@cavalierdriver wrote:

Rememberred one – just as I hit submit as well!

How is Sabrina doing? Baby must be about to hatch. If anyone is talking to her wish her well from us lot.

CD

About to hatch ??

Sabrina had a lovely baby girl in May. Mum and baby are doing fine. They both look great from the photos she sent me.

@cavalierdriver wrote:

1. There have been a lot of sets recently (particularly involving Ariel) where the model, restrained in metal cuffs, have found themselves in a swimming pool. I guess for such sets safety was clearly a consideration (though in general it is fairly apparent how this concern has been dealt with i.e. not too strict bondage – legs free) I can’t help looking at the sets and wondering about metal cuffs in wet swimming pools. I know it’s amongst the more boring things I have ever brought up in here but is this sensible?

From the safety point of view we have left the legs free in most of these sets, although we have done some with legs tied. We also make sure that there are at least two people around should we need to pull someone out in a hurry. For the ones shot in Spain, for example, I was behind the camera and one or two out of Ariel or Sammie or Elle were holding the reflector. So if anything had happened we could have got there and got her out very quickly.

We did a more worrying set where Ariel was tied to a big Lilo in the pool. The worry here was that if the thing capzised, she would not be able to right it or escape and could be held face-down in the water. For that set the third person was on lifeguard duty, as well as the reflector holder and photographer being on the lookout for problems.

As far as the effects of chlorine-laced water on the steel, it doesn’t seem to have caused any problems. Where possible, rinse in clean, fresh, non-chlorinated water, dry with a towel and then leave to bake in the Spanish sun. They all seem to have survived without ill effect (which is more than can be said for shooting on the sand in Sweden, which has definitely got some sand in the locks of a couple of pairs of handcuffs. They work, but they graunch and grate a lot more than they used to!)

@cavalierdriver wrote:

2. Chanta Rose. So just recently we are aware of Chanta from her website (ChantasBitches) and from her appearances on here – where she is predominantly cast in the dom role. But I remember her from her early appearances on the site when she was mostly sub – indeed I believe you rigged her first suspension? (I think the topic of her switching came up in one of the behind the scenes, Chanta ties Ariel, videos a while back). I was wondering how your working together came about? Was RE Chantas first foray into bondage websites? Are her archive sets on RE therefore a little bit of bondage history? Did you help create the monster! (I mean that in the nicest possible way)

I don’t believe RE was Chanta’s first foray into bondage modelling, but it was one of the early sites she worked for. I think she contacted me to ask about shooting rather than vice verse, but it is so long ago I could be totally wrong.

As she got more and more into bondage, travelling the world doing bondage shoots, we pushed what we shot together more and more because she wanted to replicate stuff she’d seen. Our styles matched pretty well at the time and we did several content-swap shoots as she was starting a site. She’s gone more in the industrial grunge direction since, but her earlier stuff was very cute and girly, as at http://www.bondagepussycat.com/

I admit that she was the driving force behind the more ambitious rigs (like the upside down suspended hogtie)
but I also knew that she was a very good person to experiment with more intense stuff with, as she was into it enough to want to give anything a go, but professional enough to be able to stop and analyse if something was rigged wrong so we could fix it. I certainly feel that her archive sets are a big bit of RE history, because I learnt a HELL of a lot from the work we did together and am doinga lot of stuff today that I tried the first time with Chanta.

I maybe helped to create the monster a little bit, I think it was already lurking! 🙂

@cavalierdriver wrote:

3. Do you still work with the EvilMagician (Hywel and the Magician have a site called EvilMagician.com but I notice it hasn’t been updated for a while). I remember conversations in here about the time it started about how as a child I was drawn towards magicians on TV in hope of seeing his beautiful assistant tied up and in some inescapable peril (Debbie McGee!). It would be a shame not to do more sets of this sort – if not for the Evil Magician for RE.

I don’t directly work for EvilMagician.com any more, but Rob the Magician still shoots for it (often at my studio). You can see his more recent stuff at:
http://secure.surfnetcorp.com/acbuild2/showprod.cfm?&DID=53&CATID=6&ObjectGroup_ID=134

For various historical reasons, Rob’s photosets have tended to be listed under the “XMP Photography” heading rather than under the “Evil Magician performances” on the site. (This is now an anachronism and I think Rob is going to reorganise the site accordingly).

Rob has only been shooting stills since I stopped working on the EvilMagician stuff. He’s hoping to get the video side back up and running next year- he has a bunch of my old footage to practice editing on! As always, it comes down to time.

Time is the main reason I had to stop doing stuff for EvilMagician, too. With RE now updating daily with rather bigger sets, and weekly with more complex videos, the workload has steadily increased. Editing videos is a major time investment. A complicated performance shot with multiple camera angles and multiple takes would take me a full day or two to edit (as opposed to an hour or two to shoot). I’m already spending about a week every month editing the videos for RE, and finding the time to do even one EM video each month just got harder and harder. I guess especially so because RE has a fixed and demanding update schedule where EM’s has always been “it gets released when it is ready”, and customer pay per download rather than having a membership.

For a while I hired someone to edit video, but it was not cost effective to keep doing that purely for EM, and for RE it wasn’t particularly satisfying as I have such detailed ideas for how I want a video to turn out that I ended up micromanaging or, worse, re-doing some portions of the edit each time.

@cavalierdriver wrote:

4. Talking of beautiful women in peril – you must do a Perils of Penelope Pitstop -inspired set (or even video – I bet Ariel does a perfect Heeellllppp!). Inspiration can be sought from the many episodes uploaded to YouTube. Slight shame that she was always a little overdressed (pink outfit, white boots, white gloves and a white hat and scarf set) I am sure the RE version can do away with some of that – perhaps start with the boots!

Oh yes, I’ve mentioned this possibility to Ariel several times, and purchased an episode or two to show her (you can get Penelope Pitstop from iTunes now- cool!) This is definitely something I’d like to pursue.

@cavalierdriver wrote:

5. Lost models – any thoughts about the likelihood of you working again with, Charisma Cole (she went off to America didn’t she? Is she still in the business? She was one of my early RE favorites) and Jessie (a staple of early RE, and the EvilMagician now I think of it, who seemed to disappear), who else……?

Sadly Charisma quit modelling when she moved. She was a favourite of mine, too.
Jessie still models occasionally (she has shot for EM not so long ago) but has backed down her modelling work to become a makeup artist. I wouldn’t exclude another shoot with her in future.

@cavalierdriver wrote:

6. Check out http://www.boundlife.com I stumbled upon it about six months ago and was a member for a short while. It’s a site set up by a Dutch lady called Gina who after modeling on a couple of bondage sites decided to document her own adventures in bondage. I think she is genuinely quite submissive but the homemade nature of the site makes the photography not quite up to RE standard. I wonder whether you fancy working with her? Both sites could potentially gain something from such a collaboration

I always like collaboration, so this is something we could think about next year.

@cavalierdriver wrote:

7. Do you still draw? In the ‘special features’ section of the site there are a few examples of your early work on the site (I think in the early days the site was more about the artwork than the photos) but not so much recent stuff. There must be some pictures of Ariel in an artists drawing book somewhere (don’t wish to be intrusive 😀 )

I haven’t done any drawing in ages.

Back when I was a scientist, drawing used to be my brain’s haven from having spent the whole week thinking maths and physics. Now that my brain spends the whole week thinking artistic imagery, doing more art to relax doesn’t seem to work as well. The same “mental muscles” are used for getting the image in my head to draw from as to shoot or script a video.

It is something I would like to get back into. I tried drawing Ariel once, but wasn’t really happy with how it turned out- I need to get my eye back in and draw a dozen pictures to get back into it. I’m actually hoping that the input of a few more people into the site will eventually mean that I can back down the amount of artistic input and inspiration needed directly from me- I admit that 30 ideas a month, every month, all of which had to be seen through from inspiration through creation to editing and delivery was taking its toll. It has been really good to get other people involved in the process, and I’m hoping to “get my mojo back” a little and have enough spare energy and inspiration to take up artistic and creative pursuits outside the website again.

It sounds like whinging, I guess! I shouldn’t be carping, I do have the most fantastic job in the world, but the demands of the update schedule do take their toll after a few years. Some of my other long-standing hobbies have suffered a bit as well- I run role-playing games for my friends, have been running stuff for largely the same people since college days (gulp) 20+ years ago. But writing storylines and characters for the game is a little bit too like writing the script for a video, so again my poor brain has been squirting out sideways when I demand that it spend an evening writing game stuff the day after writing, shooting, or editing a video!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, what my brain has actually been craving as relaxation has been maths and science 😉 Hence the acquisition of a 5″ Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, a diffraction grating, a CCD camera… 🙂

Yeh, anyway, I would like to do more art again, and I hope the opportunity will come now that a few more people are contributing the the production for the site.

Cheers, Hywel.