Her Tale of Hubris

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How do you like your damsel dressed?

I put up a new poll today. Correction, I put up my first poll today. I view my work as adaptive and evolve my content and style based on what is selling the best and more importantly the many emails I receive about likes and dislikes. Looking at the number of views I've been getting I wanted to try putting up some polls to give everyone a chance to express what they prefer when it comes to damsel in distress video. I still want those emails to keep coming, but this could be a great way to quickly take the temperature of everyone when it comes to bondage material. The first poll as the title of this post indicates concerns the attire of damsels. I'm always asked why I don't do more nudes or more stockings or more costumes or more latex. I shoot what I think looks nice is the simple answer. If I know what people are looking for then I'll shoot more around those preferences. No need to vote if that's not your thing, but any I do receive bring me closer to what you are looking for in future content!

One of the categories of the poll is garters, hose and heels. My formative bondage years were in a time when that was frequently seen in bondage images and movies. I've always had a strong preference for it going back to the beginnings of my photography. In fact the beginning of my photography was almost always that with some panties thrown in from time to time. Some of my favorite movies and images of this attire come from the film loops of the late 70s and early 80s, and they had a lot of garters, hose and heels. Hell there was even a bondage magazine called that. A little bit back I decided to try my hand at reproducing that look and style. The elements that I needed were a vintage looking model, the constant thrashing of the model, slight graininess to the film stock, the slightly accelerated movement speed, the look of 8mm celluloid film and that wonderful soundtrack.

The model was easier than I expected. I worked with this gal that called herself Betty Page and showed up to a shoot with this tussled throwback hairstyle and showing me the vintage shoes she just got at a rummage sale. I always keep garters and hose on hand, but would she go for the idea? I had worked with her twice before and although the bondage was strict the content was very mild. I went through all the elements from those loops that I could think of and she didn't balk at any of them. I was elated: noose, vibrator, groping, topless and bottomless were all now on the table. My video idea was one step closer to being complete. I coached her about the movement, and she nailed it. Gagged with her own panties held in by a strap she was dragged in by a noose and her sometimes rhythmic, sometimes thrashing movements were perfect.

Betty had given me perfect emoting and perfect movement. She had pulled off the vintage look and the movement from those old 8mm loops like she'd done it a hundred times. I had my footage, but the rest was up to me. The graininess was easy even shooting on DV film instead of celluloid. You can do it in post-production or while filming. With Betty I decided to shoot the video slightly underexposed and then bring up the brightness in my editing software. The grain effect came out perfectly. The slightly accelerated movement speed of the film proved slightly more difficult. I tried a dozen things. I sped up the play speed. I removed frames. I used plugins. I posted in forums. Everything I did though made it play far too quickly or made the playback jerk and hitch. I spent days on this effect and it was a fail. I decided to work on the funk soundtrack to at least make some progress. I found a great royalty free CD for around $60 and grabbed it. The songs were wonderful and very similar to the music tracks heard on the videos made using those old loops. That's when a very cool thing happened. I turned off Betty's audio and turned on the funk track. She seemed to be moving slightly faster. I turned her audio back on and she was moving at normal speed. I though I was going crazy, but somehow she seems to thrash more quickly with no sound or with the funk soundtrack. I decided that there must be some brain mechanism that makes time perceptions change when detached from the auditory experience. Regardless of the reason, the effect was there. Three cheers for dumb luck!

The last element was the look of old film stock. Anyone who's seen these loops or has some old home movies knows that the film has scratches, dust, blotches and those crazy hairs that float around while you play the film. They have plugins for that, but I didn't like the looks I was getting. I went back to looking and found some videos of actual 8mm film and videos that people created artificially. The actual 8mm was a bit distracting. The borders jumped all over the place and quite frankly gave me a bit of a headache. That's not a good thing watching a bondage video. The artificial one looked great but was a bit repetitive which made it seem artificial. The easy answer was to just pick one and be done with it, but I'd come so far to compromise. Again, there was a happy accident. In testing things I had both the actual 8mm and the artificial 8mm overlaying the video. I'd turn on one and turn off the other, but I accidentally left both on once and it looked wonderful. So I trimmed out that annoying border and used both merged. This did two things. It resulted in the longest video render of my life, but more importantly it nailed the look of the old 8mm film I wanted.

With that Betty in The Priss was born. As an homage to those loops I kept the story similar. Betty was a prissy wife who scoffed and her husband's bondage desires. Just like those loops a masked antagonist is brought in to teach her a lesson and make her into a compliant bondage model and toy for her husband.

I'm detecting some patterns :)

I'm a numbers guy. I've always been great with Math, loved puzzles and watch trends carefully with everything I'm involved with. The really odd thing about that is I hate fantasy football. I guess I should correct myself in saying I like numbers and trends when you can maximize a productive result. Fantasy football is a fun result ... number crunching sales is productive :)

Ever since I first started putting out material I've watched things closely. I change how I do updates and watch the trends. I look at how certain models are received both when they are being published by others and when I'm the only one putting material out with them in it. I'm a bit of a geek because I wrote a heat map program that I export my sales data into. For anyone unfamiliar with a heat map, it's basically a grid of where you color-code values. The cooler and darker the color, the less the value and the hotter and brighter the higher the value. The end result is that every time a clip of mine sells those keywords get weighted into my heat map application.

Now what does all this mean? Well, I know that you like the models I've shot with that people haven't put any material out of or any material in the last 5 years. I know you like elbows that are jammed together. I know you like a lot of things. I'm not giving anything away but suffice to say that out of the last 10 clips that I have put up, they have performed in a manner that I expected. That's great because it lets me put up what folks like and gear future shoots towards those trends. And when the trends change I'll see it!

My latest clip is part of that. Every clip with the girl in it sells well. She's cute, her elbows can be glued together, she can take a huge gag and she makes the most adorable noises. She shows up as orange in my heat map which is respectable being so close to red. The content of this clip is a bit different, so we'll see if that changes the trend. But so far my heat map on this model shows good things. Check out Elita in She Came for a Story and see what happens to a nosy reporter trying to get a scoop on a serial kidnapper!

Nyssa and Taylor, Double the Damsels Double the Fun

I tend to avoid two-girl shoots because of logistics. I have to move the camera around a lot and paying attention to who might be struggling out of frame is fairly taxing. Then I have to combine that with moving the camera around a lot and it becomes a bit tricky to make sure you have two damsels struggling in each frame as opposed to a damsel and half of a damsel with her head sticking into the unknown.

I had some trepidation about the idea when Nyssa Nevers suggested I work with her traveling companion Taylor Rae, but Nyssa won me over when she said that if I told her where to stay she'd flop around but always stay in frame. And she did! The exotic beauty was always in frame and struggled like hell. She made it easy to concentrate on Taylor during her bondage sequence with no worries that Nyssa would get cropped out somehow. The video was one of the better sequences I filmed that year. Two girls very different: one blond and one brunette, one exotic and one girl-next-door.

It was a fun shoot on many levels. Both girls were charming to work with, I got a great struggle sequence with Nyssa in the beginning, I used panty gags for the first time, I got to man-handle two-girls at once and I did my first on-screen forced orgasm with Nyssa. It is a LONG video that demands a DVD release and the clip may have to be cut down to be palatable to some. However Nyssa Nevers and Taylor Rae in Trouble for Two: Ropes, Gropes and Orgasms is now available as a clip. Warning: If you don't like two beautiful women stripped down to just shoes getting panty gagged with tape head wraps and then worked over stay away from this clips. Great job Nyssa and Taylor!

The Miracle of Modern Medicine

Where would we be without modern medicine. Yes, there is compelling data that life expectancy has not gone up because of medicine but more likely to improved access to quality food and living conditions. However I do like that my sinus infections go away faster and I have something for aches and pains other than just alcohol.

Regardless, modern medicine has brought the bondage word countless advances. I thought nothing could get better than co-flex with all it's stretchy, self adhering goodness, but then those medical folks had to invent a tape that adheres like glue but doesn't rip off your skin. Even better it doesn't stick to hair. Now all my captives get a full head wrap at least once with tape all the way around. Take poor the poor girl here for example. The ballgag was bad enough but then we add several layers of tape around her head. First, the gag is going nowhere. Second, saliva leakage equals zero ... try choking on that while sitting on a hitachi magic wand. Finally, it's like rubber. It stretches and then squeezes even more than co-flex. And so medical profession, I salute you. Oh, and lest I forget the poor gal gagged to the max and having multiple orgasms is the talented Randy Moore in Taught Bondage and Bad Vibrations.