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I may be a tiny minority in this, but while I would have liked to see “long term bondage,” I really don’t care for the “Long Term Bondage AND DICIPLINE” video series currently being run.
Dicipline and s/m just isn’t my thing, and I’m a big fan of Restrained Elegance in large part[1] because elegant bondage tends to be comfy bondage (or at the very least bondage that *looks* comfy from the outside.) “Elegance” cuts against grotty nasty s/m-ness, and that’s why I’m a longstanding Restrained Elegance member and not a member of sites featuring women in grimy industrial dungeons.
Just had to get that off my chest. :soapbox I’ll put away my soapbox now.
[1]The other major parts being the bare feet, the beautiful models, and the high quality of the photography.
Sigh. Can’t please all the people all the time.
This isn’t a rant aimed at you, Lurker, more a bit of venting about why I need to keep trying new things and exploring new directions as well as shooting sets similar to things I’ve shot before.
I couldn’t really think of any possible way of structuring 24 hours “in bondage” without some sort of discipline and the resulting character interaction- and since Ariel is very, very into the whole spanking and punishment side of things as well, that’s what we did. Within the limits of trying to do it for real, without elaborate lighting rigs, camera work, editing, etc.. I would claim that it is STILL a long way away from S&M in grimy industrial surroundings (I don’t think you’ll see an “eating lasagne at the dinner table in a silk evening gown” scene on Sex And Submission any time soon, for example). Chanta and I fundamentally disagree about what makes a “good” setting for a shoot- she likes industrial grime a lot- but we often agree on what bondage makes a girl look fantastic. There’s space for a wide variety. I’ve shot the occasional industrial grime set, but it isn’t my main thing nor is it likely to become so.
The Long Term Bondage was an attempt at something different, which has at least generated some feedback… some positive some negative. You are not going to like the last two episodes of it either as they are the last two demerits.
In fact you will probably not like a lot of the Restrained Elegance nights material as it is deliberately darker with more of a BDSM edge than pure bondage. That was Ariel and my idea for the feature in the first place, since she likes to do considerably more intense stuff than a lot of the models and I like to explore some of these elements in my own way with someone as inspiring and imaginative to work with as Ariel.
However, it is only about three or four days a month, leaving plenty of space for a mix of all the other things I also like to shoot- including the very glamourous and elegant stuff which was my original inspiration to start taking bondage photos. But thirty sets a month is an awful lot to shoot if you are going to stick to the same formula… and impossible to produce 30 updates a month which EVERYONE likes. So I’m going to continue to experiment with new and different stuff that interests me. The unifying theme will always be that it was something I found interesting either conceptually, in terms of the bondage, the look, the lighting, the model, the peformance, the storyline, the clothes, the setting, the photographic style, the punishment. If it doesn’t tweak my interest how can I expect it to tweak anyone else’s? If I have to experiment a few times and produce stuff which doesn’t please everyone… so be it!
😀 😀 :p 😀Restrained Elegance is a very personal project for me and ultimately I’m going to stick to my own artistic vision. I’d rather shut the site than compromise on that. I know that sounds very pretentious and arty! I’m not really a businessman at all. I’m only running this as a business coincidentally, as a means of covering costs and giving me enough to live on while I use the funds all you members generously pay to bring more of my ideas to life. I hope that enough of what I do strikes a chord with enough of you that I can continue the huge privilege of letting me do what it is that I do!!!
Of course if I try new directions ultimately I will piss off some of the existing members… hopefully not to the point where you all quit your membership… but if a few do, I guess that’s inevitable. I can’t and won’t compromise just to keep the money coming in. I could almost certainly make more money running five or six strictly defined niche sites which ran according to a never-varying formula, updated once a week and charging about the same each as I do now. But shooting to a formula or to someone else’s brief doesn’t really interest me, to be honest, even if it makes me money. If money was all I cared about I wouldn’t be a bondage photographer in the first place LOL.
:rudolphI hope to offer enough people enough of interest that I can carry on running the site. I find silk blouses attractive, and I shoot them sometimes, but I could never run a site like Bhowani or Bondage Bob do with nothing BUT blouses. (And you should hear them on the subject of feeling straight-jacketed by their members’ expectations when they dare to try as outrageous a variation as leaving the girl ungagged for one set once…) Fortunately the general realm of “beautiful woman in some sort of bondage or peril” encompasses enough variation for me not to feel constrained too much- I do still have hundreds of pages of notes for ideas I haven’t shot yet.
Hopefully with the kind support of members here on the site I can continue to bring those ideas to life. Some will be liked, some will be hated, some will be both liked and hated in equal measure. I guess the worst would be if everything were treated with total indifference- then it really WOULD be time to quit!
Cheers, Hywel.
Edited By Hywel on 1156971779
Hi Lurker,
I’m so sorry, it’s my responsibility really because I came up with the idea of long term bondage to begin with, and I didn’t think anyone would want to watch me just struggling and sighing for a whole day and night… Also, there was the issue of needing to change the ties, give me a break to get circulation back, and make the whole thing visually interesting. So introducing a structure of punishment and ‘training’ seemed a good way of giving us a basic narrative.
Nevertheless, it’s all my fault and I should be punished. :;):
OK, I had negative feedback to give wrt Restrained Elegance Nights, and I couldn’t come up with a graceful way to give it. Especially since my negative feedback came down to a primal “No sir, I don’t like it!”
I don’t want to see RE fall into a rut; I agree with you about the need to try new things. But trying new things means that some of them won’t work, or won’t work for everyone. And this new thing just didn’t work for me. Should I then hold my peace, or should I say so?
Part of what bugs me, I think, is a long-term trend I see, not just on RE but on bondage sites in general. Experimenting and trying new stuff is good, it keeps the site from falling into a rut, and in theory, at least, it gives a chance for creating improved stuff, better than what came before.
The problem I see is that changes & experiments always, somehow, seem to result in a site that drifts toward the darker and more SM-ish side of BDSM. It rarely throws up creativity on the brighter, happy-to-be-in-bondage side of things, and never enough to create a trend in that direction. Which I find annoying because I *like* that brighter, softer, more sensual side.
And I see drifting in the darker direction as being, in it’s own way, a rut in itself.
@arielanderssen wrote:
Hi Lurker,
I’m so sorry, it’s my responsibility really because I came up with the idea of long term bondage to begin with, and I didn’t think anyone would want to watch me just struggling and sighing for a whole day and night… Also, there was the issue of needing to change the ties, give me a break to get circulation back, and make the whole thing visually interesting. So introducing a structure of punishment and ‘training’ seemed a good way of giving us a basic narrative.
Nevertheless, it’s all my fault and I should be punished. :;):
That’s the problem: You and Hywel are both gluttons for punishment 🙂 🙂 🙂
As a hypothetical, why not a long-term bondage scenario where, instead of putting a great deal of creative though into coming up with interesting and amusing punishments & demerits, a great deal of creative though is put into coming up with interesting and amusing *rewards* for the pretty, helpless slavegirl. Where the victim is seduced to the point where she proffers rope to the master and begs to be put into a tight, inescapable cross-ankle hogtie…
A slave training scenario without any demerits or ouchies. Think of it as a challenge :devil
Hi Lurker,
That’s a lovely idea 🙂 I agree with you that the idea of all nice soft bondage sites drifting further and further towards ‘Insex’ territory would be a bad thing. Although I really like the WHOLE BDSM experience, bondage, pain, submission, big giant gags; it’s also important to me to represent the fact that it’s something that can be pure pleasure; it doesn’t have to involve an SM element every time. I think it’s called ‘Love Bondage’ and I’m all for that too.
So thanks for the feedback, I think there’s room on the site for a great variety of bondage scenarios, and there certainly is in my imagination…
:spin
Hi Lurker,
You should absolutely give the feedback, no matter that it is positive or negative!!!
I completely agree with you that the tendency is often for sites to slide down into darker stuff. It is often done as a perceived need to compete with other sites, and “old hands” in the bondage website business point to it as a danger sign. Often the site goes out of business shortly after- if the stuff you are producing isn’t good enough quality, it still won’t be good enough quality even if it is hardcore and more extreme. On the other hand, there is no denying that the sites with the largest memberships and the biggest budgets ARE the industrial hardcore ones- Cybernet and Insex have or had budgets so far out of my league that it makes me salivate to think of what I could achieve if I had a million dollars to spend on my studio sets and dozens of staff. The obvious inference is that the audience for the “dark side” is bigger (or possibly just more willing to cough up their cash). I have no idea whether that’s true or not but if I were in this business to make money it would keep me up at nights worrying about it. In that situation it is perhaps understandable why people feel the need to go down that route!
I’d claim that some of the stuff I shot on my first-ever trip to Los Angeles in March 2001, before the site even officially opened, was every bit as dark as the RE Nights stuff (tape tie with Emily Marilyn so hot wax dripped on her feet, nipple clamps, spiked board… a lot of the same elements that carry through to now). I’ve also done more explicit stuff in the past that anything I’ve shot this year (the Suzi Slavegirl sequence and Chanta’s forced orgasm, for example).
I’m going to keep doing the darker stuff and the explicit stuff in the future, but not as a trend towards ONLY doing the darker or more sexually explicit stuff or even necessarily doing very much of it. I just want to keep it in the mix of things I do, as it was from the start, along with pure glamour bondage and more of the light-hearted upbeat stuff. When I stop doing it, I feel the lack after a while.
It does depend quite a lot on what really talented and inspiring models are around and what THEY want to try, too. Belle’s Corner was pure comedy for a year or more which was fun, but we both felt that we’d got a bit stale on that. Belle was definitely feeling that she wanted the chance to show her more glamourous side rather than just be “Belle the brat” for a while. If you meet her in person she’s jaw-droppingly gorgeous and we didn’t always bring out that side of her in the sets. Ariel was just starting to really explore the darker stuff in her work at the time and it seemed like a good counter-balance to some of the lighter stuff, bringing back some of the “edge” which I felt had got lost in the preceding six months or year. Paige clearly approaches things with a very light-hearted manner so a lot of the stuff I do with her is more upbeat- although she does love the challenge of a tough bondage position, so she’ll end up dangling by her ankles from the ceiling a lot!
I completely agree that the slide into nothing but relentless dark, dingy, industrial grunge porn is one that too many sites fall into and rest assured that Restrained Elegance is highly unlikely to ever do so. But I reserve the right to shoot some of that if the mood takes me, too!! 🙂 🙂 🙂
I really like your idea for a light version of the Long Term Bondage!
Hywel.
On the other hand, there is no denying that the sites with the largest memberships and the biggest budgets ARE the industrial hardcore ones- Cybernet and Insex have or had budgets so far out of my league that it makes me salivate to think of what I could achieve if I had a million dollars to spend on my studio sets and dozens of staff. The obvious inference is that the audience for the “dark side” is bigger (or possibly just more willing to cough up their cash).
That’s another point that makes me grumpy 🙁 As I put it in my original post “I may be a tiny minority in this…” My intuition keeps telling me that there ought to be a huge audience of people like me, looking for the softer stuff. But all the evidence I’ve seen points to my intuition being clueless.
I am relieved, though, to hear you confirm that there is a tendency for sites to slide down toward the darker stuff – that I wasn’t being paranoid and imagining something that wasn’t there.
Yeh 🙁
It isn’t just by a little bit, either. Have a look at the Alexa traffic rankings for a few sites- RE does pretty damn well ranked at around 160,000 or so out of all the websites Alexa looks at. There’s a fair few other “big” bondage sites around the 90,000 to 200,000 mark. Now there are an awful lot of websites in the world, with new ones launched all the time, so being ranked that high seems pretty good- after all no-one expects you to be on the same level as the BBC, Google or MySpace.
Hogtied is 4,430. Sex and Submission is 5,505.
We aren’t even close. We aren’t even vaguely in the same league. Now OK traffic doesn’t necessarily translate into sales, and there are lots of cavets (give away lots of free stuff and you’ll get a good ranking but you could bankrupt yourself with bandwidth charges). But nonethesless, the sheer scale of the difference is a bit depressing!!!
Now a lot of it is down to very shrewd marketing starting right from the beginning on Cybernet’s part, but you have to say it looks pretty likely that more people are willing to seek out and pay for industrial grime BDSM than glamour bondage…
Cheers, Hywel.
Hi All;
So you don’t pay attention to the forum for a week and it all goes a bit serious! Might as well enter my two pennyworth…
Ref; The Restrained Elegance Nights Series. First and foremost I, like I presume the majority of long-term members here, am here (like Lurker) for the glamorous models exquisitely tied, beautifully dressed or not dressed at all! BARE FEET (why do other sites insist on tying bondage models up in suspenders and high heels? and have the cheek then to describe the model as submissive! A contradiction there somewhere methinks) and of course the high quality of the shots (not gynaecological!!!). However in recent years the odd set/video has turned up on here that if described to me without viewing I would have almost certainly have said was likely to be a bit stronger than I was really looking for (presumably the darker stuff that Hywel talks about), and yet many of these sets have turned out to be quite spectacular and have almost certainly broadened the sort of content I find myself downloading. A set that immediately springs to mind is the Rose Wood butt-plug in the kitchen video (recently repeated in the archives). Though not really what I am looking for (another trend in bondage sites of late, which I absolutely loathe, is the tying a model up in such a way that a vibrator can be positioned such that the set culminates in the model being ‘brought off’ with said vibrator whilst completely immobile – NOT a dig at Jasmines site – who I notice is using vibrators a bit more lately on her site) I feel other sites might have shot that particular video a bit differently such that, whilst the video was notably different to your standard RE video it clearly maintained the RE ‘spirit’ (it certainly wasn’t the formulaic gynaecological stuff you see on every other site) and so, quite to my surprise, I actually found myself enjoying(?)/liking the video.
I have mentioned in these forums before that I did have an initial fear about the RE nights stuff, following the first instalment, that the discipline side of the series may be too strong – if you recall there was a scene just inside the door with Hywels foot on Ariels back whilst he was whipping her bum. On the whole those initial fears were unfounded and I don’t consider the majority of the content too harsh/dark – particularly when Ariels narrative of the shoot and her entries in these forums, whilst not going so far as saying she enjoyed the punishment, gives the impression of someone looking to find her own limits. The timing of this forum thread is interesting as it seems (correct me if I’m wrong) to coincide with video 12 – the rather extreme bastinado video – which if I’m honest is perhaps the most uncomfortable I have been watching the RE nights series (this is from a foot fan who has often suggested more bastinado for RE in these forums – you have done some ace videos of this particular punishment with Jasmine). I think this was largely due to the unrelenting nature of the punishment and the apparent effect on Ariel (might have been good acting or lack of sleep but I am sure I saw some tears in her eyes). That said, I absolutely believe that if Ariel is wanting to go explore her limits let’s see it – even though it might not always be comfortable viewing.
I think, in conclusion, (the scientist in me coming out) I encourage you to try out new things and indeed dabble in sets that get a little darker than normal (I am sure this will not be too big a lerch towards the dark side!!). Yeah sure your not going to be able to please all of the people all of the time and nor should you try – but I am sure that you are not going to do anything that is going to damage the core RE concept – the sort of stuff I listed above that keeps the likes of Lurker and myself coming back for more. Presumably membership figures and response in this forum is soon going to be a good barometer of what is working and what is not.
As a final comment in Hywels replies (above) he lists some of the budgets, staffing levels and visitor numbers of some of the large US sites. As a fellow Brit I have to say that another draw of RE is the intimacy of this ‘one man band’ along with the ‘real’-looking beauty of the models you use (many of whom, of course, are home-grown). Sometimes you get the impression with the bigger sites that they are just one big bondage machine whose main motivation is to raise money. With Hywel, as reflected in some of his replies above, his love for what he is doing comes through in his work as does his rapport with the models.
Keep up the good work.
CD
Ps. Damn-it another syrupy full-of-praise entry to these forums by CavalierDriver – why can’t I learn to be more critical and angry!!
Very true CD, you look away for a few days and look what happens.. 🙂 Not sure I can raise a full pennethworth but there’s a point raised here which struck a chord with me..
Now its mentioned, I can see the general trend toward “the dark side” amongst websites, this trend has been brought home to me at another level in the last month. I became a part time D/s player 4 or 5 years ago and initially had lots of fun with loads of scarves, a few bits of hollow rope, the odd icecube etc. A few weeks ago I realised I’d just reduced the same girl to tears by the liberal application of my belt and then banned her from using furniture for allowing her makeup to become a mess. Later I thought “how the hell did we get to this??” , is it possible that ongoing experimentation leads to a natural drift toward darker stuff in all of us? or is that just two people slowly finding the level of their mutual fetish?? Been wondering this for a few weeks, has anybody else out there noticed this gradual change in personal taste, either in web surfing choices and/or D/s life?
I’m guessing a gradual change, or at least broadening of the content / context of RE.com is essential not only to accommodate the maturing tastes of surfers such as myself but also for the sake of our Webmaster, how many fluffy bedtime rope sets can one man produce before completely losing it :iconcrazy
There was a valid query in there about “maturing tastes” before I buried it, anybody relate?
I live in hope..
Cheers
M
P.S. Where does RE Nights go from here?
P.S. Where does RE Nights go from here?
Taking this lurch to the darkside to it’s logical extreme is it not a little worrying that Hywel appears to have skipped the country AND we haven’t heard from Ariel in a while. Could we be about to see the first RE snuff movie???
No offence intended.
CD
heh
or perhaps she’s killed ‘im :ghostface:
Re “slide into darkness” / “maturing tastes”… I think there is a natural tendency to push at limits a bit. After all if you have done something and it was thrilling but OK, you know you can do it… and the adrenaline junkie in all of us says “try it a little harder next time”.
Personally I like a wide range of stuff- it is fun to explore the dark side with someone like Ariel who is having fun exploring herself, but it is just as much fun to do some really glamourous and upbeat stuff with Hannah or Paige who are definitely not into the same level of spanking and punishment but who looks sexy as hell and have great fun looking gorgeous and elegant when the ropes and chains come out.
Variety is the spice of life!
Cheers, Hywel.
And so it ends.. arrr
Any chance you could manage 48hrs next time? 😀 Must admit I was interested in seeing what ending you’d go for, I suspect you guys were too, hehe. Certainly not something I’d expect to see anywhere else, well done both.
Speaking of saga’s, whats Sigrid been upto? the last page kinda set my appetite, it read as the prologue to a weighty tome indeed. Say, a couple of hundred pages, a page every other month, hell it’d better be good or I’m going to a dissappointed pensioner in about 30 years! 🙂
Cheers
M
Hello everyone 🙂 I’m back in England for a few days. Thank you very much for your concern, CD and Merlin – Hywel didn’t in fact actually manage to kill me with the bastinado, but it did hurt A LOT and I didn’t need to do any acting, good or otherwise :;):
I’m rather sorry it’s over, actually. The experience of shooting it was super, and watching it back was really strange, sometimes I felt pretty uncomfortable with it because it looked harsher than it felt sometimes. The problem is that I really love it, but you can’t see that, you can only see the pain reaction. Fortunately for me, I could remember how it felt, which was kind of good!
Ooh, Merlin, sounds very interesting at your house! I worry too about how my tastes might change to the extent that the things I want to do are dangerous or just kind of scary; but I kind of hope that really my tastes stay more or less the same, I just develop the confidence to try things instead of just fantasise about them. I wonder if that’s actually more common, especially in a long-term D/s relationship, where you gradually explore eachothers’ limits. I do think it’s harder on the dom though; the sense of responisibility as you move on to harder play must sometimes be a bit much. Anyway, come and order me not to use my furniture either, great idea 🙂
Am I the only one who thinks the life of Ariel Anderssen sounds a bit rock n roll. 😎
Nice of you to grace us briefly with your presence Ariel as you waft through en-route to some other “glamourous” location.. 🙂
Interestingly, you’ve kinda touched on a point that I’m fairly sure most subs don’t realise. For a Dom (capital D thankyou Ariel :p ) a submissive can often be hard work. From personal experience I own a sub whom only rarely submits, but does so in absolute terms. ANY bondage has safety considerations and so for a sub to live / eat / sleep in some form of bondage her/his safety has to be monitored at all times. This means that although as a Dom I try to give off the impression of going about my normal day in her presence I’m really not. For instance Jo thinks that if I chain her collar to an office chair and leave her some correspondence to type up I can then go and do other stuff thus making her efforts very useful to my business and deserving of reward. Rubbish, for fear she becomes unwell, the office catches fire or fills with gas etc etc I can’t really be out of earshot for long and therefore tend to end up pacing up and down the next room with nothing to do or playing solitaire on another machine. Not only that but doing ALL the thinking for two people – what to do, when, how, then, if.. gets genuinely tiring after a while. After hours or potenitally a weekend of this I sometimes struggle to keep it up (so to speak). Pick an RE video and the sub is invariably playing a character basically courting discipline, correction or attention in some way, which makes for entertaining viewing and a busy Dom. However this the exact opposite of what a genuine submissive does 95% of the time. God knows how you guys shot an entertaining video for 24 hours, I’d imagine Hywel wouldn’t want to do a weekend at that pace…
I’ve heard it said before that subs have all the fun. Don’t agree with that fully but I’m sure most subs don’t realise the workload of being a (responsible) Dom. Or is that just mine…
Not sure where all that :soapbox came from, I only looked in for a minute.. 🙂
Cheers
M
Speaking of saga’s, whats Sigrid been upto? the last page kinda set my appetite, it read as the prologue to a weighty tome indeed. Say, a couple of hundred pages, a page every other month, hell it’d better be good or I’m going to a dissappointed pensioner in about 30 years!
We’ve just finished the second page, I’ve just uploaded it to the site. Brian and I have been having a lot of discussions to and fro about how to match up the images and the story-telling so it doesn’t end up taking 30 years (or hundreds of illustrations) to complete!
My tendency (and it is the same when directing video) is that I want to show all the important things which happen in the story- if I have the shot down on tape, I can choose to use it or not when I get to the edit suite. The equivalent thing with Sigrid’s Saga is that I have some important things happening in the first few chapters which I would like to have illustrated because I know they are foreshadowing important things further down the line. Brian on the other hand needs to be free to pick and choose dramatic moments from the story to illustrate when he gets a good strong image in his head. So it is a matter of sending a flurry of emails back and fro to decide what is going to appear in the next drawing!
I think it will all settle down after the first few chapters, as I will have set the stage by then and we can get on with the sex’n’bondage! 🙂 🙂 🙂 I’m hoping to step the production up to one drawing a month if we can, but it might be a bit slower starting until we get into our stride. As you can see from the second picture, Brian packs a hell of a lot of detail into each one so it is no wonder we need to make sure we pick our moments to illustrate quite carefully… especially as he sends me the pencil sketch and I have thus far invariably been a picky pain in the arse and asked for a few tweaks and changes on each!
Anyway hope you enjoy the Saga as it unfolds… and promise we will get to the bondage before too long!
Cheers, Hywel.
Edited By Hywel on 1158915403
About that long term series…
I saw the previews of RE for a while before I joined, and I must admit that the longterm videos I saw were much harder than I had expected.
This isn’t bad, it’s just unfamiliar. As soon as you realize that it is still consensual and playful, you can really enjoy them. I was shocked a bit when I saw Ariel after the night in the cage. For a second I thought: is she breaking down now?
I had to rewind it a couple of times to actually see that she is okay.My opinion is: experimenting is good, breaking the expectancy is good. Usually I don’t like this whole punishment stuff, but I still watched it, and I have to admit that it IS interesting and sexy.
If Ariel is fine with this, why not? I guess this is a good guideline for other shoots as well: if a model wants to try out something, why not follow her trail? This might lead to yet unknown territory, but you actually might find something special this way.
After all, all progress is based on employee’s satisfaction! :;): :tongueThanks Marius, I’m glad it didn’t disturb you too much! I’d hate to think I’ll never get a chance to experiment like this again, and I’ve got lovely memories of the whole experience 🙂
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