Hywel’s Blog

Risk Assessment

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:14:01 +0000

Today I read a salutary reminder that what we do is not risk free in the following post by Midori:
http://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/sex/suspension-accident-it-finally-happened-0130121/

I’m not qualified to make any comment on the specific incident. I wasn’t there, and I don’t know anyone involved.

The message I take from it is that risk is ever-present in bondage (as in any other physical activity) and that we must do our best to think about those risks, and the potential consequences if something were to go wrong.

So it is a timely reminder to review our safety procedures on Restrained Elegance shoots.

It is also a call to urge other riggers, producers, models, players and participants to take an hour to do a simple risk assessment of their bondage activities.

Although most bondage websites are too small-scale be to legally required to do so, the recommendations of the HSE are a good way to start. Even if we only carry out the steps mentally (which I’ll admit is all I’ve done up until this point).

http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg163.pdf

I’m not an expert. But that’s the point, the HSE advice is targeted at non-experts who have to assess everyday risks. I’m going to try doing a risk assessment. I’ll concentrate on risks to the bound model, but of course there are wider issues (trailing cables, lights, walking backwards over a cliff whilst taking a photo...) for other participants too which I should flesh out in a second draft.

I’d like to emphasise strongly that this is me doing a first draft and going through the process, in public. The important thing isn’t to follow we what do, but to think about it.

As the fiancee of a bondage model I’d be so much happier if all producers went through a basic risk assessment procedure for their own shoots. PLEASE DO SO!!!!

The life of the lady I love is in your hands. Quite literally, especially in the case of suspension, but also even in the most ordinary of bondage shoots.

So I’d really appreciate it if we all took the opportunity to go through a basic risk assessment process for our shoots and think if there are things we should do differently. A few incidents I know about have made my hair stand on end, and Midori’s post shows that even a very experienced rigger who has suspended people thousands of times is not immune to risk or to making mistakes.

Please pause to consider what risk you may be placing your model (who might just be my fiancee) in, and whether there are simple ways to reduce the risk and mitigate the potential consequences if something did go wrong.

Thank you.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY THE HAZARDS
Let’s have a go. It’s not exhaustive but the most obvious ones are:
1) Tripping or falling, which is much more likely and possibly more severe when someone is bound.
2) Damage from too-tight bondage on the wrong places (nerve damage, strangulation, cutting off blood supply, rope or metal cutting in).
3) Choking, especially if gagged.
4) Dislocation, an added complication to the falling risk.
5) Suspension, which multiplies all the above risks considerably because of the extra weight, extra height and extra helplessness.
6) The presence of hot lights, heavy lighting rigs, electrical cables especially if suspended above the model or near her.
7) Neck damage. Anything anywhere around the neck, especially if it is attached to something else (like a yoke, or a fiddle, or a collar on a leash) has the potential to get fatal, possibly instantly, if something goes wrong. We should flag that up for especial concern. A trip is bad, a trip with a potential broken neck is something we need to remove as a possibility.
8) Overheating from any sort of mummification.
9) Fainting. This one is rare (has happened twice in over 500 shoots, but that’s often enough to really need to consider what would happen if she were to faint).
10) Getting cold which can increase other risk factors.
11) Poor communication. I also include broader issues like the possibilities of models “not say anything even though it was getting uncomfortable because I don’t want to be a diva” and riggers and photographers not telling the model what to expect.
12) I’ll presuppose existing good practice- safe, sane, sober, consensual. Obviously, allowing someone drunk or intoxicated onto set is a no-no but it isn’t something which happens at our shoots. If you like to play after a glass of wine or two, your risk assessment should probably include some consideration of it.
13) Whipping the model with the rope ends or giving her friction burns as you tie/untie. A relatively minor one, but one which is a possibility with every tie.
14) Not being able to get someone out in a hurry if you do need to.
15) Fire and burn danger especially if using hot wax.
16) Harm caused by nipple clamps (reapplication is bad, clamps sliding off is bad)

STEP 2: DECIDE WHO MIGHT BE HARMED AND HOW

1) The model, who is obviously most at risk from these hazards. It is her risks we’ll focus on for this first draft as the person most likely to be at risk, and most likely to be in a situation where she may be unable to help herself.
2) The photographer, who is also capable of walking backwards into a hot light, or tripping.
3) The rigger, if present.

That’s obvious, so let’s concentrate on the model.

STEP 3: EVALUATE THE RISKS AND DECIDE ON PRECAUTIONS

There’s a misconception about health and safety law. The law recognises that there are risks which cannot be eliminated. Your responsibility is to do everything “reasonably practicable” to protect people from harm. The HSE say:

Can you get rid of the hazard altogether?
If not, how can you control the risks so that harm is unlikely?

A good place to start for your own shoots is “current practice”. Google “Bondage Safety”, or look at the Restrained Elegance basic bondage safety page, follow the links on that page to more comprehensive documents as well:
http://www.restrainedelegance.com/bondagesafety.php

Reading back through that document, which I wrote a couple of years ago, I’m pleased to note that I mention many of the hazards I identified above. Our “safety culture” on RE shoots includes a fair bit more “folk wisdom and current practice” which I ought to get around to writing down more formally to make it easier for us to look through it.

I don’t want to go through all the above risks, this is a long enough blog post already. Let’s just look at a few illustrative ones, starting with a simple one.

Whipping with rope ends and rope burns
We’ve got to tie and untie models, so we can’t eliminate the risk. But we can surely control them.

Good working practice when untying someone greatly reduces the risk of giving someone a rope burn or hitting them in the eye with the rope ends. Put your own fingers behind the rope when you undo it, so you can feel any heat generated and protect their skin. Do it slowly and carefully, and you’ll greatly reduce the risk of whipping with the ends too.

Unrigging in a calm, unhurried manner reduces this risk so we probably don’t need protective goggles for model or rigger. That might have been necessary had ropes flying around at great speed been essential to the procedure. But it isn’t: we can just slow everything down. Maybe get the model to close her eyes or have someone else shield them if the ropes are near her face.

What can we do about some of the others?

Hot lights
Nothing should be so close to the model that she might roll into it or pull it down onto herself. Any light up high should have a wire safety cable to a secure point just in case the mount slides off an inadequately tightened spigot. We can’t eliminate the need for hair-lights, but we can make sure that if they do slip off the spigot, they get held by the safety wire.

Let’s take a look at the serious bondage-specific ones.

Neck Risks
The neck issue is probably the most frightening. That’s the sort of thing that can take a minor incident and turn it into a fatality. So we just plain don’t do ties where there’s ropes up near the neck; anything going either towards the front or back of the neck has to be tensioned down to something like a chest harness or under arms so it can’t ride up.

If there’s anything like a collar attached to a chain, the chain has to be PLENTY long enough to reach all the way to the floor without putting pressure on the neck area, and should be checked for snags or places it could catch. In fact, maybe we should consider bungee or easily-snappable elastic bands or something as the final attachment of such a leash to the wall or ceiling point, so there’s something with lots of give in it should there be a sudden jerk.

It has only recently occurred to me that the yoke is also a neck danger if someone were to trip. I’m not sure what to do about that one yet. So I’d better restrict it to positions on the ground or on a bed until I’ve thought more carefully about it.

Suspension
Given the unfortunate incident which prompted this post, let’s look at suspension. That’s another one with clear danger of death or serious injury. All manner of issues here. You could eliminate the risk by not doing suspensions. But what if you love them and want to continue? How might we control the risks?

1) Make sure the suspension point is really sound. Ours is a very sturdy welded steel U-plate with two large bolts through a floor joist, so the basic point is probably sturdy enough to suspend a mini from. That is a single point of failure, but if it fails, the house is probably falling down. I have some concern about the winch and pulley system, which has a lot of single points of failure, so I’m considering backing them up with a climbing sling around the U-plate with carabiners clipped in to the suspension ropes. It would have to be done once the model is already up in the air, but it does provide backup to the whole winch system, so I should probably do it.
2) Consider crash mats. I should buy one as hitting a mat is definitely better than hitting a hard floor and we could totally buy a white one which will sit nicely in our cove and can be propped up against the wall when not in use.
3) No suspension tie with a single point of failure. It’s just not worth the risk if a rope slips, if that’s the only support. It may be less stylish, but spreading the load between many ropes is just safer.
4) Be extremely careful of anything inverted. In fact, I don’t think I will do inverted suspensions again, I’m not happy with the risk tradeoff. Certainly not until I have crash mats and backup slings in place.
5) Consider whether a tie can just as easily be done with hands in a position where the model can use them to protect herself to some extent, should something go wrong. Falling onto your arms isn’t good, but falling onto your face or neck is a lot worse.
6) Do the tie on the floor and winch up slowly, assessing the safety and comfort when the model is 6 inches rather than 6 feet in the air.
7) Rig anything that can be a semi-suspension as a semi-suspension. If the model can get a foot down, and control it herself, everything is safer.
8) There’s a reason we’re now doing suspensions in a white infinity cove- once you get high enough up that the model’s hair doesn’t touch the floor, it properly looks like she is suspended in infinity space. This can often be done only two or three feet up. Falling three feet could still be serious but falling six feet is far worse. We can make it look maximally dramatic with minimum height.

Trips, Falls, Faints, Dislocations and Face Planting
Just for a moment imagine standing up straight, holding your hands behind your back, and deliberately leaning forward until you fall flat on your face, onto a hard floor. Would you be willing to do that? No? Me neither. So we’d damn well better figure out ways to minimize the chances of our model doing it.

Thankfully, we’ve had very few accidents at shoots in the 11 years we’ve been going. The two or three which have really put the wind up me have been falls.

One was caused by mis-communication: I was going to lower a model on to the floor from kneeling, whilst tied. she let herself go before I was ready to take her weight, and I just couldn’t catch her from the position I was in. She hit the ground with a thump, knocked the wind out herself but fortunately no harm done, but that could have been nasty if she’s properly face-planted.

The second was caused by a pregnant model (who had not told me she was pregnant) who fainted in the bondage. She was wearing a steel collar with a chain the ceiling. Fortunately, she was supported by her wrists, and there was a reasonable amount of slack on the chain but that one still gives me nightmares which is why I am quite so uptight about anything around the neck. I also now decline to shoot with pregnant models. I accept one could possibly do bondage safely with them by being very careful, but I prefer to eliminate that risk completely.

The risk is dislocation if a slip or faint happens is one I feel is often not considered seriously enough. For example, a strappado tied with no chest/waist harness to take the weight were she to slip, fall or faint would turn a minor slip into a potential shoulders-wrenched-out-of-sockets incident.

It probably looks fine, the model will assure you she’s OK, but just consider what would happen if she DID slip or faint, and you’ll see the value of having ropes to take the weight in extremis.

We used to tie unsupported strappados until we did one outdoors on uneven ground and Ariel correctly realised it was a serious accident waiting to happen. Having realised the potential for damage, we now only tie supported strappados. It doesn’t change the look of the tie THAT much, and seems like a very worthwhile trade-off to eliminate the dislocation risk.

I think a lot of people are aware of the dangers of nerve damage, choking and so on- these are discussed at length in bondage safety web pages so all we need to do here is follow good practice and have good communication on set.

Actually, the single biggest improvement for safety probably comes from having an extra person present. This is why I always try to shoot with another person these days. (It also helps productivity and gives me a rest instead of the day being absolutely non-stop). The best way to forestall the “what if the photographer faints/knocks themselves out/has a heart attack” concern is to just make sure another person is present... or at least in earshot.

I know that’s not always possible; if it isn’t, we should consider leaving a phone inside the model’s reach.

In fact, I just asked Ariel to change her current practice when rigging on shoots for me and stay in the room while I’m shooting the set; she usually goes out but stays in earshot. It might feel a bit awkward to have another model on set looking at the girl in bondage but I think the safety advantages of the rigger constantly monitoring the safety without the distraction of looking through the lens outweigh that.

STEP 4: RECORD FINDINGS AND IMPLEMENT THEM

We’re meant to do this in a simple way. We’ve already got a set of working practices for RE which the crew all know. So rather than list everything we do from square one, I’ll list the things in this review that are new for me (and memo myself to do a proper “safety bible” writeup for ourselves sooner rather than later).

1) Existing injuries: make sure to ask at the start of the shoot. We usually do this anyway, but it needs to be done every time, as part of a general introduction for the model into safety at the shoot.
2) Ensure that EVERYONE knows how important it is to communicate, and do so in good time. It is much better to stop and re-rig or rethink than have to cut someone out in a panic. Emphasise how important this is to every model, especially new ones, and make sure to thank and praise them when they do so.
3) Good practice: before you start each rig, pause a moment to evaluate the safety implications, especially the most serious ones: can she fall, what if she faints? Can anything damage neck, head or dislocate anything? If so, change the position, change the rig, add extra supporting ropes or just plain do something else. Needs to be done for metal bondage (eg yoke) as well as rope.
4) I should write up our oral culture “safety practice” so we can update it and review it.
5) I should distill the essentials of the safety practice for the short introductory chat we have with every new model when they arrive.
6) Eyes-on: make sure the rigger stays on set to be a safety monitor during the tie; ask all the riggers to do this.
7) Suspensions: winch failure. Add a backup sling system just in case.
8) Suspensions: buy a crash mat.
9) Suspensions: hands. Rig so hands can be used to partially protect self in case of a fall, just in case.
10) Suspensions: tie anything which could be a semi-suspension as a semi-suspension, so the model can control when she is off the ground.
11) Suspensions: no inverted suspensions until new slings/mats in place, and possibly not even then. Suspensions are risky, but a lying-down one three feet above a crash mat is a lot safer than an upside-down one six feet up over a concrete floor.
12) Yoke: be much more mindful assessing trip/fall risks. Consider limiting to floor/bed positions only until properly thought through.
13) Go over safewords with new models, especially if gagged. Demonstrate “cut” as safeword so we hear it and she knows it.
14) Only rig strappado if there are supporting ropes to take weight just in case she were to slip or faint.
15) Consider use of bungee or low-breaking-point material like elastic band for anything where a neck chain or similar fastening to a wall is used and there’s potential for neck or dislocation damage.
16) Buy anti-trip covers for studio cables on floor.
17) Consider banning drinks from the studio entirely- there’s no reason they can’t be kept in the kitchen out of the way of hot lights and electricity with a bound girl on the floor.
18) As we have done already, have a separate rigger wherever possible.
19) If we must do solo shoots, put a phone inside the models’s reach (as well as the keys)

I hope the above doesn’t come across as preachy, holier-than-thou or “we’re safe, everyone else is dangerous”. The important thing isn’t to blindly follow someone else’s rules. It is to DO THE RISK ASSESSMENT YOURSELF, FOR YOUR SHOOTS. Consider what COULD happen if a rope were to slip, or a model to faint. You might just break out in cold sweats realising what would happen if something did go wrong. So TAKE SENSIBLE PRECAUTIONS by changing the way you shoot, or the way you play, for the better.
Then do:

STEP FIVE: REVIEW YOUR RISK ASSESSMENT AND UPDATE IF NECESSARY

As I hope I’ve shown, it isn’t rocket science. Anyone can do it. Just think about it every so often, and revisit it in light of experience.

Situations change, you do more interesting stuff, or push the limits, or realise something is riskier than you’d thought initially.

Go back and review it every so often.

Just remember- it might be my fiancee who is at your shoot, and I’d really like her to come home safe and sound.

I’ll do my very best to look after people who come to work with me, too.

Thank you.

Hywel

Art or Business?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:48:09 +0000

I don’t get “is it art?” debates. It’s a matter of opinion and when it comes to art, one opinion is as right as another.

In science, you can appeal to experiment and statistics to give a weight to each possibility. You can’t do that with art.

In a democracy, you rely on the opinion of the majority. But that doesn’t work for art either because something genuinely can be a beautiful work of art to some people and meaningless noise to others (even the majority).

Calling oneself an artist runs the risk of pomposity or pretension, so I’ve always been reluctant so to do.

However, I think there are meaningful differences between whether erotic websites are primarily artistic endeavours or primarily businesses and you should decide which you are doing.

I’m not making any value judgements about the relative merits of art vs. business. After all If you are selling art you are by definition also running a business, and if you are taking photos and making videos as your business, you cannot avoid making artistic choices every time you do a shoot. But it helps to decide where your primary focus lies. Are you an artist who sells their work or a business-person creating products that people want to buy?

I’ve been thinking about this and it has really cleared up some things I was worrying about.

I have faced up to the fact that Restrained Elegance is an artistic endeavour. I should stop feeling guilty about being at best an amateur businessman and revel in the opportunities I have to become a better artist.

Of course, I still intend to do everything I can to take care of the kind people who are my customers. But I’m not going to follow the market or launch a dozen different tightly-themed sites I don’t care about just to make more money. I’m going to make art I think is “good”.

Let’s take the example of the photo of Ariel opposite.

Re-enactment Viking costume? - check
Neolithic burial chamber? - check
Sunset? - check
Stylish lighting? - I hope so
Blonde? - check
Blue Eyes? - check
Long Legs? - check
Barefoot? - check
Bondage? - check
Overblown Drama? - check
Unnecessarily more work than shooting something in the studio? - check
More expensive and time-consuming than a shoot in the studio? - check
Likely to sell less than a shoot in the studio? - I imagine so
Shot on way over-specified kit for delivery as a web JPEG? - check

Commercial success? - dubious
Commercially, should I shoot more like that? - doubtful

Do I care? - No

Am I proud of the pictures we shot that day? - Hell yes
Do I want to shoot more like that? - Hell yes!!!

Art? - I guess it probably is, then

Will I shoot this sort of thing as often as I would if it were wildly popular commercially? I guess not; the money has to come from somewhere.

But this photoset follows in a long line of descent from my earliest drawings of viking girls in fjords, and I’m not going to stop doing it just because it less popular that certain other images I also like to shoot.
Frankly, the popular stuff can subsidise my indulgence in stuff I like to create but which might not be as commercial.

I’d still have the site even if only a handful of people like it and I’ll keep on shooting stuff I feel is high quality even if the market doesn’t really demand it (or sometines even appreciate it!)

That’s the way I think things should be running a website as an artistic endeavour. The market will decide whether or not you can do it full-time, but if art rather than business is your aim, you should stick to your own artistic judgement of what to shoot and try not to be too swayed by the public reaction. Use the funds you generate to pay for the next project and whatever gear you need to make it happen.

If you are running a website purely as a business, you should absolutely do the opposite- carefully analyse what sells, micromanage your production accordingly, control your costs, and make lots of profit. Buy whatever you need to serve your business model and no more, cover your costs, run lots of sites which don’t even necessarily need to be to your own taste particularly, and see a nice fat bottom line.

That’s what business is all about, and absolutely nothing wrong with it. I just think you should figure out what is more important to you, and run things accordingly.

I started Restrained Elegance because I was instantly addicted to creating bondage images after a two-decade search for the right medium. I started the website to pay for the expensive photo and lighting gear and models I needed to get the images in my head onto paper (or pixels) the way I wanted them to look. I’m very fortunate that it took off to such and extent that I can now do this full-time. I try to be professional about doing so, and try to avoid making big business blunders, but the main purpose of the website is to generate the funds to make the next project and buy the equipment to make the photos to the standards I aspire to (not the standards the market requires, which might be quite different!)

I mustn’t lose sight of the business aspects, but I’m surprised how much happier I feel admitting to myself that I’m an artist selling his work rather a businessman.

This provides the answer to the question “Why are you shooting on a ridiculously over-specified camera when your customers are mostly viewing the images as highly compressed JPEGs?”

I’m shooting that way because that’s what it takes to make the pictures on my screen look like the pictures in my head.

There’s no business justification for it. The business-orientated webmasters who have pointed this out look at me like I am slightly crazy when I agree that it is totally unnecessary given that most people are looking at the pictures scaled down even from the 1600x1200 pixel web versions. I just don’t care; that’s not the point. The justification is the “WOW!” factor it gives me when I look at the photos and compare them to the images in my head. The sales on the website have very fortunately provided me with the wherewithal to buy the artistic tools to make images the way I want them to look, fulfilling the original purpose of the website.

I think the primary difference between the business model and the artistic model is what you use to judge the quality of your work.

I use an “internal artistic compass”. I can tell at a glance which shots are “the best” in a set. I have a subconscious set of criteria which match up the images to the glowing images in my head and instantly yells out “That one!” The internal artistic compass is what tells me if a shot or a set is any good, and tells me what to concentrate on improving next time. It’s emotional, gut-reaction, instinctive, entirely internal and it feels like it is telling me what to do so strongly that it is hard to resist. It’s even hard for me to understand sometimes why other people can’t “see” that the shadows are a bit green and they need to be pushed to blue so the image looks “right”. I sometimes feel I have very little conscious choice about how to finish an image, so strong is this internal compass.

Following the imperative of the internal artistic compass is what matters most to me about my images.

This is not a good way to run a business. By all means develop your own style and start with your own ideas, but I think if you are truly running a business the final quality filter should be what your customers buy. That is what tells you what to concentrate on doing different next time, not your own artistic judgement.

Experience has shown that I do not work well that way. Without the internal artistic compass, I have no idea how to get started with ideas, how to light, how to dress the set, where to stand, who to hire, or when to press the shutter release button.

Pride in my work is really important- it is ultimately the reason why I quit my lectureship and became an artist full time. I had the internal compass for lecturing, and did very well at that. I had it for writing documents, but never had the time to do it well, so I always fell short of my own standards there. If I’m honest I only had a few sparkles of it for my research, and I didn’t have it all for managing a research group or getting grants. I hated not having a feel for parts of the job, and not having the time to deliver to my own standards for most of the rest of it. Hence the full-time artist move!

The internal compass is a prerequisite for taking pride in my work.

This is why my images feature women of similar physical type. My internal artistic compass knows how to “make ladies like that look good to me”. I know this is prejudiced, but I’m not a jobbing photographer working to an art director’s brief (something I’ve tried a couple of times and hated). I’m trying to bring out pictures in my head, and the pictures in my head feature girls I find pretty.

I have done two shoots starring a male model. I liked one and hated the other. The difference was in the “Artistic Compass”.

The one I liked was a shoot with a cross-dresser who wanted to be made to look like a Restrained Elegance girl. I totally got that concept, and I was really pleased to be able to have a go. I’d happily do more shoots like that. I have an opinion on how I did, and ideas about how to do better. That’s because of the artistic compass. I won’t be making a business of it because in the pictures in my head the girls are actually girls, not cross-dressing guys, so it is easier to start from a female model. But as a fun project from time to time? Absolutely.

The no-fun one was a male model who wanted shots for his portfolio. Not his fault, but since I don’t find men attractive and have never pored over photos of male models in magazines, I don’t know what makes men look good. My artistic compass is silent on the matter.

No pictures in my head, just a few clippings from magazines to try to imitate. No feeling for which shots of a set were any good, no real feeling for how I might do better next time. Given lots of time and external feedback, I’m sure I could learn what works or what sells, but I doubt I’d ever “get it” in an instant the way I do with pictures of women.

I’m not cut out to be a photographer-for-hire. I can do you a good job on women, especially if they are in bondage, being spanked, satin-clad or barefoot and you want them to look attractive in a certain slightly on-a-pedestal 1970’s sort of way. I can do you a reasonable job of mountains, also thanks to my internal artistic compass. (My teenage drawings were of girls, mountains, and girls standing in front of mountains!)

But a general photographic assignment? Forget it! (No, I definitely do not do weddings!)

I totally agree with Pandora Blake’s very thoughtful blog posts about representing a wider range of people and preferences in spanking porn, like male-male spanking and female-gaze spankee porn rather than male-gaze spanker porn. The audience could well be huge and largely untapped. If I were a businessman, I should be looking at that niche and seeing if there was a big profit to be made.

But I know that I’ll never have a feel for it, which means I’ll never really take pride in it, and that means I’d never really be happy doing it. I’d be constantly on the look-out for the chance to shoot an idea I wanted to shoot for myself.

That’s not the business-minded thing to do, and I’m also troubled by the parallels Pandora draws between such prejudices and racism. My defensive explanation is that by restricting myself to stuff I have a feel for, I am creating images I can judge the quality of for myself. I hope people will like them enough to keep buying them, as I’ve been so lucky that they have to date, so the business will have to muddle through as best it can. I like a challenge too so of course I’ll take the occasional opportunity to shoot stuff outside my comfort zone; some I’ll turn out to have a feeling for and might do more of, some I won’t.

Proper artistic exploration of different kinks and different gender/sex themes are probably best left to people who do have strong feelings by which to judge the quality of their work for themselves. And business explotation is probably best left to those able to work to customer’s preferences rather than their own.

So yes, it turns out, I am an artist who makes a living selling his work. Who’d have thought it? :)

Cheers, Hywel

http://www.restrainedelegance.com
http://www.elegancestudios.com

Time For A Bondage Documentary?

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:47:36 +0000

Call for expressions of interesting in making a documentary about BDSM and bondage/spanking website production.

To date, I have not seen any documentaries on Fetish/BDSM lifestyles or the production of fetish erotica told from the inside, by people who "get it", which allows us to attempt to explain to a wider vanilla audience what we do.

I’m thinking of a program explaining what we do and ho we feel about it in our own words, without a vanilla TV presenter leading things in whatever direction the program makers wanted to take things in the edit room to "spice it up" and where the insiders have the editorial control.

I've seen programs with negative slants, programs with reasonably-positive-but-a-bit-baffled slants and LOTS of programs with giggly school-yard salacious slants and prudish indignant tabloid slants.

I've never seen one that felt like it was attempting to tell it from the inside. Either the inside of being in a stable kinky relationship, or the inside of being a fetish website producer (operating as a cottage industry, as nearly all of us are).

So it got me thinking- why don't we make one?

I have never attempted a documentary before but I'm willing to give it a go.
I'm willing to produce (i.e pay for & organise) it, light it, film it, edit it and appear in it... but I can't do it all by myself! :-)

So this posting is a first invitation for collaboration, help, suggestions, advice
and input on this project, to see whether it is a goer.

The form of the final documentary will be largely shaped by the people involved, because I think we should stick pretty closely to what we know. Otherwise we'll just do the same slanted/outsider's perspective that other documentary makers have done.

Therefore I think we should restrict the documentary to what we (Ariel/Amelia and Hywel) know- bondage and spanking, with female bottoms/subs.

I don't feel qualified to make a program about anything else as an insider and that would defeat the object of the exercise. Of course, I'd be more than delighted for people whose tastes/activities are broader to discuss them in the documentary if they were to get involved. Obviously lots of people are switch, and it would be nonsensical to interview someone who does one-to-ones as a top AND as a bottom and not discuss that aspect of their kink and their work.

However, to be coherent I think the program will have to concentrate on bondage/spanking/female bottom/sub as our main thread. I'll leave explorations fem dom, lesbian/gay/transgender BDSM and everything else to programs made by those more qualified. (Or at least to collaboration on sequels if this one happens.)

The project is only at the vague musing stage, so there's an awful lot to discuss and therefore an almost infinite number of ways in which anyone interested might be able to help out. Nothing in cast in stone but these are my initial thoughts:

1) Either 30 or 60 minutes final running time- whichever seems to fit best once we've got our outline.
2) Initially I'll be looking to distribute it online. Either free (as PR for involved sites) or for a relatively minimal price to cover bandwidth/hosting costs.
3) As it is being done as a private project, the budget will necessarily be low. I'm willing to put up enough capital & time to drive around all over the UK interviewing people and getting shots, paying expenses and what I warn you will be a modest per diem crew rate where necessary. I'd not exclude a couple of transatlantic flights or Eurostar tickets, but my feeling is that there's more than enough in the UK to be going on with.
4) We will have all the Restrained Elegance resources at our disposal, including video cameras, lighting, sound and post production facilities.
5) Very important: anyone willing to appear on screen will have editorial veto over what appears in their segment. I don't think it is practical to give everyone editorial veto over the whole thing, but you will have final say over anything featuring or referring to you. If you don’t like it, we will change it or remove it entirely.
6) That applies to me (and Ariel/Amelia) doubly. If others get involved, it is on the understanding that we will have final editorial say, once everyone appearing approves their segment.
7) We should not exclude the possibility of wider distribution if the project happens to work out. I'm not arrogant enough to imagine my first documentary would be of high enough quality to interest mainstream broadcasters, but at least let’s shoot the raw footage to broadcast standards so we aren’t excluding the possibility from the start.
8) Pre-production in early 2012, production in mid 2012.

I am interested in hearing from anyone who thinks they be able to contribute in any way, from ideas and blog post musings through to appearing in the documentary or helping make it.

That certainly includes performers or producers interested in appearing in the program in some capacity (as an interviewee, performer or behind-the-scenes at your shoots, for example).

It also includes producers willing to tell us a bit about how their shoots work
either on screen or just as background research.

It also includes anyone with bright ideas for how to frame this as an interesting and compelling story or who knows something about making documentaries!

It also includes anyone techie, kinky or not, who would be interested in working on the project as DOP/cameraman/sound recordist/sound engineer/director/editor/anything else.

And of course if this piques the interest of a professional documentary maker, I’d be more than happy to hear from you.

No commitment at all, just a gauging of interest! Drop me a line to
webmaster@restrainedelegance.com

Cheers, Hywel

http://www.restrainedelegance.com
http://www.elegancestudios.com

Screenwriters

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 15:46:35 +0100

Woah, two blog posts in one month, what’s happening?

Adele Haze posted an insightful comment as a postscript to my review of Inditero:

“The main impression I got from this review is that even big budget porn houses don't appear to see the need to pay good writers. People are quite happy to throw money at the production end, but commissioning a proper script seems to be seen as inferior to the needs of the visual side of things.”

It’s true.
In theory they could have.
In retrospect, they should have.
I wonder why they didn’t?
And I wonder if we should? It is a really interesting idea!

We’re far from alone in this. Hollywood pays its writers, but it doesn’t pay the writing enough attention. How many blockbuster movies are been ruined by a rotten script? Most of them! :-)

I guess my main question would be CAN you commission a screenplay from a professional at an appropriate budget, and would it be any better than what you write in house? Or would it be a better written script that utterly fails to grasp the fundamental nature of the kink? Is there anyone around who I could try to commission such a script from, and would they be able to write it for me in such as way as to allow me to film it?

Why Don’t We Hire Professionals?

Every niche porn production house I am aware of started off really small. When you are small, you can only afford to hire people who are genuinely necessary to the production. That means hiring the on screen talent (and if you are a model, even that you do yourself). You do everything yourself and teach yourself how as best you can. Only if there’s a fundamental inability do you bring in outsiders (eg web hosting, sys admins, billing company, and believe me you resent those!)

That means that even when production houses get bigger, the “in house, self taught” tradition is very deeply ingrained.

So part of it will just be tradition. Kink have probably never commissioned a script from a writer, so it never occurred to them to do so. They just did it in house like everything else they don’t absolutely have to sub-contract.

I’ll bet that the Kink staff are mostly kink first and professional trained whatevers (cameraman. cinematographers, sound recordists, editors, colourists, etc. ) second... if at all. Many of them are probably self-taught, the same way everyone who works on RE is self taught, and like us they probably have to double and triple up on jobs that would be done by separate people at a TV station.

If you were a professional video cameraman, why would you apply for a job for a kinky company if the subject matter holds no interest for you? If you are any good, you’re better off shooting adverts for Pepsi Cola or at least the local car dealership. You’ll have more job opportunities and the pay is probably a lot better.

No, the guys you are going to get are either too rubbish to make it in the mainstream, or committed kinksters. (Possibly both, but I like to think that passion for the material is a great motivator for trying to do a great job with very limited resources).

In fact the Kink.com house style is very storyline-llight, with each of their sites essentially featuring just a single storyline idea played out with different models and different BDSM play, because that’s more important to them and their customers than the storyline is. So they probably don’t have enough work to support a professional script writer in house, even a kinky not very good one.

Hiring People Who Don’t Get It

If you don’t “get” the kink, you won’t do a good job filming it, especially not with such restricted budgets. You won’t know what to concentrate on, what bits are important to the fantasy, how to craft images that will appeal to the target audiences and so on.

I’ve hired a few non-kinky specialists and it is a bit hit and miss. I’ll consider hiring them again but my gut instinct says “only in a role in which they can self-sufficiently do what I tell them to do”. I don’t think I’d dare hand over direction, and I’d be equally nervous about script.

The makeup artists I’ve hired have been good; you don’t need to be kinky to do a good job of that and I’d totally hire them again. The one professional videographer I worked with was a pleasure to work with, but I couldn’t have entrusted the direction to him. He was a pure technician on shoot days. Delivered lovely shots, but wouldn’t have known what to shoot if I hadn’t been there. I’d consider hiring a pro crew (DoP, sound, camera) but doubt I’d let the direction go out of house. The video editors I’ve worked with delivered some nice stuff but I usually had to re-edit to make sure they kept the kinkiness intact, and now I can’t imagine leaving that to a jobbing pro.

The independent photographers I’ve commissioned work from all produced pretty images. But the only one whose work really made the grade is an amateur who has taught himself photography, because he “gets” barefoot bondage in a way the pro photographers simply never will. His shots are not a glam or polished as the pros, but he gets the fetish and in the end that’s far more important.

So, could Kink commission from outside if they had thought of it?

Hiring a professional screen writer to write our scripts sounds like a really good idea- but could I actually do it? Are there any qualified people out there, who get the kink but have proper professional screen writing credentials and experience? So actually, who would you commission a professional script from?

Where would I find such a person? To be worth paying, they’re going to have to turn in a script which understands all the limitations of the production house as well as getting the kink, and being a good script to boot.

I guess there are enough aspiring writers around Hollywood, and probably London too, that both Kink and RE might be able to find someone if we really try.

It means having an intimate knowledge of the kink you are filming, and the target audience, though, and that will need a lot of input from the commissioning studio/director.

Because we work on such shoestring budgets, it also means having an intimate knowledge of what the production house has available. They’d almost have to be an insider to know that they need to script for very specific locations, because we can’t just source (INT OFFICE NIGHT) the way the BBC could, it would probably blow the WHOLE budget for a film like SlavAuction or Haunted.

(Parenthetically, if you are curious, budget for Slave Auction was £1000, the vast majority of which went to the models. We could only afford to do this by economy of scale shooting it as one day from a week long location shoot so a lot of expenses got spread out. That cost also doesn’t include anything for my time, which probably came to a couple of weeks all told. Slave Auction is in profit but not yet by enough to finance the next ES.com movie or give me a minimum wage payment for my work, but I am hopeful it will in the long run. You see why I say the budgets are TIGHT, and the shooting schedule has to be pared to the bleeding bone).

So if you are a professional, would you write a script for a niche project or spend the time writing a mainstream one? If you are a professional writer, you go where the pay is. I’ve NEVER had a professional screenwriter pitch me a script. (I’d like to- email me!) I wouldn’t know where to find one to try commissioning and I doubt I could afford their rates, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong!

I’ve had plenty of scripts pitched by customers, but they have even less understanding of the restrictions of our productions than a professional might, and have zero skill at writing screenplays to boot. At least we have experience of staging, filming, editing and distributing kinky short movies to build on and know what we can script that might actually work.

Everything In House. At Least We Are Consistently Incompetent!

The best people we have found thus far to write our scripts is the production team who will be doing everything else for the movie. And I think I understand why Kink.com are doing the same.

From story to script to pre-production to logistics to production to editing to distribution, at least we understand the kink and understand the limitations of what we have available. It isn’t ideal, we aren’t specialists, but we can probably do it more efficiently than an outsider could, even if we lose on quality.

We’ve found the best person to write it is the director, who in our case will also be the editor (as Steve, Ariel and I are now all at a basic level of competence as video editors). That carries the concept from pre-production through final product in the hands of someone who understands the story and has the best chance of keeping it intact and in touch with the basic kink. A separate writer would be under so many competing constraints from the low budget and the requirements of the fetish that unless they are a part of the regular production team I don’t know how they could write anything we could or would want to film.

Kink.com chose to have the director write their film too. And I guess, like us, she was neither a professional director nor a professional writer but an in house person trying to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.

It would be a very interesting experiment, so if any genuine professional screen writer is reading this, please do drop me a line and pitch me a concept for a script if you are interested in developing one for us.

I wonder if there is any mileage in combining the initial storyline ideas, knowledge of limitations and “getting it” of the kink with the technical skills of a good screen writer. I wonder if running a proto-script by a professional almost in the role of “fixer” is worth doing?

Especially if you are shooting scripted dialogue that may well be worth trying. We don’t- we improvise dialogue in tightly controlled bursts as it seems to work better for non-professional actors. Which means our scripting requirements are even more specialised than Kink’s would have been for their movie; you’d need to write a script outline and work with the director on shots and visual storytelling, but without detailed dialogue OR full storyboards. We use camera plots for the shots where it is practical but space limitations are a big issue there, so sometimes the camera just has to go where it will fit.

Still, same offer applies- any professional screenwriter reading this who is interested in coming in and collaborating on a script, please email me!

I’ll pay you standard RE crew rates for your work!

Hywel

Review: Indietro

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:14:28 +0100

If you read our blogs, it can’t have escaped your attention that the Restrained Elegance crew have been trying our hand at movie making. We releasing our latest project, Haunted, over at EleganceStudios.com in a couple of days’ time, for Hallowe’en.

Kink.com have had the same movie making impulse, and released their first project, Indietro. (From production house KinkStudio.com - great minds think alike :-)

I bought Indietro, downloaded it, and watched the first scene before deciding to burn it to a DVD and watch it with Ariel next time she came home.

Actually for a few days I was gloomy, because the first sequence was really good. So good that I feared it might be a tour-de-force of visual kinky storytelling, made by a company with hundreds of times the resources that we have. “Maybe we should just pack up our cameras and SM Factory cuffs and leave it to the big boys?” I thought.

Having watched the whole movie, I now feel a lot better about our own efforts.

For us, Indietro didn’t live up to the promise of that first scene. This review is an attempt to explain why.

Before I go any further I should add two disclaimers. First, obviously, Kink.com is my competition. They are by far the biggest company making BDSM erotica/porn on the web today. (Erotica = porn I like, porn = erotica I don’t like, in the colloquial definition of course). We concentrate on different ends of the market, but they are nonetheless the big boys in the field. So yes, I should have a vested interest saying bad things about their products.

Disclaimer two is that know just how hard it is to make a movie. Kink’s resources vastly exceed ours, but in turn Kink’s annual production budget for all their sites is a minor blip on the budget line of a Hollywood studio. Indietro’s makers are to be applauded, because they’ve succeeded: they’ve made an actual film you can buy and watch and which requires you to view it as a movie.

Ariel and I watched it with the same expectations that we’d watch a mainstream movie. We responded to it as a movie, not as you’d react to a downloaded webcam video. That’s the biggest accolade anyone at our level can get, but it is funny how much more sensitive you are to the imperfections when the general level of the production is higher.

The film opens with a lovely sequence of moving camera shots introducing the apartment where the movie is set, with classics of BDSM erotica strewn about. Then we dolly over a sleeping blonde (Aurora Snow) on a lusciously appointed table filled with the aftermath of a very good party, all set to the music of an atmospheric piano. The girl still has ropes tied around her wrists and ankles. A door in the deep background opens, and we rack focus to reveal Madison Young in stylised maid’s outfit, collared and cuffed, carrying a big bucket. She tidies up around the blonde, who wakes and croakily asks for a glass of water, before asking “where is he?”. The camera pivots around to reveal a second door in the background. The maid walks towards this door and hitches up her skirt to reveal her bare bottom. We rack focus to her, then to the door, as Mr. Dom-of-the-world emerges from sleep. He louchly walks across to the maid and starts to fondle her.

So far, a masterful exhibition of visual storytelling. We’ve got three characters and we already know where they sit in relation to each other. Although Madison Young is clearly the maid, she’s also at home here, which the visiting blonde is clearly not. And “he” is obviously the dom in charge of all this. What’s more, it is gorgeously staged in depth, with lush production design, atmospheric lighting and smooth camera moves.

I was very keen to find out more. This was the point I thought maybe I should pack up and go home. This was a real movie, and I was judging it as such.

Then the characters starting talking. And bizarrely, they didn’t stop. They talked and talked and talked and talked and talked. I estimate at least 75% of the screen time, someone was talking. And most of the talking was by Mr. Dom-of-the-World.

Film is a visual medium. it is about watching stuff happen, some part of which will be conversation. Little of the talking in Indietro was what you would call a normal conversation. These were written lines in the script being uncomfortably delivered in serious, portentous tones. I don’t think any real people talk like that, even in San Francisco.

In a film, you shouldn’t have to sit through a character reciting a poem about how submissive she is, or have the Mr. Dom-of-the-world deliver long lectures to Aurora Snow saying how she will be objectified and made to submit. Point of order, Ms. Director- you don’t talk to objects, so why the lecture? Objectify her and let us see what it looks like. Movies need to be show, not tell.

With all that talking and only one hour of running time, the actual action got squeezed into the gaps. Very surprisingly for Kink.com, the BDSM and sex action was both brief and lucklustre. Much of the bondage is desultory, I think extra “whack” noises may have been added to a self-whipping scene, and the sex scenes are neither well motivated emotionally nor justified by the progress of the story, feeling tacked on in places.

All of this is exacerbated by the decision to tell the story backwards (Indietro is Italian for backwards). I know, in the wake of Pulp Fiction, Memento and Inception, this sort of creative decision is very tempting. But Indietro is a salutary lesson for all film-makers at our level. There’s nothing in the story of Indietro that requires it to be told backwards. One should learn to tell a story forwards first.

We’re left with very awkward moments where the script is full of expository dialogue, like the married couple arguing on the stairs on the way to see Mr Dom-of-the-World, telling us lots of information WE ALREADY KNOW because the story is being told backwards. Exposition is a necessary evil at the right point in the story; being served the exposition in waffly chunks of flabby dialogue when you already know the information is excruciating.

It is a first film, one must make allowances and it is great to have lofty ambitions. But for film number two, I suggest toning it down and learning to tell a linear story in a compelling way with sympathetic characters first.

The first film syndrome is also on display in the attempts of the film to display “first year art student” erudition at every turn. Reference is made to several literary works in the manner I associate with a very particular type of art student, who clings to the books they have read as though it grants membership of a club of cleverness.

Aurora Snow’s character explicitly belittles her poor husband for not knowing “The Story of O”, not recognising the literary reference of their pseudonyms of “Nick and Honey” and a few other similar references through the film.

As it happens, I haven’t read “Who’s Afraid of Viriginia Woolf?” It didn’t appeal to me. So I didn’t know the “Nick/Honey/George/Matlida” reference until I Googled it afterwards. Having one of the characters in the movie directly insult people like me for not having read a particular book did not endear me either to the character or to the film.

It is like me insulting someone watching my movies for not recognising it if I slipped the Dirac Equation into the plot, or not recognising that consistency in time implies conservation of energy (a consequence of Noether’s theorem, one of the most beautiful and profound results in all of theoretical physics). But if you’ve not come across them, why would you know them? It doesn’t make you stupid.

That this was being done in the middle of a huge chunk of unnecessary, already explained expository dialogue added injury to insult ;-)

There is more good stuff especially on the technical front. The film is a visual treat, especially in some shots like the splendid opening sequence and the “human spinning wheel” and I’ve already raved about the visuals of the opening sequence.

There is bad stuff too. Some sequences don’t work so well: the blue-light bedroom scene with what appear to be Cylon laser-sight spots aimed at the characters was just odd and rather unmotivated both geographically and emotionally.

There are technical issues in the grade where wide shots don’t match closeups. The sound edit is a bit rough in places, but these are all minor technical issues in an otherwise technically adept low budget movie. (Which, if you have never tried making a film yourself, you should understand is a big compliment to the hard work of the director and crew).

But oh, lordy, the script....

We have five main characters.

Mr. Dom-of-the-world, who explains what this marvellous world of BDSM will be like over and again but who does very little of it, seems to take even less pleasure in it, and whose main motivation seems to be the unstoppable urge to talk in ponderous endless monologues. We never learn what he is getting out of any of it or what his relationship with the other characters is going to be after the end credits roll.

Madison Young’s character is probably the best developed, and the few brief tender moments between her and Mr. Dom-of-the-world are brilliant, naturally acted, touching and FAR more informative than the chunks of monologue. We learn that actually she is his true love (possibly wife), this is a kinky game they are playing with consent. He checks she is OK, and tells her it was never part of the deal that it would be easy for her. It is somewhat sabotaged by her sulky topping from bottom at a few points, and by him forcing another character to fuck her for no readily apparent reason despite the fact that no-one seems to want it. But more or less we like her by the end. We have no real feeling for Mr. Dom because the tender moments are outweighed by him being a total arse for the rest of the film.

We have feeling for Aurora Snow’s character, but unfortunately we really dislike her. She whines and moans and complains and witters on insulting her poor husband. She has dragged him along unwillingly to a group sex session where he has to watch her get whipped by random strangers who proceed to insult him and emotionally blackmail him to screwing Madison Young’s character. Aurora’s character is horrible to Mr. Hubby, meaningless to the dom, utterly spoilt and self-centred and has that characteristic Californian WHINE about hubby “pulling this crap” by quite reasonably wanting to get the hell out of there that I personally wanted her poor hubby to ditch the bitch, leave and find someone nicer RIGHT NOW. Or possibly just strangle her and be done with it.

Mr. Hubby is a cardboard cutout wimp who provides for wifey’s every need, wishes he had time to read the books she’s insulting him about but doesn’t because he’s earning the money so she can sit on the couch eating bon-bons and versing herself in erotic literature (I’m not making this up, the poor actor had to say those lines with something like conviction, pausing on a landing because the dialogue is SO wordy they couldn’t get through it walking up the substantial staircase). His character is the only one who seems to develop, but the development, (shown backwards, remember) is from very oddly-dressed and slightly camp walking handbag to Ms. Wife to someone basically forced into fucking Madison Young so Mr. Dom can claim they are even. Despite the fact that it seems to be entirely against his character’s wrong-headed devotion to his wife and despite Mr. Dom describing it as moronic but “that’s men for you”. It is a very unappealing part of the plot and doesn’t endear the characters or the movie to me.

The final character, “Matilda”, played by Lilla Katt, seems to be some bizarre switch/predator/possibly prostitute lover of Mr. Dom-of-the-world, or possibly a hooker hired by him. She randomly ends up in bed with Aurora Snow for a reason which entirely escaped Ariel and me when we watched it. There’s a lovely scene stylishly shot under the end credits where Mr. Dom, Madison Young and Matilda are laughing and playing which is by far the sexiest sex scene in the film for me. Remember, I am so into BDSM that it is my day job, and I found the rest of the sex scenes pretty much a turn off. Maybe if I was polyamourous they might have had more appeal, but the main problem is that I really didn’t like any of the characters and the sex scenes were not given the weight they deserved, either emotionally or in screen time, because they were so squeezed out by the endless talking. And the BDSM was kinda random, especially in the party scene, and never given enough screen time to develop and breathe. It was window dressing to the dialogue.

Anyway, given an hour of screen time and just five main characters, it is pretty bad that we don’t know much about the characters by the end of the movie. Matilda in particular we don’t know ANYTHING about. Indeed all we really know about any of the characters is a sketch of their sexual preferences and a few droplets (Mr Hubby works- but no idea at what. Mr Dom publishes photos of himself on the interwebs, but not idea why or what for, and so on).

The shame is that so much information was imparted so beautifully in a few fleeting scenes like those between Mr. Dom and Madison that they could have cut 80% of the talking, beefed up the action a hundredfold and trusted to visual storytelling and the abilities of their actors and crew to capture emotions without having to monologue everything. It is a warning to the rest of us that visual storytelling IS film-making; everything else is just pointing a camera at stuff.

(Parenthetically: disurbingly in lingering closeup behind Peter Acworth’s name in the titles was an old-fashioned syringe, the import of which was never explained. Needle play or drug taking? What was that all about?)

(Parenthetically part two: if you hop about in time, you need more of a visual clue to when you are that saying “3:50 am” and relying on your audience to realise that that makes it BEFORE the scene before. I didn’t remember the numbers for long enough to be sure, so I was initially quite confused about the timeline).

(Parenthetically part three: Doms spouting endless dialogue suggesting that the godless heathen sub girl has a deep need to worship the dom as their deity might read OK on the screenplay but are cringe making in the extreme to sit through in the movie. And I’m afraid Ariel and I actually cracked up and had to stop watching when he solemnly intoned about her “bringing negative energy into his household” - a line we suspected could only have been penned in California :-)

Oh gosh, now I feel really uncharitable and mean. Worse, I feel the patronising “I see what you were trying to do there but it didn’t really work, did it” comments coming on. Indietro is an actual movie, and making a movie is a huge achievement. One that I cannot yet boast myself, because our efforts thus far are shorts rather than features, and Indietro is twice the length of our films. I don’t know if Kink.com even know we exist, and if they do I’m sure they will rightly be able to point out a veritable feast of fuck-ups and shortcomings in our work. (Actually, I’d be very interested in hearing from anyone at Kink if they do ever read this- drop me a line!)

As one BDSM producer with aspirations to another, I’d like to say to the anagrammatical writer and director Vivian Darkbloom (google it)... for film number two, concentrate on the visual storytelling, on the characters and on the concrete establishment of time, space, place, and story. Leave the literary experiments and backwards storytelling until you have got a better grip on the basics. Trash at least 80% of the dialogue and have the characters show and do, rather than talk and tell.

A creed which I am going to try to put into practice myself. I’m fired up to get going on my next Elegance Studios film now. I’m going to leave aside all fripperies and try to make as straightforward and compelling a story as I can write, put together with technique as good as I can exercise, and figure out how to walk before I run.

Hywel

Celebrate (repost, bizarrely)

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 23:33:13 +0100

Somehow I managed to delete a previous blog posting, but the miracle of Google cached copies seems to have let me retrieve it so I am reposting, as it was a particularly heart-felt one.

In the words of HM The Queen a few years ago, the last year has been a bit of an Annus Horribilis for a lot of people I know. Economic woes, health problems and the loss of loved ones seemed to be coupled with a general doom and gloom. I guess as the years go by one is bound to have bad stuff happen. This was brought home to me recently by the the sudden and unexpected passing away of a friend who was only a few years older than me.

The fact that this is first such friend I’ve known well to pass away is a measure of just how damn good life is in the modern western democracies. Two hundred years ago EVERYONE, even pampered royalty, would have had the grim reaper as a constant companion.

There have also been a lot of cynical, bitter and disillusioned posts on many of the forums I frequent. The tough times seem to make people feel trapped in what they are doing, bitter because they are doing something that they don’t really love, feeling hard done by having to put up with people they hate working with to earn enough money to get by, or feeling that the industry they have worked in is shit and quitting.

It’s all a bit dour and depressing.

So I just wanted to celebrate some good stuff.

Hooray for friends who come around to call, argue about politics then stop arguing and have cheese and biscuits and play fun games until it is time to go home.

Hooray for having a job where I am my own boss, making movies and photos to satisfy some sort of artistic vision and the surprise of still being able to sell them, put the profits into making more, even in a recession.

Hooray for the lovely people who buy the photos to enjoy and who are usually so courteous and lovely in the virtual community we’ve started.

Hooray for the people we work with who are unfailingly enthusiastic, energetic, full of ideas, polite, thoughtful, helpful and have a can-do attitude. Every shoot with them is a pleasure well worth celebrating.

Hooray for still being on the web, more than a decade after putting up my first Restrained Elegance web pages.<br /></p>

Hooray for living in a time and place where medical miracles are not only possible, they are almost routine. I know there are problems with our health care and that not everything goes right, but many of my nearest and dearest would not be around today without the NHS (including me, truth be told).

Hooray for living in such an exciting time where a Star Trek communicator has gone from a science fiction pipedream to the “Next Generation” glassy screen reality of iPhones, iPads, Wifi, Kindles, Mac Pros, 30” computer screens, 31 megapixel cameras and wikipedia.

Hooray for there still being beautiful places to walk and climb, mountain air to breathe, and enough good health and good friends to enjoy it.

Hooray for being able to learn exciting new things about film making, the evolution of language, Tudor History, the hacking underground, Geology and anything else you feel like learning about either for nothing (if you have a web connection and a bit of time) or for modest fees well within many people’s means. <br /></p>

Hooray for living in a secular, plural society where I can say “There probably isn’t a God. Stop worrying and enjoy your life” and not get burned at the stake.

Hooray for living in an accepting society where I can make images based on something that many people may have a negative initial reaction to the thought of it (tied up girls...) but where I’m allowed to explain what it is all about (really, it is just playing games in the bedroom with someone you love who happens to want to be tied up). And for not being persecuted for it, thus far. (I’ll reserve a “bad thought” for tabloid journalists who hypocritically sell papers on the back of being vile and cruel to harmless kinksters- but at least they no longer have racks and burning fires with which to persecute).

Hooray for living life as an adventure, telling stories with cuddly toys like you never grew up, getting lost in a good book, playing a fun computer game just because you can, watching a spell-binding film, being so rich that the problem is having too much food, rather than worrying about starvation, having the freedom to drive all over the country and the world in a little car of my very own and living in a house which might be fully mine some day if I’m lucky enough to pay off the mortgage.

Hooray for clean water from the tap, clean power from the wall, piriton to make the hay fever go away, a command performance of Beethoven’s Seventh, second movement by Hebert von Karajan any time and any place I feel like it.

Hooray for being able to drive to see my parents half way across the country on a whim for Easter Monday, talking to my Dad who has had throat cancer but is still alive and able to converse, for making the most of the time I may have left as best I can.

Hooray for the music of the Beatles, Pink Floyd and ELO. Hooray for knowing about the men who walked on the moon, Dante Gabriel Rosseti’s “Beata Beatrix” which still almost makes me cry, the child-like enthusiasm for science of the Mythbusters, the excitement of waiting for the LHC to find the mechanism for mass generation (even if I am no longer part of the team so doing), pictures from the surface of Mars, the beauty of the rings of Saturn and knowing many things about how they work- but knowing there are still lifetimes of learning for future generations to find.

Hooray for sometimes having the energy to enjoy it all, and for having enough time to rest that I don’t need to treat every moment as if it could be my last (even though I know I probably should, it is a hard thing to live up to).

Hooray for not accepting the state the world as a divine plan and for ceaselessly trying to make it better, even knowing that we know very little about how to achieve the things we know we might one day be able to do... and for recognising when we’ve done a bad job and trying to make amends. And for not castigating ourselves when we did our best with good intentions.

Hooray for Heather and Joceline who probably don’t want a name check but who are just two of the nicest and most interesting people I’ve ever met, as well as being unfeasibly physically gorgeous to boot. Hooray for optimism, for making the most of it, for celebrating some good stuff once in a while.

And sorry for all the saccharine horror of this posting. I’m not going to exhort you with platitudes to count your blessings or make the most of what you have, I just felt the need to do so myself given how drearily downbeat a lot of what I’ve been reading out and about on the Internet has been recently.

The Apprentice: Bondage Business Plans

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:06:56 +0100

Oh good grief, how can it possibly have been six months since I last wrote a blog entry? And I was doing so well at keeping it up at one a month! Guess that’s what you get for reading a blog written by an introvert!

I digress. Today’s long-overdue post is some thoughts provoked by watching the final of The Apprentice (series 7) on the BBC a few days ago. The final contestants had to present the Boss with a business plan for a joint venture into which he was going put £250,000. The contestant’s plans were all rubbish, frankly, although for different reasons. (The usual ones- wildly over-ambitious projections, not understanding legal and regulatory requirements, thinking that because you would use a service it is suitable for a mass-market expansion, numbers not adding up and being no sort of idea at all for a viable business).

I’m in the very fortunate position of having my bondage website business up and running already, having done so at a time where all you needed was a bit of spare cash to hire models, a decent camera, a few lights, some home-made bondage gear a lot of ideas. I didn’t have to write a business plan to convince Lord Sugar or my bank manager to inject cash to start it off. Good job, because I wouldn’t have had a clue.

Ten years on and I would at least have enough knowledge and experience to do a reasonable business plan. And since I get occasional emails from people asking me about getting into the bondage photography business or running a website, here are some of the key facts you’d need to know to put a good business plan together.

WHAT ARE YOU SELLING?
Three things: photos, videos and community. Peter Ackworth of Kink.com (the one giant fish in the BDSM bondage website pond) is quoted as saying that people will only pay for high definition video and community- they won’t pay for still photos. He’s wrong. They may not pay for HIS still photos, which are shot as an afterthought and for PR pictures for his videos, but people will pay for stills if they are of the right subject and of good quality. Stills can be more evocative and stimulate the imagination if done well.

You will need a unique selling point. Most niches are already covered, so look around and see what your competitors are doing already. You will need to understand the niche extremely well, so don’t even consider shooting something that has no personal meaning for you. Running a bondage site if you aren’t into bondage is a recipe for instant failure.

Your USP can be pretty damn specific, as a lot of fetish niches are already very segmented into specialist areas. Don’t be afraid of that, but realise that you are going to have to generate hundreds of ideas a year of what to shoot. If you can’t site down and write out 30 photoshoot ideas without thinking, find another niche. You need to balance specificity (this site will be exactly and precisely what a high-heels-satin-skirt-white-cotton-blouse-rope-bondage-ballgag-hogtie-brunettes fan wants to see ) with broadness of appeal (but someone who likes blondes, bare feet or ball ties might not want to join).

WHAT ARE YOUR MAIN COSTS?
1) MODELS
Unless you are a model, you’re going to have to pay to hire the talent that appears on your site. And even if you are a model, you may still have to (solo girl websites are a lot of work to run commercially).

Models cost about £350 a day in model fees and a few small overheads (like feeding people on location).

For a bondage site, you’ll get one set done an hour. Call it seven in a day on average, so £50 a set for the model. Two models = double that. More explicit stuff than we do on RE will tend to command higher rates- so be aware that if your business idea is a lesbian orgy site where every update features four girls having sex, you’ll be looking at £300+ a set.

A “set” here is defined as one photoset of 40-100 photos or a 5-10 minute video, shot with the same girl in the same location, with one tie (which might progress a bit).

There is scope for efficiency by shooting both stills and video of each set, so long as the model can stay in bondage that long and so long as you don’t mind compromising the quality of both. There’s scope for being efficient by shooting more than one set in each location before moving on, saving on light set-up time... but that’s factored in to the above already. When you are just starting you’ll either get low quality sets quickly, or high quality sets at more like four a day.

Bottom line- you’ll be doing very well to get sets for any less than £50 each in modelling fees alone.

How many sets do you need to get going? Depends how often you update. The more updates, the more lively the site and the more members you will have. The more material you have the more you can charge. Let’s say you start small with one photoset and one video update a week. On day one, you will need to have at least 50 photosets and 50 videos on disk- 100 sets. You will need to shoot 50 more of each in your first year. Call it 100 sets a year plus 100 for startup and to have a bit of a cushion so you can go on holiday or have ‘flu.

1) EQUIPMENT
Here’s a basic shopping list to get you started. You can probably get individual items cheaper but you’ll find you need extras like camera bags etc.

Camera (5Dii or equivalent, spare batteries, memory cards, etc.) £2000
Lenses - L series zoom or selection of primes £2000
Basic flash lighting system (3 heads, light formers, stands with a decent recharge rate so you don’t keep the expensive model waiting) £2000
Sound recorder (assuming you double up and use the artistic but ergonomically horrible 5Dii for video too) £300
Fast computer, decent monitor £2000
Software (at minimum image editor and video editor- let’s say you can get away with Aperture and Final Cut Pro X) £500
Storage and backups (digital photography generates data at a ferocious rate. You’re looking at 4 TB minimum, with AT LEAST one on-site backup and one off-site backup- let’s say two Drobos and three disk sets) £2000
Video lighting £1500

Bondage Gear
Let’s say you start with a good rope order from Twisted Monk, some gags, handcuffs etc. Call it £1000

Let’s say the start-up equipment costs come in around £13,000. Obviously you can hire stuff while you get going, but buying will be cheaper in the long run.

1) LOCATION/STUDIO HIRE
Most of us started off in our houses, plus hire of local studios. Let’s add in £25 per set for location fees- even if you shoot at home, you need to heat the place and run the lights and computers.

1) WEBSITE DESIGN AND HOSTING
You are very lucky- these days, this is basically free. You can launch a nice site using a “Web2.0” online interface somewhere like Clips4Sale with very little knowledge and no need for graphic designers or website programmers. The drawback is that they charge a much higher commission. Let’s say you shop around and can find somewhere with a 65% payout. For a start-up that’s probably better than a pay-per-month hosting scheme, at least you don’t have fixed overheads. Beware getting locked into a system you don’t control, though.

1) INSURANCE AND BORING STUFF
You need employer’s liability insurance, possibly public liability insurance, and definitely insurance for all that camera kit. You’ll probably need to talk to your accountant, pay interest on loans to buy the camera, get a faster brpadband connection to upload stuff, drive to shoots, etc.. Call it £2000 a year for starters.

1) PUBLICITY AND MARKETING
You are in luck. Most webmasters are happy to swap links. But these days many want to sign up to an affiliate scheme and take 50% of your sales in order to send you traffic. This may be worth it, 50% of a sale is better than 100% of no sales at all. But if you are already paying 35% off the top to the web hosts, you are down to a miserly 32.5% of sales actually getting to you. Not all sales will be affiliate ones (traditionally, you make money off people signing up through an affiliate scheme, cancelling, then coming back to the site and rejoining direct).

Let’s split the difference and say you get 50% of your sales when all affiliate payouts and web host fees are taken into account.

1) YOUR TIME
Do not forget this. You will need to:
Shoot all the photos. Call it two days a month for the 100-sets-a-year website.
Edit & upload all the photos & videos. Call it five days a month ditto. It takes substantially longer to prep photos and especially edit videos than it does to shoot them. Frankly when you get started it might be a lot slower than this, but you should be able to get it down to five days a month whilst still producing good quality stuff.
Admin and customer service, answering emails - drip drip drip, but call it a couple of days a month even for quite a small site
Publicity, link exchanges, giving material to affiliates - call it a couple of days a month too, although this one is a bottomless pit of time devouring with big teethies. Like the Sarlacc on Tatooine.

About 11 days a month- like working half-time. Possible to do in evenings and weekends if you enjoy it, but a bit marginal to keep doing it for years in your spare time.

So really you should price yourself at a reasonable wage, to represent the opportunity cost of you not doing anything else with that time. Median pay is around £26,000 a year, so lets say that it has to make you £13,000 a year or you might as well go get a part time job.

You are likely to work more cheaply than anyone you could hire incidentally. Hiring a photographer will certainly save you time, but cost you money.

FIRST YEAR COSTS
So to get a website producing 100 updates a year off the ground from a standing start, a rough estimate of the costs would be:

Models 200 sets x £50 = £10,000
Equipment £13,000
Location fees 200 x £25 = £5,000
Insurance and boring stuff £2000
Your time £13,000

Total startup costs for the first year: £43,000. ULP. Even if you discount your own time, you are looking at £30,000 startup fees for a reasonably professional site.

Will you break even? What would it take to do so?

INCOME- THE MEMBERS. THE LOVELY, LOVELY MEMBERS!

A typical website membership costs $20-$30. Your competitors will have more material than you (as they have been going longer) but so long as you have great material and a good unique selling point, you can probably charge in the middle of that range. Call it $25. In UK pounds at current exchange rates, that’s about £16. But assuming you are paying your webhosts a percentage and getting a good fraction of your initial membership by affiliates, we said you’re only like to take home half that. £8 per member.

To break even, even without your time, you need 3750 membership payments. If everyone joins and stays and pays you every month (they won’t) that’s 312 members, to break even in the first year. In your first month you’ll be lucky to see 50 members. It will be a long slow haul.

300+ members isn’t impossible. In fact as you can see, it is where you need to be shooting to get a professional-quality site up to speed- once you’ve paid off that initial equipment buying, you can probably take your £13,000 in year two and be doing nicely with 300 or so members. More fun than part time at MacDonald’s, for sure. You’ll still need kit replacements and updates from time to time but the hump is getting the first batch of kit to shoot with.

There are plenty of sites around with more like 100 members. How do they do it? Well, they’ve usually started smaller and put in a lot of their own cash to buy equipment already (I certainly had camera and computer kit already). And they’ll be doing it for fun, and still have the day job.

Trouble is the days of a small startup website having a niche totally to itself are gone- you will have competitors, and you will be fighting for attention. With a world-wide recession on, you are also fighting the general doom and gloom with a purely non-essential luxury feel-good product, too.

As you get established, there are certainly things you can do to improve the bottom line. The 50% revenue from each sale is a shocker. If you get enough members to justify it, getting a hosting plan and a payment processor with a better payout works out much cheaper, but it will be more work and require more time and webmaster expertise from you. As your name gets known, hopefully the fraction of signups coming to you direct improves too.

You’ll still have to pay out to these service providers, but you might manage to get your own payout up to 75% instead of 50%, which obviously makes a world of difference, especially if you only need to shoot 100 sets in year two. Then we’re looking at 150 members for you to get your £13,000 to live on.

Then there’s additional sales channels, you can probably pick up an extra 10% of your membership sales by putting some content on shopping cart systems, pay-per-view, Clips4Sale and so on. (Maybe higher, depends where your focus is).

You might be able to get economies of scale making more than one website, which helps, too. And of course it helps a lot that you only need to shoot 100 sets a year ongoing, not the 200 you really need to shoot in year one to give you a launch day platform and a cushion.

Bottom line? You need at least 75 members to run a website as a hobby covering its basic costs. You need 150 to get enough money for yourself to pay for your time. You probably need 300 to be comfortable and able to invest in new kit, location shoots, two girl shoots, etc.

Note that many people join occasionally, so to generate 150 steady membership payments each and every month, reliably, you will need to find thousands of people to join once, and to get those you will need tens of thousands of people to visit your site. It takes a while.

(P.S. if you have ever joined Restrained Elegance or bought one of our sets or videos- thank you. We really appreciate it! It is the only way we can afford to stage next month’s shoots).

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. SORT OF.

Executive summary? Running a professional bondage website with mainly solo model content requires a steady membership of 150-300 to be a viable “cottage industry” business proposition paying the webmaster at least a part-time wage.

Startup costs are around £30,000 assuming you draw no salary for the first year, and running costs stay at around £22,500 a year assuming you draw a median part-timer salary and are shooting 100 sets a year.

This level of membership is challenging to achieve, but not impossible. You will need a bloody good unique selling point to draw people in as the market is pretty saturated, but plenty of niches still exist.

The costs increase DRAMATICALLY if:
1) you update more frequently
2) you feature multi girl sets
3) you go to locations more expensive than your house and the local studio
4) your sets are slower to shoot
5) you require substantial investment in something as a USP (eg if you are running a latex bondage site, you’ll need a steady supply of new expensive latex clothes).
6) you need to hire in expertise (photographer, video editor, webmaster...)
7) you find it takes more than half your time, because you will need to draw a living wage from the business

In order to cover the expenses of a more ambitious site with several of those features, you are looking at needing a steady membership of 500-1000. This is hard to achieve, and if such is your desire, you should probably not launch unless you have upwards of £100,000 backing. Getting up to those memberships levels for a niche website will likely be a multi-year struggle and you may not get there at all, many do not.

IIn order to get rich from niche websites, you are looking at multiple thousand members. Few such sites exist, and they are unlikely to give up their market leading position in a hurry. You will not get rich running a niche fetsih website. You might get rich running a large family of such websites?

If you want to launch a family of such sites, you will need that amount PER SITE for startup. And you will need people to help you run them. Unless you are in San Francisco, you probably can’t advertise in the local paper to find such people.

REAL EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Don’t run a niche website to get rich. You won’t.
Consider it if you would do it for nothing, as for a while you will be.
You need £30,000 or so to get started, assuming you have no kit and you will buy some decent suff to last you a few years.
It is possible to make a living at it if you can manage to get several hundred members but the odds are you will not be able to take any money out of the business yourself for at least 18 months.

Making Movies!!!

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 16:01:11 +0000

Exciting development- we have decided to start producing longer movie features (up to an hour long, which is the most you can fit on a standard DVD-R with high enough quality) as well as shooting video clips for RE.

We’ve been talking about this for a while, but something Merlin suggested just before our annual planning meeting a couple of weeks ago really crystallised it: he suggested we produce movies as DVD downloads (and high bit rate HD MP4 of course).

This immediately clicked with everyone because:
1) It solves the many problems of distributing physical DVDs (different laws on what you can sell and what you can send in the post in every different country)
2) It means that the longer video features, which we’ve been making and trying to slice and dice to fit into the normal Restrained Elegance video update schedule will now have a proper place of their own
3) Which in turn means that we don’t have to feel like we are short-changing viewers if there’s no bondage in the first ten minutes. A bondage website update with no bondage always feels a bit naff, but setting the scene and building the tension in the first ten minutes of a one-hour film is great.
4) It lets us make a few more tightly-focussed productions without having to cater to quite so many differing tastes in each. For example, we can have an hour long video with just metal bondage, an hour long video of foot torture, or a storyline with three or four girls being kidnapped without having to worry so much about maintaining the general balance of updates
5) We can even branch out and make movies in slightly different fetishes as they appeal to us (Ariel and I like spanking as well as bondage, for example, so it would be great fun to be able to make a “straight” spanking movie)
6) The films can be made on a more relaxed time schedule without needing to hit the weekly update schedule. This also means that films can be released complete, rather than in parts
7) It also means that other people can take charge of editing, producing or directing without the deadline pressure of the RE update schedule
8) It will mean that we don’t have to worry about whether to put all parts of a multipart story up in the same month (which a few people have asked for, but runs the risk of pissing off people who don’t like that particular video seeing nothing else on the site for a month) or split them up (thus maintaining the variety, but meaning that a lot of people don’t start watching part one until the final part has been done, so they can watch it all at once)
9) It lets each movie be a real event, and it won’t matter if we can only make a small number of them each year
10) It will be great fun to shoot, it is really fun to watch things on a big screen TV instead of a computer monitor

Hopefully it will also produce some really high quality, original fetish feature films, of course!

We’d already shot a couple of things which fitted more into this new idea than as regular RE updates, so we have somewhere to start.

At the end of last year Steve was charging up and down the motorway to Cornwall shooting a film with Sammie B, Sophia Smith and Katy Cee. He’s been busy editing it ever since and it is looking good! Needs a little bit of extra footage shooting to tie it all together but is well in progress.

Ariel and I had started shooting a series of domestic discipline spanking scenes which we’d vaguely thought could be put up on a website somehow... we realised it makes a much better fit to making one really strong, action packed DVD download rather than a slightly wandering, irregularly updated website. We just need to shoot the last scene for this.

So that’s a bondage film and a spanking film to get ready for launch day. There’s a few old RE series which we might re-edit for DVD download- things like Lady of Pain and Medieval Epic really were intended as continuous story-lines rather than episodes anyway.

But mainly it is an excuse for us to let our hair down and go a bit wild with two or three ideas a year and see if we can make proper movies out of them and really do the subject justice. We’re looking to make definitive high quality kinky films with no compromises on quality or purity of concept. Yay! :-)

The Restrained Elegance video updates should benefit too- we’re still going to be aiming as high as we can with the quality and the experience of shooting short movies has already been invaluable, so we’re sure that the skills we learn making these long features will feed directly back into better, hotter, sexier and more action-packed videos for RE as well.

For RE updates we’re going to stay with our regular mixture of 5-10 minute videos, the “as-live” videos of myself and Ariel like long-term bondage, the occasional music video and behind-the-scenes videos thrown in, and some episodic storylines where the story clearly fits into two or three self-contained episodes (each of which has a good stiff dose of bondage of course).

Story-lines that feel like they belong as one continuous movie... we can now have a go at making them that way and doing them justice.

We’ll be launching a new site shortly with news, behind-the-scenes looks at what we’re working on and the DVD downloads themselves, of course. The movies will be for individual purchase rather than a membership site (this is the only thing that makes sense for individual films on different topics).

Exciting times ahead- and hopefully it will mean the videos on RE stay focussed and don’t get out of hand, now that we have a new avenue to explore the more complex and involved movie ideas.

Will post again when the site is ready for a preview... Elegance Studios, fetish film productions coming your way soon!

Cheers, Hywel.

Mixing Business with Pleasure

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:09:38 +0000

I could talk about the extreme techno-joy of deciding to invest in a new set of video gear for Restrained Elegance, but most of it hasn’t arrived yet so all I would be doing is drooling. (Ariel saw me shopping for LED light panels and immediately accused me of looking at porn- and she wasn’t ENTIRELY wrong...!)

Instead I wanted to talk about the tricky business of mixing business with pleasure, and mixing real life with fantasy life. Anyone who works with the person who is also their life partner is going to have to figure out a lot of things, especially if the business is run from home. As a kinky couple who also make a living from our fetish, it gets even more complicated, and from conversations Ariel and I have had with numerous people both inside and outside the industry, it seems to cause a fair degree of bafflement.

Obviously the most important thing is to set some boundaries by mutual agreement, and stick to the as best you can. Everyone’s will be different and as long as both people are happy with it, there’s no “right way” to do it. That does mean that there’s a LOT to talk about and even after living together for two years we’re still finding out a lot about each other.

The trickiest thing for most people to understand seems to be that Ariel is submissive, but that our relationship is a partnership of equals based on liking and mutual respect. In play scenes I might well order her around, tie her up, spank her and do all manner of other things to her. She’s equally likely to provoke me into doing all those things- playfully. We slip into these BDSM play roles often in day-to-day life- just read Ariel’s blog if you don’t believe me. But there are limits, some explicitly discussed and others implied based on the mood of the other person. I would not dream of spanking her “as a punishment” if she’d done something real-life which she (or I) was genuinely upset about. She would not play up trying to get spanked if she knows I’m worried about something.

BDSM is not, for us, any way to settle an argument or to decide how the living room should be decorated or who’s going to pay for the double glazing. I guess some people who really crave 24/7 relationships might want the other person to take all of the decisions and have all of the responsibility; we do not.

There are different roles to be played, different sides of ourselves which are appropriate in different circumstances. Just because I am dominant to Ariel doesn’t mean I want to tie up random men who email me (or even random women unless it is to be photographed for the site). Just because Ariel enjoys being spanked in a grandiose way for reputable spanking producers making an effort to create a good product doesn’t mean that she is OK being spanked by a stranger who recognises her at an event.

A submissive isn’t a door-mat, and a dominant isn’t a tyrant who must always get their own way in all things at all times. We pretend to be those things for or pleasure and each other’s. (Actually Ariel plays a door-mat very poorly- she’s more likely to be claiming to be the Queen and demanding to be taken seriously).

This is already complicated enough, but like any relationship one learns to read the other person’s moods and figure out when it is appropriate to be Hywel-the-sadist and when it is appropriate to be Hywel-the-supportive-partner.

It gets complicated by the fact that both of us also have to play the BDSM roles professionally as well as in our private lives. Another thing that seems to cause people confusion is that there are things we are happy to do in private that we’re not happy to do on film. I don’t know why this should cause misunderstandings, but it does. I don’t think one would expect a theatre actor who is happy to kiss the leading lady on stage to be expected to have actual sex with her on stage. It is the same with BDSM. There are plenty of things we do in private which we do not wish to portray on film.

There’s also things we’re happy to do with each other on film that we wouldn’t want to do with another actor. There’s also things we’re happy doing when the other person is there on set too which would feel awkward and wrong if they were not, and a few things we’re happy to shoot for our own website that we wouldn’t be happy doing for someone else unless we felt the project was really laudable and of top-notch quality.

We’ve found a few things which one of us was OK doing on film which caused a problem for the other person- we discussed these and agreed what to do (and will continue to do so if more crop up). I was jealous and unhappy about Ariel’s spanking shoots initially, which came as a bit of a surprise to both of us. She’d been doing those before we were together and intellectually I approved but it turned out to tweak a “jealousy button” which I didn’t even know I had. We had a calm and reasoned discussion and came to an understanding which we’re both happy with; it helped when I met some of the people she was working with and found out what a nice bunch they are (especially the Northern Spanking crowd. Hi guys and gals!)

And just this week I discovered that I’m really uncomfortable with kissing on film. It was just a reassuring little kiss, but it made me really squirmy and uncomfortable emotionally. We’d been shooting some spanking and bastinado scenes, and we’d also filmed some of the reassuring care and come-down pastoral care of us hugging afterwards. We talked about it afterwards and I completely agreed with Ariel’s feeling that it was important to show that as part of the scene- after talking it through, I narrowed it down to the kissing, which just turns out to make me uncomfortable as it feels too personal to show on film when we are being ourselves on screen. (I’d probably be happy with it if we were both playing clearly differentiated characters). So in future we’ll show the reassurance but keep the kiss off-screen :-)

As for living together and working together- same as any other couple who do that. You need a bit of space and time to yourself, a bit of space and time to work, and a bit of space and time to be together not working. It can be tricky to fit them all in but we’re doing our best ;-)

Cheers, Hywel.

Technojoy!

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:33:58 +0100

In case you hadn’t gathered, I am a nerdy, geeky, science-y sort of chap. I like technology and like new bits of techno gear. (Unlike Ariel, who flounces off at the very mention of new techie gear, and who HATES having to learn how to use something new!)

The latest gadget to give me considerable techno-joy is the 3rd generation Kindle from Amazon.

Techno-joy can be inspired by many things. It can be inspired by a gadget that lets you do something new (like the Sony Walkman, which let you listen to your own selection of music on the go).

It can be something that lets you do something that would previously have been utterly out of your price range (the way a Canon 5D Mk2 brings bigger-than-35 mm cine film qualities to a prosumer camera).

It can be something that does something so much better than the predecessor technology that it becomes something new (like an iPod which stores your whole music collection in your pocket, rather than having a rucksack full of cassette tapes).

It can be something that brings together a bunch of old technologies in a new way (like a smartphone which subsumes the functions of phone, wristwatch, netbook for checking emails, GPS unit and DVD player).

Or it can just do one job really, really well.

And that’s the joy of the Kindle.

Unlike a tablet PC, IPhone or IPad, it just does one thing: it lets you read books.

But it does so really, really well. Not flawless by any means, but the people who designed the Kindle seem to like reading, they read a lot, and they have designed a product for people who do too.

I’d seen older generation eBook readers and been less than impressed- the main flaw was the slow page turn speed. The main reason an eBook reader appeals to me in the first place is that I read fast and get through books fast as a result, so carrying enough was always a pain.

Anything which slows my reading speed down significantly would have me tearing my hair out with frustration (if I had enough left to tear out....)

The Sony one I checked out a couple of years ago was so slow to turn that it felt like I read each page quicker than the page turned- felt like I was spending 50% of my time waiting, rather than reading!

Seeing a friend’s Kindle and observing that the page turn was quick enough not to slow me down was the tipping point for me. Well, that plus the fact that the price has come down a lot, not quite to the point of disposable commodity but definitely down to a sensible price.

I ordered my own, and after a few days tantalising wait, it duly arrived.

Since then I’ve bought or downloaded free about 30 books, read six of them cover to cover and dipped in and out of the others working my way through.

The Good

- After a few minutes, the Kindle mentally disappears and you are left with just the words and the story, just like a book. I can’t emphasise enough how important this is to me. I stopped thinking “I’ll read something on my Kindle” and started thinking “I fancy re-reading Who’s Afraid of Beowulf”... which just happened to be on my Kindle.
- You can carry a very large library with you. It is like carrying a single paperback book around which magically transforms into hundreds.
- The heavy Amazon protective cover protects it well and makes it feel very much like reading a paperback. But if weight is a primary concern one can just take the Kindle itself, which is very lightweight (great for flights, I’m thinking!)
- The power lasts like no other device I’ve ever used. I charged it when I first got it, have downloaded and read the books at it is still on about 75% charge. On a week’s holiday you probably wouldn’t even need to take a charger. Result.
- The screen gets progressive more readable as the light level goes up. It feels maybe a little grey and low contrast with just a reading light, but in normal room light or daylight it is super.
- You stop noticing the screen flash when you turn pages.
- You can tailor the layout to your own preferences (although there are limits- see below) which means you can optimise to keep the “reading flow” as smooth as possible.
- Downloading is fast (and free)
- Amazon’s samples let you read a chapter or two for free before buying, which is at least as good as ordering a paper version from them.
- With the 3G version, you need never be stuck without a fresh book ever again, so long as you are within reach of a phone signal (which I usually am). There was no desperation quite as bad as finishing one’s last book a day or two before the end of a long work trip in a foreign country miles from the nearest English language bookshop. Very forlorn.
- Syncs with Kindle apps on other devices. I have it on my phone, which I always have on me. So if I get hit with unexpected hanging around, I can just pick up my book where I left off (as the system remembers how far you’ve got). Sure, reading on the phone is nothing like the pleasure it is with the Kindle itself (or with a real book) but it is a hell of an improvement on not having anything to read!

The Bad

- You don’t get a paper backup. If for some reason Amazon goes tits-up or has to withdraw something, you could in principle lose access to some of the things you’ve purchased. This would be a disincentive to switch to the Kindle as sole book purchasing device. This isn’t a huge issue for me- I’m likely to buy fave books on the Kindle that I already have, or buy one to read on a trip and buy a paper copy too, or obtain free ones which you really can’t complain about!
- No colour. This rules out Kindle for many textbooks (especially as the screen is also a bit small compared with being able to open a large textbook to a double page spread). I gather colour e-ink isn’t ready for production yet.
- Which brings me to screen space, which is still a little limited An extra 3 cm at the bottom would help a lot, as would a screen-colour border around the screen itself. I find I like a reasonable margin so my eye can quickly follow the text flow, so I’d really like to have a bit more of a “gutter” of matching colour for this reason.
- A touch screen would be more natural. I gather there are technical issues- for maximum contrast of the e-ink screen, you can’t have a touch screen. The ultimate form factor would ditch the keyboard in favour of a larger tpuch screen. It’ll do for now but could be improved.
- The control over the appearance of the text is limited. Only three typefaces, and of those I’d only really ever want to use the regular one myself. On some books, on some settings, the word-wrap and justification seems to get a bit confused. This isn’t really rocket science- any decent word processing package would make a better job of text flow and layout so I don’t know why they can’t make a better job of that. I’d like more options.
- Related to that, there is a loss of “personality” from books read on paper going to the Kindle. Typefaces do matter, and reading a familiar old friend in the wrong typeface doesn’t feel quite right. Probably no worse than picking it up in a much later edition I guess! It does make me a little sad that they can’t be supplied in the right typeface, with better layout, hyphenation and justification implemented.
- The range of books is still limited, although hopefully this will improve a lot with time. There’s no problem getting recent books on the Kindle, and lots and lots of 70+ year old material that has come out of copyright is available for free. But there is a definite gulf in the middle- if you look for books published 10-20 years ago, you might well be out of luck. I’d certainly not plan on being able to replicate your whole library digitally just yet, and for the time being at least you can forget finding rare out of print stuff unless it has fallen into the public domain.

Overall, though, I’m absolutely delighted with my Kindle. I’ve spent a lot of time in various waiting rooms over the last few months and being able to turn it on and decide whether I am in the mood to continue reading something light and fluffy, or would prefer to read something a bit more serious, is just GREAT.

It is so good that even Ariel has some techno-envy and is talking about getting one when she’s back on her feet.

The best thing of all? I know that if I ever need to go away to work for two or three weeks in future, I will no longer have to find some way of cramming the 15-20 books I would need just to maintain my sanity into my luggage! That is worth a considerable glow of techno joy to me!

Do you need one? No, of course not. It only does the same thing as a rucksack of paperbacks, in the same way that an iPod only does the same as a rucksack of cassette tapes. But is the concept sound, is it fun to use, is it nice to read on and it is worthy of techno-joy? Absolutely!