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Warning: something of an essay!
Cheers, Hywel.
Website videos… what plots are permissible to film?
… and what does one have to do to make the treatment acceptable?Over the years, we’ve shot hundreds of videos (and thousands of photosets) for the site.
Recently I’ve been criticising myself for not being adventurous enough with what we shoot on video. Thinking about it, it boils down to a choice about the sort of storylines I’m writing and choosing to film. I was wondering what you all thought about it.
Why is this a concern for videos rather than stills? Because stills are more capable of standing on their own and inspiring the viewer to construct their own story around the images.
If purely consensual love bondage is your thing, you can construct such a fantasy around at least 50% of stills sets on the site. If harsh kidnap fantasies are your thing, you can do the same. Some sets might appear in both lists, especially if you ignore one or two images which might have a different mood. I know a lot of people don’t read the little stories that go with the sets for this very reason: they want to imagine their own. Still photos can be quite “fantasy neutral”, capable of multiple interpretations of how that moment of time fits into a story.
Videos are much harder to make fantasy neutral. The appeal of moving pictures is that you can see the girls in action- that means that there needs to be some action to see them in. The girl’s mood and reactions to the bondage are likely to be very different in a love bondage story and a kidnap story. So if the actress and crew are doing their jobs, a love bondage video and a kidnap video will be quite different.
The only way I can think of to avoid that is to “pick an instant” in a storyline where the girl happens to be tied up, and just film her struggling in her bondage. This leads to the traditional bondage website tied-up-girl-going-mmmmmmmmph!-for-five-minutes video.
These videos are rather like watching your favourite Hollywood movie with a bit of bondage in it, slowing down the bondage action and watching just that segment over and over again. A perfectly valid approach it, but rather limiting, and even then the actress’ expressions and actions in bondage will probably reflect whether she is a damsel in distress or a love bondage partner or a sub/dom game player.
So we shoot these, and try to keep them relatively fantasy neutral, but they feel very limiting from our point of view on the production side. Hence our interest in other things to film, and the current bout of soul-searching.
A lot of my personal fantasies are non-consensual, at least in part. There’s a powerful element in the dominant/submissive dynamic which involves being in charge and imposing your will on the submissive. I often hint at those elements in the story snippets I write to accompany photo sets. I’m happy with that, it is hot to hint at bad stuff happening off screen.
I do have more of a problem with writing them down as a detailed shooting script, directing others to act them out, explaining the story in detail, spending a day shooting them and a week editing them. It is more personally exposing. One worries about freaking the actresses and crew out, not to mention alienating the members for whom a particular video doesn’t fit their kink. There may even be legal implications in some places, depending on exactly how plain one makes the combination of non-consenuality and sexual activity.
I should emphasise at this point that no-one involved with the running of the website in any way condones any sort of real-life violence or non-consensuality. I know it has been a worry for many people who are inclined to sexual dominance that we might be potential serial killers; I certainly wondered about that in my teenage years. I no longer worry about it. None of the doms I’ve met even comes close to fitting the profile (for example, serial killers usually begin activities with animal cruelty). I believe that anyone with a healthy mind knows the difference between play and reality.I think the BDSM scene has been careful in its choice of “playing together” and “scenes” to describe consenual BDSM activities which might include mutually acceptable play acting of non-consensual elements. Safe, sane, sober and consensual are the watchwords for what is acceptable in play scenes.
This is the approach that most hardcore sex-and-bondage sites take: their videos are basically recordings of BDSM play scenes, complete with framing interview of somewhat nervous but excited submissive before the scene and lots-of-smiles post-orgasmic come-down interview afterwards. This “top-and-tailing” of hard BDSM scenes presumably started as a legal protection for the producers and has become the absolutely unvarying formula for most sites combining hardcore porn with BDSM.
We’ve used this approach, for example on the recent Ariel’s foot torture series. The videos show us being more-or-less ourselves (at least the kinky side of ourselves) and the video is a consensual BDSM play scene enacted for the cameras. The lighter the activities in the scene, and the more obviously consensual the scene as it plays out, the less need to top-and-tail. But it is always there as a great option to bracket the footage and make intention clear.
It has the great advantage of making it absolutely plain, in language that cannot easily be misinterpreted, that this is all consensual done by adults of their own free will because they like it. An individual part of the scene might hit someone’s squick button (nipple clamps might make you cringe) but the scene as a whole is unlikely to, because there’s not really much acting or storytelling involved. The video is largely a documentary portraying a BDSM play scene.
Spanking and CP videos, on the other hand, usually have consent implied by situation, in that the submissive accepts the spanking by an authority figure as an alternative to something worse. These almost always have a storyline set up. The story is often hackneyed, lame, or pressing the bounds of credulity, but it is there. If you watch the video, you will learn why the girl is going to get spanked, as well as see her actually being spanked, and that story will be fiction.
Is it non-consensual? In the real world, it is a very murky question which leads into very difficult questions about why people remain with physically and mentally abusive partners, or the abuse of positions of trust by people who should absolutely be removed from them.
In the fictional world of the CP movie, though, there’s an implied consensuality. Often the story is so loony that no-one can take it seriously- one hopes that few secretaries would really allow themselves to be spanked for making typing mistakes! But the fact that the girl is not usually tied down for the punishment matters, and that’s to do with her implied consent. She is allowing herself to be spanked as an alternative to being grounded for a month or having to pay for the crashed car herself or whatever other far-fetched scenario we have dreamed up.
Couple that with the lack of sexual interaction between top and bottom that’s considered de rigeur for most spanking films and you have a formula which feels comfortable to producers and viewers alike. I know a lot of bottoms like the story of being punished by a stern top who is doing it “for their own good” and who take no pleasure from inflicting the punishment themselves: a lovely thing to act out, but only with a partner who does in fact get something out of it themselves!
We’ve done that in some of our spanking-heavy films, like the Ariel’s slave training series from a while ago. (Sammie still teases Ariel with “that one doesn’t count!”)
The third big genre is the abduction/damsel-in-distress video: intruder breaks in and ties up girl. Usually the reason for his so doing is not explored in detail: a throwaway line about teaching her not to steal from her company is about the most one usually sees.
In real life this would be horrifying, legally and morally indefensible. One can set up the story so the viewer can believe that somehow the girl deserved it. Of course in the real world that’s absolutely not acceptable. If you are like me, this might worry you. But the films are hot anyway, and even hotter if there is a sexual element like stripping her or cutting the buttons off her blouse. It doesn’t have to be sex to be sexual (we don’t do hardcore anyway) but it definitely adds to it for me if there’s the strong implication that sexual things may happen off-screen at the end.
In fantasy, this is a perfectly acceptable game to play with your partner by mutual consent. I truly and strongly believe that. It is doing no harm to anyone and is no-one’s business but your own. It can be played straight and serious, or verging on slapstick comedy (tied & tickled, anyone?)
So why does it make me uncomfortable to type about it, or to write screenplays portraying it? Why do I not want to explain to actresses what the story is about? Why have I spent the last two hours avoiding typing the word “rape” or even the euphemism “force fantasy” which is the standard BDSM scene term? We’d never show anything hardcore on screen anyway, that isn’t our aesthetic, so why am I so hesitant about even implying it?
I guess for the purity of the form, one does not want to top-and-tail it with the same happy interviews as the BDSM scene; the story would lose its dramatic tension. That leaves one with a piece of work which ought to be viewed in isolation in order that it has proper impact. This denies one the same opportunities to demonstrate to an uncharitable vanilla viewer the spirit of BDSM play with which it was filmed, and leads one to worry what sort of audience might want to view just those isolated scenes from the Restrained Elegance canon.
We had a similar rather disturbing experience with EvilMagician.com with people who were only interested in seeing dismembered girls, rather than the somehow rather innocent fetish of the true magic fans who love the whole scene and for whom it is absolutely of vital importance that you see the girl magically mended from being sawn in half at the end of the trick!
There are story conventions which moderate the impact. The temptation is to water down the sexual element almost to the point of oblivion, and that’s the thing that feels cowardly to me. In my head, I do not fantasise about tied up girls in an asexual way.
The other usual approach is to water it down by having her fall in love with the assailant, sooner or later. “Abducted by slavers, sold to the harem, fall in love with the sultan” and other variations on the theme of falling in love with the bad man can be found extremely widely in many genres, including numerous Mills-and-Boon bodice ripper romances squarely aimed at a female audience and written from the female point of view. Even Mary Stewart heroines from the 1950’s get bruised wrists from being man-handled by the bad man they eventually fall in love with.This is an important point to make. These fantasies exist from both the dominant and the submissive side. Some women do have force fantasies, in fact a sizeable enough number of them that it is a common sub-genre of romantic fiction written by women for women to read. The only pure force fantasy website I know about is originated and run by a woman (Lorelei, from Bedroom Bondage. I don’t know if the site is currently up or not: the billing companies are very leery).
It is ironic that this genre seems to be less acceptable in mainstream cinema than horror flick torture porn like the Hostel, Saw and other interminable gorefests. It is unusual for BDSM porn to have a body count, unlike a horror film.
Which brings us to catergory number four, the horror film. I certainly got some of my early BDSM fixes from horror films of the 1980’s, before I had found any sources of BDSM erotica and porn. Allowing the supernatural element in helps because you can kill a sexy vampire and have it be exactly the right thing to do within the logic of the film. We’ve done a few of these over the years, too (Lady of Pain, notably, but Emotional Ties also had a deliberate undercurrent of it).
Why it is that I don’t cringe about explaining the plots of those to actresses so much, I wonder? Is it just that we’re following the mainstream cinematic example more closely, in fact toning them down a bit?
Is it the worry about glamourising rape, or glorifying violence towards women? Everyone on the site is most emphatically against any real life chauvinism, let alone discrimination, abuse or violence. But maybe it is hardest of all to show that in the implied force fantasy videos?
I wonder. Should we find a formula for topping and tailing those videos so we can film them in a pure form for the “core” part of the video? Should we play it straight, and rely on the context of the website as a whole to persuade everyone that we’re safe, sane, sober and consensual people here?
How do we explain ourselves to possibly uncomprehending vanilla friends and family who might view material we like and are comfortable with for ourselves, but which if viewed in isolation might seriously be open to misinterpretation of the spirit of BDSM play with which they were written and filmed?
Ariel and I are very open and honest about what we do with all our friends and family, but some things feel very personal, and in need of careful explanation. After all, we wouldn’t expect to discuss the details of our sex life with anyone and everyone. But by converting our fantasies and ideas into scripts to shoot, it feels like that’s exactly what we are doing. It does feel very much more exposing than shooting stills, having to explain in detail what should happen and what the characters are feeling to actresses who may not share exactly our kink. And even worse to have the results seen by people who may not share our kink even slightly.
I wonder how we should approach this for the future? Should we attempt explanation of BDSM play context somehow, or are we worrying over nothing? Should we be brave about shooting “pure form” BDSM videos or top and tail in the manner of kink.com?
I wonder what sort of videos you actually want to see?
And I wonder whether you have the sort of qualms about enjoying your kink that we both used to have before we discovered the notions of BDSM scenes, play, and the guidelines and safety net mechanisms therein. In the days of alt.com and Fetlife this might all be a complete non-issue, only of concern to old fogies like me who can remember before the internet age.
And I wonder if anyone has actually read down this far, or even cares what we film so long as it is gorgeous girls in hot bondage!
But after ten years of shooting bondage it is something I’m still rather wrestling with internally, and I’d be very pleased to know how others feel.
I’m not sure you should even try to make videos “fantasy neutral.” Instead, pick a fantasy for a particular video, and then run with it. Just do different fantasies with different videos, and avoid shocking twists (no fluffy humorous story with a sudden horrific end, and no dark & grim story with a sweet and happy ending tacked on).
As for how to portray those fantasies, I’ve been wrestling with some of those same issues myself, wrt my fiction-writing and rpg gamemastering. Since you inflicted an essay on us, I’m going to inflict an essay or two in return. Here’s one I wrote some years back, about fiction in general, rather than Bondage/BDSM fiction in particular:
The Evil that Good Guys Do: How Storytellers and Setting Designers Help the Audience Overlook and Forgive the Wrongful Acts of Heroes in Cinematic Settings
Cinematic heroes tend to ignore the rules; they often don’t follow the laws, regulations, social norms, and moral standards that apply to ordinary people. They are outlaw-heroes, even in cases where their activities are approved of by the authorities and the general population. Conan is a bloody-handed barbarian. James Bond is a womanizer and a cold-blooded killer. “Dirty Harry” is a maverick cop who uses a non-regulation .44 Magnum. Even “boy-scout” heroes like Superman and Captain America wear funky costumes, beat people up, violate FAA regulations, and otherwise behave eccentricly.
More importantly, the audience cheers on the actions of cinematic heroes even when the authorities and general population don’t approve. Furthermore, the audience cheers on the outlaw-heroes even when their activities are actual crimes that the audience ought to disapprove of – and that the audience actually does disapprove of in real life. Part of the cinematic storyteller’s art is to soften and disguise the evil and criminal appearance of the outlaw-hero’s actions so that the audience can overlook and forgive the evil nature of those acts. This allows the audience to vicariously enjoy the pleasures of the hero’s outlawry without feeling guilt or revulsion.
The general techniques that storytellers use to do this include:
* Villain-victims who deserve the crimes that heroes commit against them, at least in the sense of it being “poetic justice”. This is an almost universal technique; almost all cinematic stories use it. By establishing “poetic justice” as the standard of justice in the setting, and by making the bad guy mean enough to deserve to get it good and hard, the storyteller can get the audience to cheer almost anything that the hero does to the bad guy.
* Villains so bad that the heroes, eccentricies and all, are needed to stop them. Another common technique. The big-shot villains in cinematic settings are often, like the heroes, eccentrics who are beyond the law. The ordinary, by-the-book agents of authority are helpless to stop them (and are frequently shown getting pasted when they try). Thus putting up with the heroes’ “questionable” actions is part of the price of stopping the villain. (And it’s a price well worth paying, since the villain’s actions are (and are painted as being) much more evil than the hero’s.)
* Heroes’ crimes that are treated as being “no big deal”. This is usually applied to such things as property damage and theft rather than physical injuries to innocent bystanders: The total destruction of someone’s store, car, or house is passed off as a joke, with the financial and other consequences to the victim ignored. However, personal crimes can also be treated this way in a suitably exotic setting: In a bloody barbaric setting where people get hacked down left and right, it is no big deal when the hero adds a few more bodies to the pile.
* Victims who agree to be victimized. This is fairly rare, and usually melds with the villain-victim who “deserves” what the hero does to him. For example, it applies to a villain who agrees (or insists on) a duel or trial of combat against the hero, and who thus “deserves” or “agrees to” his fate when the hero wins. But it can also apply to the victims of a hero’s romantic advances.
* Victims who ought to agree to be victimized. Like the above, this is fairly rare. It usually involves the hero riding roughshod over someone who foolishly refuses to let the hero have what he needs to stop the villain. But also like the above it can refer to the victim of the hero’s romantic advances. It can apply to cases where the hero’s romantic victim resists while the audience shouts “Give in, dammit! You know you love the guy and are destined to live happily forever after.”
* Other Techniques:
o Use of exotic backgrounds, so that the hero’s crime can be passed off as just another exotic custom.o Making the hero eccentric in ways that are obviously not evil (or not obviously evil), then passing off the hero’s crimes as just more eccentricies.
o Having lots of evil in the background so that the hero’s crimes won’t stand out so starkly.
o Showing the good side of the hero first, so that the audience will have to change their minds about the hero in order to condem his crimes.
o Giving the heroes Official Permission to be naughty
o Exagerate the differences between the hero’s crimes and the villian’s crimes. Present the difference as being a litmus test for good vs evil. Force the audience to choose between the hero and the villian.
o Make the hero’s crimes look “cool” and esthetically pleasing. Get the audience caught up in admiring the esthetics so they’ll forget to condem the ethics.
o Not showing the uglier and longer-lasting consequences of the hero’s crimes, and pretending that they don’t exist. (This is another facet of treating the hero’s crimes as “no big deal.”)
o Not having the hero cause accidental injuries or deaths. The audience can’t be allowed to percieve the hero as being a serious threat due to being a “loose cannon.”
o Give superficially plausable justifications for the hero’s questionable actions, and then treat the justifications as completely adequate.
Continuing my babbling:
WRT “force fantasies” being popular among women as well as men, I remember how surprised I was to learn that the Gor novels were popular with women as well as men. I’d figured them to be a “guy thing,” with the audience being overwhelmingly male. My current working theory is that it’s a fantasy of magically dispensing with the awkward & embarrassing parts of asking for and giving consent, with a side order of extreme desirability: The woman is so desirable that the man just has to go ahead and take her, and the man is so desirable that the woman just has to be happy to be taken (at least by the end).
A big problem I kept tripping over in my own stories was how to keep the men treating the women more-or-less nicely even as they are capturing, binding, and enslaving them. If a male character is willing to enslave females, then why should he scruple at treating them with great misogynistic cruelty? Conversely, if a male master is willing to be nice to his female slaves, why would he want to keep them as slaves at all?
As for the “topping and tailing” of BDSM videos, I think one big advantage that “regular” movies have is that the Bad Stuff happens to fictional characters, rather than to the actors & actresses themselves. With BDSM videos, the Bad Stuff is happening to the models, and if any line exists between the real woman and her persona in the vid, it’s a thin and blurry one. So it might help if you could make a video where it clearly not Ariel who is being abducted and made to sexily suffer, but rather a fictional character, with Ariel just happening to be the actress portraying her. (An exotic or historical setting might help, here.) “9 1/2 weeks” pointed in that direction from the regular-movie side of things, likewise the movie versions of “The Story of O” In both cases the victim/sub/slave to whom all the BDSM stuff happened was not the same as the actress portraying her.
@lurker wrote:
I’m not sure you should even try to make videos “fantasy neutral.” Instead, pick a fantasy for a particular video, and then run with it. Just do different fantasies with different videos, and avoid shocking twists (no fluffy humorous story with a sudden horrific end, and no dark & grim story with a sweet and happy ending tacked on).
Glad you agree that trying to make videos “fantasy neutral” is not the solution 🙂 I don’t mind shooting the occasional struggling video with not much plot, but it would be very limiting to shoot nothing but that! The main point I was making is that a lot of still photos are inherently pretty fantasy neutral, unlike videos.
I also agree that avoiding shocking twists that totally change the tone of the film is wise. Up to a certain point it can be a useful device to change pace or introduce tension, but a fluffy comedy tickling video that turns into a slasher flick would be step too far.
What we were talking about in terms of topping and tailing darker videos was more along the lines of making the actress/character divide clear by providing more behind-the-scenes information rather than compromising the tone of the main piece by plot twists, just to clarify.
Treatment of some themes by making them comedy is another approach (we’ve never done it to the heights of Strictly Come Spanking from Northern Spanking, it has to be said… 🙂 🙂 )
Interesting point about the blurred distinction between actress and character. We have shot videos where Ariel is quite clearly playing someone else (Princess Rosamund in Medieval Epic, for example). But remember that most models are using stage names already, so there’s already one step of remove from reality…
Cheers, Hywel.
How about the prison fantasy?
The prison guards are not abusive by nature, they’re just doing their job.
If a prisoner has been sentenced to solitary/ hard labour/ flogging, they just carry out the sentence.
In all the best prison dramas, everyone is innocent of course!As a spanking enthusiast, I have always been looking for scenes that are as realistic as possible. Downloaded thousands of videos (yes, I AM addicted) and put only a few in my “Five Star” category.
It’s my personal believe that those who play their own fantasies, coming straight from their hearts perform BEST.
Rosaleen Young portrayed much of herself in her movies and her book, which – as I believe – made her so very loved by so many. (me included).
Both Ariel and Rosaleen have the same. They can portray themselves and you can SEE that when they perform. Often they have to do so in an environment that is not really theirs and that takes a lot away. But when free to really play out their fantasies, both women perform extremely well – TOP.
Those performances are noticed by many and a lot of fellow enthusiasts rate them high. As they look (are) genuine.So my answer to your question is: ‘Try to be as genuine as you can. Show as much as you tolerate yourself (and Ariel or other models) to show of yourself (your fantasies) and film the genuine thing.
Whilst drawing (I’m an amateur only) I always try to depict a scene as realisitic as possible, hampered by the fact that I have no formal Art education. But amazingly a lot of people recognize my efforts and like the simple drawings because of that. The site I own together with Uasketcher counts well over 22.000 members and quite a few confirm they like the genuinity in my drawings.
Hope this will help a little bit.Funbun
PS: English is only my second language, so please bare with meHywel, I don’t pretend that I know anything about running a website. Particularly running a bondage website. You know more than me about what you are allowed to do without attracting the wrath of censors and credit card companies.
But I do think that you should explore some of the themes you were hinting about. Create a kind of second brand, like what was done with RE nights.
You have piqued my curiosity. I just looked in my notebook where I jot down website passwords and logins, I first joined RE in Oct of 2001, and I am dying to see some of the ideas that you are afraid of explaining to models.
If you feel you have to add the kind of pre and post interviews that Kink.com has been doing for years go right ahead. Sexandsubmission.com has for years been doing “force fantasy” succesfully.
I believe that their two major no no’s is they cant “abduct” a model who is kicking and screaming and while the models are “forced” they don’t seem to complain about it too much.I’m not saying you should get into the hardcore business, but if you are talking about using more non consentual themes and ideas from horror movies go for it.
A website like any company needs to grow and change. Clearly you are thinking of doing this or you wouldn’t have started this post.
If you are looking for support you have mine.
I thought the escapology video was brilliant.
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