that she has lived in Amenia for 21 years, while Donnelly lives in Staten Island, their work together being largely remote. Their actors may reside in the UK or the US and participate in script reads together on Zoom.
Donnelly, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist, has earned several awards for his 2015 documentary “Crossing Waters,” an examination of the ebb and flow of immigrant residents within a single low-income neighborhood in Poughkeepsie.
Watson and Donnelly work together on auditioning and casting, and then Watson takes over on pre-production and production, voice actor direction, and then post-production editing and sound design, all at the kitchen table.
The podcast episode, released Aug. 2 and titled “Who’s the Ass?” is inspired by a fable, “The Miller, His Son and the Ass.”
“The premise is how things can go terribly wrong when you try to please others, when you let strangers tell you how you should live your life. I thought immediately of how it could correlate to today’s culture of people pursuing “likes” on social media or following the advice of “influencers,” Watson said.
Watson said she liked the satiric idea of interplay between fable characters and modern culture. “There is also a bit of a clash between generations: a Boomer vs. Gen Z,” Watson said.
The concluding episode of the nominated podcast will be released in November.
“I’m a storyteller at heart,” Watson said. Watson has a background as a New York City photojournalist and later a filmmaker and she fell in love with audio drama podcasts about nine years ago. They reminded her of old-time radio broadcasts and the power of imagination.
“Just about everything you can do with a camera, you can do with sound,” Watson said, identifying foreground and background and other tricks with audio to tell the story.
How to Vote
Fans of podcasts who would like to hear the nominated episode(s) can go to any of several platforms such as Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Audible and others, and search for “Spiked Eggs Productions.”
To cast a vote for a Signal Listener’s Choice award, go to vote.signalaward.com and scroll to “Start Voting.” In the search space, type “Spiked Eggs Productions” to see the three nominations. Voting concludes Thursday, Oct. 17.
