What Ho, Producer Head On

Good heavens, I am indeed alive.  I actually have proof of this, having done a million things in the past 3 weeks. I think I'll tell you about some of them now :)

First of all, oh my goodness, I scripted and directed a bastinado movie.  Bastinado is something I have an uneasy, love/hate type relationship with.  I love the BDM .  He loves bastinado.  I, therefore, have experienced lots of it, with various implements.  Foot caning works beautifully for me, hooray, but I absolutely hate, hate, hate anything with leather straps involved. The BDM loves leather strap bastinado beyond all other things as a result.  BDSM's awfully complicated, isn't it?

So writing and directing my own bastinado movie seemed like a good opportunity for me to explore my feelings for and tolerance of bastinado.  With me as the lead actress, it was inevitable that I'd have to.  (I know this is horrifically Kevin Costner-esque but I don't know any other models who're keen to try foot torture). I hoped that, by writing a story that appealed to me, I'd give myself the best possible chance of making it through the painful scenes.

So that's what I did.  I've been exploring the 'visiting professional disciplinarian' idea in fantasy and play over the last couple of years and it appeals to me massively; I love the idea of an incredibly detached, disinterested professional being in charge of administering carefully calculated punishments, so that's the role I wrote for the BDM (I think it suits his scientific nature, so I had a good excuse for it).  His character appealed to me enough to help me through the most painful bits of the movie.

I'm not clever enough to be able to capture the peculiarly cumulative, inescapable fire-y pain of bastinado in words alone, but in my experience it can be far, far more all-encompassingly painful than any kind of spanking I've ever experienced.  If the potential success of a BDSM movie could be measured in the tears of pain shed during the shoot process, then we might have a blockbuster on our hands.

Here is a teaser trailer;-

(For a lovely big version, go directly here)

We shot a final scene today, and I'll be editing the whole thing myself over the next few weeks.  I've been editing videos for Restrained Elegance for the last 6 months, but a feature-length movie will be a fab new challenge.  It's particularly exciting because the BDM has upgraded all his equipment, so the whole project was shot on a super new camera called a RED which frankly I don't understand awfully well.  Except that;

a) its really easy to use, so I can operate it and get the shots I had in my head without feeling all sweaty and asthmatic.

b) it makes everything look absolutely beautiful, even suburbia in the rain.

c) it has a touch screen so you can pretend it's a phone.

Lordy, that was a lot of talk about only one of the things I was planning to talk about.  So I'll finish (I'm baking our wedding cake at the same time as blogging, and I don't want to burn it) by talking about last week, when Restrained Elegance kindly took me on a week-long location trip to a lovely (except for the strangely ill-equipped kitchen) old house in the English West Country.  And here are some frame grabs from the movie we started making there.

 The girls.  From left to right - Hannah, Sophia, Scarlot, and meeeeeeeeee.

 Scarlot is failing her slave-position test, and it's my job to tell Mistress Kate...

Here I am, considering whether I can face cleaning a customer's shoes without the use of my hands.

It's  all about slave training; I'm the 'resident slave' who belongs to the auction house, and it's my job to get the new girls ready for the sale.  We were joined by the luminous Sophia Smith, delicious Hannah Claydon, patrician Anita de Bauch, and ingenuous Scarlot Rose, who got the lead role of the uncertain newcomer into the hedonistic auction-house world... Hooray, Temptress Kate appeared too, as the icy-cool head slave-trainer!

It was a splendid week (punctuated by trying to prepare food with knives that'd probably be blunt enough to be sold at the Early Learning Centre ) and I've got high hopes that the videos we shot will be as fun to watch as they were to make.

Thanks as always for reading, and I'll update again within the next few weeks with news of various extra-fun projects I'm working on.

All the best,

A/a

PS Re-reading this post, I discover that I've forgotten how to write anything that makes sense.  And how did I end up writing such lonnnnnnnnnng sentences? I need some sort of strict tutor to help me with my grammar.  Mmmmmmmmmm.



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