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A few thoughts on Brexit

16th Birthday Thoughts

Hi All

Restrained Elegance is 16 years old on 1st April! What a magnificent, unexpected, wonderful, lucky thing that is! I never expected anything of it- when I opened the site I was just hoping to help cover the costs of models, and maybe make enough profit for a holiday or something.

Instead I’ve been lucky enough to be doing this as my full-time job since 2003. I hope I’ve never taken that for granted- it is only the support and generosity of everyone who has worked on the site and paid to watch what we make that’s allowed it to happen.

The industry is currently changing very fast, so it’s a good time to have a bit of a think about the future. I’d really like RE to still be around in 16 more years’ time… what can we do to make that happen, I wonder?

Changing Purchasing Patterns

I have to admit I don’t join paysites as often as I used to. Partially that’s because as a producer myself it’s a bit of a bus-man’s holiday, but also it is because of the rise of places like twitter to see a little of what I like for free.

I don’t surf tube sites and pirate forums. By the way, if you see whole videos or whole photosets if different producers on a website, I guarantee you 100% it is stolen and posted without the consent of the creators. And more importantly it is being distributed without sending any money back to the creators to help fund new productions.

But there’s not even any need to view pirate stuff to get a steady trickle of fun little “hits”- just follow your favourite models and producers on Twitter/Instagram/etc.. We don’t know what effect piracy has had really, but allied with the legitimate drip of freebie pics as advertising from producers’ and models’ twitter feeds, it definitely feels easier to see a bit of what you like for free than it used to be.

What’s more of a question is how sustainable this all is. If people stop producing, those freebie streams of content are going to dry up. Reading between the lines of producers’ feeds, I think we are within a whisker of a mass exodus from the industry and sudden, drastic shut-off of new production. We’re close to the point of making production uneconomic for small producers.

Since the financial crash of 2008, and especially in the last year, money has felt tighter and tighter and it is harder and harder to justify luxury spending.

This is bourne out by the data. Median income in the UK has flat-lined. And I think recent political events in the UK and USA (our two biggest markets) have made people more and more cautious.

Although it is horrible to hear it, it is in some small way reassuring to hear that we are not alone in having had a drop in turnover since 2008, and a major drop in the last year. Kink.com have just stopped fetish production at the Armoury and moved to cheaper places; the news reports say their turnover has halved in the last few years. I don’t know of a single producer who hasn’t had something of the same.

Our turnover has declined drastically too, and we’ve already pulled the “move to a cheaper part of the country” trick three years ago. In all honesty if it wasn’t for the dollar-pound exchange rate, my profit margin (i.e. the money I need to eat and keep a roof over my head) would have been zero in February (March is looking better, February is always a rubbish month).

On that depressing note, I have to look forward.

Although producers seem to be struggling world-wide, models are doing rather well. So it isn’t all doom and gloom by any means! Web 2.0 platforms like Clips4Sale and social media mean it’s easier than ever before to connect directly with the models you fancy, rather than viewing them at one remove via producer magazines/videos/DVDs/websites/etc..

So people ARE willing to spend money, and spend money often very generously. It’s just the way we are spending it is changing dramatically, and quickly.

How to still be making BDSM erotica in 16 years’ time?

With all that in mind, how can we work to make sure that Restrained Elegance is still around in 16 more years’ time?

Should we even rebrand and refocus and just shoot Ariel the best we can, and release under her brand rather than the RE brand? It’s drastic, but I wouldn’t mind being her cameraman. On balance probably not; it puts too much pressure on Ariel for starters. But if the industry is moving that way, we’re going to have to make some adjustments. If I end up assisting Ariel more than she ends up assisting me, that’s fine- it’s just that the RE production schedule will have to be scaled down accordingly.

I also have to bear in mind that when I started the website, I was in my early thirties. I was full of energy, I had a day job, and it didn’t matter much what I shot- I could be as experimental as I liked, and I didn’t know enough to be able to do that good a job… but it didn’t matter because everything was opening up on the internet and there was a big appetite for new things. Everything was faster to shoot because it was rough and ready, but that didn’t matter as there were few polished big competitors around anyway. 3 megapixel images didn’t show enough detail to need much editing, and even with 15 years of computer power development the 3 megapixel images were faster to handle then than 42 megapixel RAW images are now. And as for video- our first miniDV videos were 30 seconds long, with resolutions around 640 pixels. Now we shoot at 3840 pixels to deliver in 1920, shooting RAW-like formats on a digital cine camera. It’s awesome, but it’s a lot slower than it was.

Now I’m nearly fifty, middle aged. I’ve got vastly more experience and skill as a photographer and film-maker, and I’ve shot around 5,000 of my bondage ideas already. Shoot days are hard but fun; I’m still energetic, but stuff takes longer than it used to because I know how to do a better job. Processing sets and editing videos is time-consuming, but deeply satisfying because I know I can make technically much more polished work than I ever could in 2001. It does take a bit more time to do the job right, and in classic middle-aged fashion, it is hard to recapture the verve of doing it and making mistakes and ploughing on with the ideas regardless the way one can when one is blessed with youth, innocence and a bad haircut.

One of the reasons model-centric channels like OnlyFans are taking off is that smartphone cameras are now more than good enough for purpose- direct connection with the model and an image adequate to show you what’s going on, plus built-in ability to upload to the distribution platform.

Maybe if I were young, hip and happening, I could figure out a way to make an iPhone based business work for me as a producer rather than a model… but I’ve always been a bit of an image quality fetishist, and I don’t want to let go of the awesome look that comes from a Hasselblad or a RED and decent lighting. Even technophobe Ariel likes looking nice with nice light on her smartphone selfies! To me, shooting for Restrained Elegance *requires* shooting like it’s for the cover of Vogue- that was always the mission statement!

Censorship and Regulation

In 2001, the internet was still in its “Wild West” growth phase. Now we are in the Web 2.0 era of mega-corporations, and even kinky stuff online is dominated by a few big players and platform providers (I’m looking at you, Clips4Sale). Worse, governments are moving in and trying to impose authoritarian control on the freedom of information and people online- something which will be much easier to do if we’ve all centralised onto a few platform providers, incidentally.

In the last few years, we in the UK have seen wave after wave of badly-thought out, badly worded, out-dated and just plain corrupt enforcement come our way. ATVOD were SO crooked even OFCOM realised it, and abolished them. The latest wheeze is age verification- to even look at free previews, you may end up having to have your age verified with some giant database company somewhere.

The costs to fetish producers of doing this may well exceed our turnovers. And would you want to hand over your credit card details even to look at a site’s preview tour? Me neither. In ultimate irony the company in cahoots with the government to do this are MindGeek, the people who have been bleeding producers dry by stealing our content and giving it away for free, generating spam advertising revenue for them at the expense of people who actually shoot stuff.

Leaving aside the asinine security risk presented by MindGeek having a huge database of everyone’s legal names correlated with their porn surfing habits, the feeling we in the UK production community are getting is that it’s probably only a matter of time before something comes down on us which will be SO prohibitively expensive that we may have to shut up shop… or at least, may have to stop running little indie websites and succumb to the inevitable and only sell via platforms who handle stuff like age verification for us, in exchange for a huge chunk of our revenues.

It’s hard not to feel a bit down-hearted about all of this. I’ve had the time of my life being a cottage industry producer, beholden to no-one, making the romantic, elegant bondage erotic art that we want to make and asking for no-one’s permission.

Responding to these big three challenges

I have to face up to the fact that these three big challenges- what feels like a sea change in our buying patterns away from subscription websites, increasing regulation and government censorship, and my own advancing years- means that I’d better not plan on still be running Restrained Elegance as a five-updates-a-week subscription site until the day I retire. (Which incidentally is about as far in the future as opening the website is in the past, hence my thoughts about it today).

I’m not totally glum. We can probably find a way through stuff like age verification- I think it is quite likely that Clips4Sale will be big enough to find a solution which all of the small producers can piggy back upon, for example.

People are still demonstrably interest in looking at bondage erotica, and are willing to pay for it if it is offered in the right form at the right price. It just seems that, like magazine subscriptions before it, the model of paying a low monthly fee and staying a member long-term is on its way out.

I certainly plan to be shooting bondage for as long as I’m physically capable- it’s just that I shouldn’t plan on still being able to generate 5 updates a week by the time I’m in my late sixties and ready to retire. So… how to manage the change over the next 16 or so years?

It’s a shame and a challenge- the great beauty of website memberships was that they were the original crowd-sourcing method.

Websites as Crowd-Sourcing

The content over the whole of Restrained Elegance’s lifetime has literally cost over a million pounds to shoot- and if you join the site on any given month you get the benefit of about 18 months’ worth out of 16 years of that… so the stuff on the members’ area of RestrainedElegance.com on any given day probably cost £100,000 to create. That you can download and keep all of that for just $39.95 (about £30) is testament to the power of crowd funding.

Sure, a Hollywood film costing $100 million can be bought for $10, but that just emphasises how important it is to have enough people chipping in. It’s REMARKABLE how ambitious we’ve been allowed to be with our silly little bondage project, given enough people paying to see it.

I’ve made a comfortable living from RE, but consistently over 80% of the money you’ve all paid in over the years has been invested straight back into RE. That’s how we’ve acquired the cameras and lenses to shoot with. It’s how we afford to hire the models. It’s how we’ve bought a storeroom full of bondage gear for shoots. It’s paid for locations, props, costumes, clothes, memory cards, lights, safety scissors… it’s gone back into the business. It’s worked like a charm for 16 years.

But what happens when people just don’t like that subscription model any more? I can run special offers, come up with Game Of Slaves and new features, do a better and more beautiful job. But none of it matters if large scale economic and social change means that people just aren’t interested in buying via the subscription website model any more. And anecdotally I don’t know of a single established producer who hasn’t experienced the same cliff-edge of sales over the last few years. Even mainstream porn production companies keep emailing me with “75% off!!!” sales – and let me tell you nobody reduces their prices by 75% unless they are pretty desperate.

And here’s the thing- even at 75% off, I didn’t want to rejoin their site. Although it was nice enough, it was a bit soul-less and didn’t really offer me what I wanted. I’m sure that’s been true of RE for an awful lot of the 100,000+ people who have joined at some point over the last 16 years. And even for people for whom it’s pretty great, they are still being more parsimonious… in the same way that I’m thinking of cancelling my Cineworld unlimited card and just going to films I really want to see.

What Should We DO About All This?

So really this post is an open question to you, the people who have made shooting that million pound mountain of erotic BDSM art possible… which direction do you think we should go in? I’m determined to still be around and still be producing BDSM erotica for another 16 years, but it looks like the current sales model will probably not last the distance with us.

Restrained Elegance is ours- yours as much as mine. So together we need to brainstorm a longer-term plan. Even if you all think I should switch tack to shooting everything on iPhone and distributing on the day we shoot via OnlyFans, I’ll give it a go!

I should emphasise that unless the government censor arbitrarily shuts down overnight, none of this is going to happen in a hurry. As usual we’ve got 18+ months of content already shot and on disk ready to be processed. We’re looking at how we need to evolve and change over the coming YEARS, not at making drastic changes tomorrow.

What we decide now will feed into our production schedules. There’s lots of stuff we can try, but only so much we can do whilst still running RE at five updates a week. So we’re going to need to prioritise and try things out rather than make any drastic changes too fast.

Here’s a few thoughts of mine, but I’d love to hear your ideas.

Update Schedule

We could gradually reduce the update schedule. At some point in the next 16 years this is probably inevitable; what should it change to, what mix of stills and video, what sales channels should we concentrate on, and how should pricing reduce to reflect the lower output? What should we do to the archive updates? Should we go for having everything up at once? But if we do that, how do we protect against site rippers, and how to we ensure we don’t lose money on every membership from the huge bandwidth bill?

We reduced the update schedule once before, when we went from daily updates to five days a week. That was more a consolidation and rationalisation; we didn’t actually shoot fewer updates, just stopped splitting them into multiple parts in a way that dated back to the days where one physical roll of slide film, 36 shots, was by definition an update. The average number of photos and hours of video has gone up since then, not down.

At some point between now and the day I retire a genuine reduction in output will become a physical necessity: doing four shoot days in a week is already a bit challenging physically for both Ariel and me. There’s no way I can commit future me to still doing that when I’m 65.

Unfortunately, reducing the update schedule does little to reduce fixed overheads like web hosting and business insurance. The site is so big that reliable web hosting is just expensive. We could certainly shop around, but it’ll mean changing payment provider too, so it’s a pretty drastic step. It therefore needs to be considered “in the round” with everything else.

My personal feeling is that I’d rather see the same quality maintained and fewer updates (and some sort of price reduction, for sure, although it’ll depend on the economics of how many people are willing to join at the lower price point). Do you agree? Or should I concentrate more on quantity at the expensive of quality?

Pay Per Update

We could move towards a pay-per-update delivery model. Interestingly, the two relatively new successful sites I know of made their start this way- shooting customs and their own ideas for Clips4Sale, and only later opening a subscription website with older content.

That’s the reverse of the way we’ve been doing it so far, with new content going on RE first, and on the shopping cart and Clips4Sale quite a while later. We always intended to catch up but never quite did. And my sales via C4S have never been spectacular, for whatever reason… maybe part of that reason is that it wasn’t the latest greatest newest unseen sets going up on there. Maybe it simply forces people to pay higher prices to get just what they want; there’s certainly an argument that the subscription model devalues what each individual update is worth.

The pay-per-update model has some great advantages- the main one being that you can release according to your own schedule, not according to a regular update schedule.

My main reservation is that what sells is stuff which is mass-produced with cheap production, piled high and updating every day. I’m not really up for rolling back technically to shooting stuff on a cheap camcorder in one rolling take with no editing, and I’m certainly not capable of shooting a video a day to RE production standards.

Nonetheless it’s a very attractive prospect for those of us on regular RE billing to get more money from a different pool of customers by putting stuff up on C4S first, then on RE later… you’ll still be able to see everything for one low price, as now.

I will shoot some stuff specifically to test this idea out. And will be adding new sets to the RE cart system on the day they come out, rather than 1-2 years in arrears as currently. (Work is in progress to facilitate this as we speak).

Personally I’m not a fan of individual clip purchases for what feels like “regular” website content. C4S in particular feels massively over-priced to me compared with the awesome value of a subscription site. But a lot of people obviously find the value proposition in just purchasing what they want- individual movie sales rather than paying for Netflix. Where is the right tradeoff for you?

Different Pricing Structures

If we moved hosting and payment providers we might be able to look into more novel pricing structures. I once joined a site where the longer you remained a member, the more of the back catalogue you were able to access. (And I think you could short-cut that by joining for a year all in one go).

That’s quite attractive- it would save me work scheduling archives, provide a double incentive to stay as a member, and allow long-term members to download anything and everything in case they get a hard drive crash etc..

I don’t think that’s something we can do under the current content management and payment provision system. But if we move providers we can look at it. Of course, the fact that this model hasn’t caught on generally is salutary. If it were that good, I’m sure Kink.com would be doing it.

I can’t make over a terabyte of content (16 years worth) available for $0.99, however much I would like to. (The bandwidth costs alone would vastly out-strip the income). So where is the best value proposition for you between individual purchase, subscription site, archive material, and new updates?

Patreon/Indiegogo Supported Production

Moving away from the pure subscription model, we could try something like a Patreon model where people pay a variable amount to support our production in exchange of increasing levels of early and special access, bonus features, tutorial days, etc.. Possibly I could build up a “pot” of sponsorship, then do a photoshoot every time the pot got large enough to pay for it.

My main concern with this is that it relies on a kink-friendly platform provider. My experience from PayPal onwards is that unless it is their core business, you’re only ever one CEO decision away from total loss of your business. (Just wait until Twitter nukes all accounts which have ever posted adult content- something they could do tomorrow if they felt so inclined).

Even FetLife has to instantly kow-tow to the payment providers, as recent events have shown. The big benefit of C4S is that kinky stuff is core business for them, so they’re on our side when it comes to making sure as wide a variety of stuff as possible stays available.

So I think this might be part of the solution. It can’t be the whole solution but for future EleganceStudios.com productions it’s well worth a go. I note in passing that we’ve not done Elegance Studios films in a while unless they were sponsored by custom video- it’s just too expensive to schedule a multi-model multi-day shoot on spec at the moment. Getting some pre-purchases to cover production costs would make a big difference here, and I’m very enthusiastic about the idea of doing big-budget ambitious ES shoots again. I will try this once the summer landscape photography experiment is over (see below).

Some of Everything

I think it is very likely that we’ll end up with some mix of these models. It seems more and more that one needs multiple means of support and payment, from direct sales of products through to paying for behind the scenes access (like OnlyFans).

The only real issue I have is that each of these sales and publicity and support channels takes TIME. Restrained Elegance is currently a full time job for me, and employs Ariel half time as well. If we’re going to have increased time overheads to deal with lots of different platforms, we will need a reduced production schedule in parallel so we can cope. Hiring more people to help is a complete non-starter at this point in time: too risky for too uncertain returns.

Annoyingly we might need to cut production a bit in advance in order to have time to bring these other activities and platforms online, which is a nasty double bind. There isn’t the cashflow there used to be to buy in a bit of extra help while we experiment.

We’ve been trying to get my landscape photography hobby transformed into a little, little business and it has emphasised exactly how fully-committed our time currently is.

We’re doing this because we want me to have at least the germ of a business I can switch to if censorship or government regulation just plain takes us offline, incidentally. This summer’s project is to try to sell landscape photos to establish whether there is a viable business in there or not.

Getting the time to do that has required a nine-month intricate logistical ballet dance just to free up a few weeks of time during the summer vacation to see if we can sell stuff. I’m not complaining- it is good fun, and a break from shooting for a couple of months is always helpful to creativity when we come back. But it does point out how routinely Ariel and I are working 12 hour days already, and forces us to acknowledge that we need to prioritise ideas for the future for RE because we need it to be time efficient.

16 Years Hence???

So maybe by the time I’m in my 60’s we might be aiming at two(??) stills updates and one(???) video update a week? Or a couple of stills sets a week and several longer EleganceStudios.com videos a year, without shooting shorter videos at all.

Production would be partially supported by Patreon/IndieGoGo style pre-funding, plus custom video/stills production. At the very lowest level of support, patrons get to enjoy seeing us tweet samples as now, and get email updates with bonus stuff and behind the scenes. Higher level supporters get early access and exclusive updates that don’t go up on the other sites for a year or more, photography or rope tutorials online and possibly set visits and tutorials and other in-person rewards for big supporters.

New stuff would go up on all the various pay-per-update channels (C4S, ManyVids, YouKandy, direct on the RE shopping cart system, Amazon eBooks, whatever else pays and allows us to distribute via their service).

Then all this content gets put up onto something a bit like the current RE website, in whatever form we’re allowed to have by the legal situation, so that those of you who have been with us faithfully every month for the last 16 years can still get full benefit of the power of crowd-funding to create brilliant stuff by spreading the cost between lots of people, and in this case between lots of sales platforms, too. But it might be that the subscription site becomes the archive for the individual purchase sets… wait a year or two and you can get it all for a reduced price. (Which is a reversal of how we’ve been operating up to now).

This seems like a feasible and reasonable way we might be able to keep Restrained Elegance going as a subscription site too… maybe even for another sixteen years or so, until I’m ready to retire and really step down the production. I’m still going to keep doing BDSM production as long as I’m physically able and not totally prohibited by law, but when I’m 65 I definitely won’t be wanting to be committed to a regular update schedule any more! And as I said, don’t panic and think that anything drastic is going to happen soon, this is a long-term plan.

We’d love to know your thoughts!

#GameOfSlaves for producers and models

What is #GameOfSlaves?

In the fictional world, it is an underground, decentralised social media tag for sharing subversive, clandestine BDSM erotica which has been banned on the sanitised interwebs of 2047. Popular performers gain fame and wealth from rich fans in the game who commission customs, host private parties to be filmed or promote their favourite dommes and subs. A good enough player in the game can become a millionaire.

In the real world, it is a series of loosely connected stories about the fictional game world. Some stories follow characters’ development from starting sub to top player or from middle-ranking domme to top-ranked sub. Other stories are just self-contained posts from the fictional characters posted on the game to try to get likes and followers.

As I said, the #GameOfSlaves Trailer should convey the general look and feel of the world.

How Do I Get Involved?

Shoot, post, tag #GameOfSlaves

The simplest way? Decide on a character you are going to play in the fictional #GameOfSlaves world. Shoot something- still photos, selfies on your phone, selfie video, anything. Post it to your usual sales or distribution channels: your own web site, Clips4Sale, ManyVids, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, anywhere. Tag it with #GameOfSlaves. Job done.

Amateurs VERY Welcome!

You DO NOT have to be a pro to join in! Take a selfie on your phone, tweet it, tag it – congratulations, you just created a character and now you are on #GameOfSlaves!

What about photographers?

If you’re an amateur photographer, next time you are shooting with your partner or a model, take a few photos set in the game world with a collared sub or a styled-up domme. Post it, tag it – you’ve just helped us build the #GameOfSlaves world.

We’d be honoured to host guest galleries of your work on RestrainedElegance.com as well, email me and we can sort one out.

Not a hot chick?

See diversity section below. EVERYONE is welcome to join in. Although RestrainedElegance will be primarily featuring female models, it is an open world. Come and join in, whoever you are and whatever your orientation.

You can find a style guide down below if you want more inspiration or want to follow the format we’re using more closely, but remember than the characters in the game are shooting stuff themselves and posting it in a decentralised way. So by design, anything you post and tag should fit right in!

We’ve decided to do most of our promotion via Twitter, via the hashtag #GameOfSlaves. If you post with that hashtag and tag me ( @RElegance) I will see it and retweet it. If we all do that, we can hopefully build some momentum to share links and publicity and build it into a real-world event.

To facilitate that we’ve decided to use models’ existing names and consequently their Twitter handles as the names of the characters they are playing the game. That keeps things simple and maximises the opportunity to cross-promote.

A link back to RestrainedElegance.com would be much appreciated, but is not necessary.

If you’d like me to promote your clips/photos/etc. then email me and send me a trailer, a selection of pics for a guest gallery, or the first video you shoot in a series and let me know where to link back to so people can buy the full clips or the rest of the series.

I don’t use Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. much so if anyone wants to volunteer as the contact person to help us all cross-promote and cross-post on those platforms please get in touch!

If you would like to shoot something but would like more input to get you started, or you’d like help underwriting the cost of production, I can help.

Getting Involved: Collaboration

Content Share

If you’re already a producer or model, I’d be happy to collaborate! You shoot a clip or photos with some input from me, I feature the clip on RestrainedElegance.com, you can sell via your own websites and places like Clips4Sale.

I’ll pay you something towards the production costs in exchange for being able to feature the content on my membership site. You retain the rights and can sell everywhere else.

We both build on the #GameOfSlaves publicity and hopefully get to carry on and shoot more and make a living. Since Clips4Sale and others are fussy about clips not being uploaded twice, I’m happy to forego the clip sales in order to feature the clips on my members’ area. If you have a members’ area I’m happy to have you put the clip there too of course.

If you have an idea you’d like to shoot, please email me to discuss.

Custom Shooting For #GameOfSlaves

I am willing to buy content outright for use of RestrainedElegance.com if it fits in very well with the world, it’s sexy, and the production values are high enough. If you have an idea you’d like to shoot, please email me to discuss.

This is not my favourite option- frankly, it is a bit high risk for me. If I want content shot to our production standards, why not shoot it myself? But I’m always up for a compelling proposition: I know that there’s stuff I am not very good at directing, models I’ve not had the opportunity to shoot, places I don’t get to go… Make it big and exciting and thrilling and fast-paced like an action movie with beautiful barefoot girls in hot BDSM action and I’ll certainly consider commissioning you to shoot it!

Regular RE Model Shoots

Of course we will be shooting plenty for #GameOfSlaves ourselves in 2017. If you’d like to model for us, please drop me a line to email me but be aware that our shoot schedule is pretty full for the first half of the year already. It would be hugely helpful if you could shoot a selfie or two and post in the meantime 🙂

I know that’s a bit cheeky but the more we build the buzz around #GameOfSlaves the better. We get contacted by more models than we can possibly shoot… but I’m hardly about to pass up a shoot with someone who’s already kindly been shooting stuff to help with #GameOfSlaves! So in the meantime please consider shooting something yourself or with other producers and help build the momentum and we’ll shoot you as soon as we can.

Only Female Subs? What About Diversity?

Restrained Elegance features female submissive barefoot elegant bondage and BDSM. That’s what Ariel and I are into, so it is the only thing we feel qualified to do a good job of shooting.

The sub-set of the #GameOfSlaves world featured on our site will be likewise focussed on women getting tied up. We’ve decided to make male doms a rare occurrence, more like game enforcers than participants. That’s because Hywel HATES appearing on camera!

BUT THIS IS AN OPEN WORLD

#GameOfSlaves is an open world- nothing is stopping you shooting a more diverse set of characters! Please do! Male subs? Male doms? Trans? Genderqueer spanking? Sissy transformation? Pet play in 2047 on a post-apocalyptic farm? Go for it. Just shoot something in character for the world, tag it and post it! HAVE ALL THE FUN IN THE WORLD WITH IT!

We’d LOVE IT if you could shoot the stuff we aren’t good at!

Style Guide and Background Information

Setting

The year is 2047. Global warming has happened; lower-lying parts of the world flooded. The world is ruled by three economic superpowers: India, China and Facebook. The USA is a dust-bowl post-civil-war wild west. Russia has collapsed under the weight of corruption. Europe has fallen apart, the bits which function best are greater Germany. The UK suffered massive economic decline after the leaving the EU and now survives by exporting the thing it has been best at for a hundred years- entertainment.

Facebook rules half the globe in fact if not in name, and rules the information infrastructure with an iron hand of prudish “safe for the children”, and “all your secrets are belong to us”. But it is still built on the internet, and there are places and spaces and ways. So while posting a nipple online in 2047 might result in revocation of Facebook privileges and instant loss of job, home and reputation, there are still cracks.

Twitter survives, and out of Twitter and the underground BDSM scene, some entertainment entrepreneurs in the UK started the latest forbidden sensation: #GameOfSlaves. Contestants vie to live out their BDSM fantasies on screen for an audience of kinksters deprived of any other outlet. The game is decentralised, no mastermind to arrest, and no-one to stop you entering yourself just by posting a video or a picture and hashtagging it #GameOfSlaves.

Contestants choose whether to enter as a dominant or a submissive. In the RestrainedElegance version, effectively all contestants will be female- but see “diversity” above. Just because we don’t feel qualified to shoot a male-sub version doesn’t mean you can’t! We’d love you to.

Dommes outnumber subs approximately two to one. So subs are very valuable, and dommes compete with each other to assemble a stable of desirable, popular, highly-ranked subs. This brings dommes into conflict with each other constantly, which means they end up battling it out and getting tied up by rivals at least as often as the subs do. It’s important to maintain that feeling of subs being valuable and dommes being at each other’s throats for tension and drama in the setting. You don’t have to actually show them on screen- just saying at the start of a single-girl struggling clip that she’s been tied up by her rival “Mistress Dariah” is enough to invoke the world-build.

Contestants start out with selfies shot on phones and webcams. If they are popular enough, GameOfSlaves will send a camera crew to film them. The top ranked contestants live a life of luxury in secret kinky manor houses provided by shadowy wealthy fans of the game where they play out their kinky fantasies in front of the cameras.

There’s a big crossover between the mistresses and slaves because a large fraction of the viewing population likes nothing better than to see a top-ranked mistress brought low and turned into the abject slave of an up-and-coming dominatrix bitch. Especially if she is reduced in social rank in the household to below that of former slaves and mistresses over whom she used to preside. A slave might collaborate with a popular mistress to develop web shows that will get them both followers, or fight to free herself and usurp the previous domme’s position. Everyone is out to improve their own ratings, forming temporary alliances and betraying them when they get a bit stale.

There is a shadowy distributed, decentralised open-source organisation in charge of the game and who enforce the small number of rules. This is something we’re going to expand upon in stories on RestrainedElegance.com.

Feeling

The contestants are doing something for which they could be arrested. It’s tense, but for many it is their only outlet for BDSM. And it is their only chance for fame and fortune, too. Some contestants shoot stuff as though it were fictional, some as though it were a documentary, but many break the fourth wall to speak directly to the fans and viewers because they know they are being filmed.

Make it gritty, edgy, exciting. Or make it cute as the character plays up to the cameras. Up to you. If you are old enough, it’s like recapturing that feeling the first time you saw BDSM porn on the web or a Usenet newsgroup!

Game Rules

These are optional but would help fit in with what we’re going to shoot.

The only weapon permitted in the contest is a stun gun, which stuns the target for six to ten seconds. We’re using Star Trek Next Generation phaser toys for this (with an appropriate “zappy” sound effect added in post). The guns recharge slowly: you only get one shot a minute. So dommes have to be quick and accurate at zapping a sub they want to steal or a domme they want to conquer.

The distinction between the Mistresses and Slaves on-screen is obvious. Slaves may or may not be naked, but Mistresses never are. Mistresses may or may not wear necklaces or neck adornment, but slaves are always collared.

You can enslave a mistress by stripping her naked and collaring her. Doing so will be grounds for a long-running feud. Should the mistress ever free herself, you’ll be her target forever.

You can steal a sub just by grabbing her and carrying her off. It is customary to replace at least her slave collar with one of your own when you get her back to your base.

To free yourself from slavery you need to get your collar off and get some clothes on, in theory. But in practice you need to physically escape from your captor’s clutches and shoot a film of yourself showing that you’re free for it to have any meaning in the game. Pics or it didn’t happen.

One exception: you may also free yourself if you manage to strip naked and collar your current owner on camera. If you achieve that, you are automatically freed and your previous owner is enslaved for a mandatory 24 hours where she cannot be freed by any means. Make good use of the time to either make good your escape or take control of your ex-owner’s household!

Styling

Slaves are ALWAYS collared. They are usually naked but nothing stops them filming themselves enslaved in sexy satin or hot lingerie or rainwear or latex or whatever their owner or fan-base prefers.

Dommes are ALWAYS clothed. They may possibly wear something around their necks but avoid anything which looks like a collar. Because losing all their clothes gets them perilously close to enslavement, they tend to wear multiple layers of clothes which are hard to remove.

In the RestrainedElegance.com version of #GameOfSlaves that means saris, chinese dresses, silk and satin, corsets and a steam-punk influence. See #GameOfSlaves Trailer page for more examples.

Because I’ve got a bare foot fetish, dommes and subs are usually barefoot in all our stuff (and on SilkSoles.com too. If you don’t have a strong feeling about footwear, making the girls barefoot would make me very happy 🙂

In our stories, subs are mostly going to be locked up in metal whereas when dommes tie each other up, they usually use rope. That gives a rival domme chance to escape eventually (although not in time to prevent you running off with her stable of slaves). Using metal is tantamount to saying you want to enslave her, which is much more likely to spark a long-running feud.

Of course, subs can be rope tied for their owners’ or viewers’ pleasure as well!

Visual styling: go low key, lots of darkness in frame with pools of light, saturated colours. Add some backlight for maximum glamour. Our style is lush, decadent, moody, elegant. Of course, a lot of the characters are selfie shooting so there can be a lot of variation.

Stories and Ideas

For your first video, why not introduce your character? Who are you? Why do you want to be on #GameOfSlaves? If you love talking, like Ariel does, you could film a piece to camera in the manner of a YouTuber. If you hate talking, you could just shoot an edgy bondage video of yourself and post it just labelled with the hashtag. If your character is a domme, she could be punishing a sub, or just dominating the camera, or giving jerk off instructions, or have the camera spy on her in voyeuristic style. Really, anything sexy and shot with the background in mind should work just fine!

If you’re a solo model, you could do some simple self bondage with handcuffs (make sure the key works!). Or just tell the camera a fantasy you’d like to have enacted upon you. Want to be spanked? Want to tie someone up? Show it or say it. Shoot more explicit stuff than we’re good at- edging, toys, whatever.

Just make it sexy, intense, fast-paced, dramatic. The whole thing should be like a trailer for a film you just HAVE to see. Don’t hang around, change the camera angles a lot. Cut it down so it moves much faster than a normal one-rolling-take video. The characters are trying to grab attention in an underground, jaded setting. Make it compelling and stylish and leave them wanting more.

(That’s the thing we are going to be working on most intensively ourselves for 2017).

HAVE FUN!

#GameOfSlaves

1 Reply

Hi Everyone!

Today we launch the trailer for our new web series, Game of Slaves!

You can watch the trailer here:

Or direct on http://www.restrainedelegance.com/preview/video/GameOfSlaves_TrailerLogo1_1080p.mp4

The year is 2047

Europe has fallen

Sexual expression is censored

BDSM has gone underground

You have discovered the signal… #GameOfSlaves

Background

It’s been a while since we did a new “world” to set our stories in. The “Honest Omar Slave Auction world” is fun, so is “Nude in Metal”. I fancied doing an edgier, near-future science fiction setting with a dystopian feel. I also had a burning desire to do something a bit different in terms of look and aesthetics- still within the “RE style”, but incorporating elements we hadn’t used before into a distinctive style for the setting.

With DVD box sets and Netflix/Amazon Prime series being hot stuff recently, I also wanted a setting that could support multiple overlapping and independent storylines. It also had to be something that could support stand-alone episodes and motivate videos and photosets that are just simple bondage ideas set in the story world. (One trouble with “Honest Omar” is that it doesn’t suggest stories for single girl struggling videos).

So I came up with Game of Slaves. Competing slaves and competing dommes in an near-future, underground, edgy online BDSM competition, under the radar of normal society. A bit like the film Nerve, maybe with elements of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones (hey, if you’re going to steal inspiration, be bold!)

We’re starting with selfie videos of our first point of view characters, as the characters introduce themselves to the game. As the character gets popular in the world of the game, they get film crews following them around to document their every scene (we’ll get to more of those in 2017). There’s a lot of written background which will slowly get revealed as the storylines roll out.

Style

I wanted to distinguish between the dommes and subs by dress code. Subs would normally be nude, but for interest and variety they could sometimes be clothed… but they would ALWAYS be collared. Dommes could sometimes wear chokers or necklaces or even collars of a sort, but they would ALWAYS be clothed.

If retaining your dominant status means keeping your clothes on, obviously the clothes should be hard to get off… which led me to the idea of corsets and overlapping layers of clothes.

Hence, corsets over Chinese dresses (also helps because dresses sourced from China generally don’t have the boobs and bum and narrow waist of western model girls- so if it fits on the boobs, it’ll very likely be loose at the waist. The corset fixes that, bingo!) I wanted to include an Indian element because that’s a form of cultural appropriation I’ve not yet indulged in, and a well-draped sari looks sexy and seductive as hell. It worked in some steampunk elements I’ve also been itching to use more.

Sari and satin blouse and corset in low key pools of light and dark = instant Game of Slaves!

While the subs get chained and collard and yoked and confined and dominated, I also wanted tension between the dommes. A good way of getting that was to make being a domme more popular, especially amongst new entrants. If two thirds of the competitors are dommes, subs become very valuable- and dommes will have to fight to defend their “stable”. Which immediately leads to rival dommes battling it out, tying each other up!

Having come up with those slinky sexy domme costumes I would have been very disappointed if the dommes hadn’t got tied up as often as the subs do!

For various reasons which will become clearer as the story unfolds, dommes are usually tied in rope, unless the rival domme already has a serious feud or is aiming to start one. Subs are usually chained and confined in inescapable metal bondage… unless their current owner or their fans like to see them in rope, of course.

You’ll also spot Game of Slaves cropping up on SilkSoles.com – in fact this week’s update is Penny Lee in her favourite domme outfit from the shoot doing a dominant foot tease set. Everyone had such fun with the new costumes and ideas on the Cornwall location shoot where we got Game of Slaves started that we just couldn’t resist shooting more foot fetish sets in the outfits!

Photographically/cinematographically, I’m working on an evolution of the RE style for Game of Slaves. I wanted something with pools of light and darkness, lush and saturated rich colours, more of a feeling of isolation and depth than the typical RE lighting patterns afford. So I’ve been investing in a bit more lighting gear and light formers to keep the RE flattering soft washes of light but offering more fall-off and more control over how much light hits the background.

This is work in progress! I want it to simultaneously look like an RE shot, but also have that chiaroscuro/film noir play of darkness. I’ve not pushed it too far in the noir direction yet- I’m still learning how to light for the look I want. You’ll see the style evolve as we shoot more into 2017, I’ve just invested in some serious new video lighting gear to facilitate that now I know where I’m aiming. (And it’ll replace the literally-on-the-blink lights we’ve been using for regular RE shoots as well of course, which will make our lives easier on shoot day!)

Story

It took a while to figure out the tone and direction of the story. As usual for me, I like to “develop in play” – start shooting, and see where it goes, rather than planning too tightly ahead. As a result, the initial stories are a bit lighter and more comedy in tone than they were in my head. I’d aimed for an edgier, more underground feeling- something I only realised we’d not quite achieved when I got the films done through the edit. Some of the stills sets are already edgier, and next year’s films will include more exploration of the darker themes of the setting.

We Need Your Help!

I hope Game of Slaves take on a life of its own. The setting is such that anyone can enter at any time- all they have to do is to shoot something and post it tagged with #GameOfSlaves. Then the fans and followers of the game can respond.

That’s true in the game world, and we can make it true in the real world, too!

We’d love your input, “in character” for the game. Tweet us and your favourite models to let them know what you’d like to see. Maybe we can make a real ranking based on tweets for the characters in the game, and drive the evolution of the characters and storylines that way.

For simplicity we’ve decided to use models’ names as their character names in the game, so tweeting @ArielAnderssen, @Temptress_Kate, @PennyLee92, @KobeATL, @AylaRoseModel, @sophiasmithuk, @toychloe and either copy in @RElegance or use hash-tag #GameOfSlaves. We’ll add more models as their characters appear in GameOfSlaves, of course!

We’d love to hear your thoughts, and the most popular ideas we’ll shoot for you. It’s like free customs 🙂 Please stay respectful and remember the model will be tweeting other stuff, not just GameOfSlaves so be sure to introduce yourself politely and say that you’ve seen her on #GameOfSlaves and you’d like to see a certain idea.

Of course, we’d love it even more if you supported us fully by joining RestrainedElegance.com and/or SilkSoles.com. That way you can see all the video storylines and stills sets for Game of Slaves… and your membership fees are the ONLY way this thing gets funded and gets made!

We’ll be introducing LOTS of new models, new characters and new storylines in Game of Slaves in 2017 – we already have 13 shoots lined up!

Models and Producers

Kobe Lee already kindly shot her character’s intro video for us, as she’s in the US and we couldn’t shoot her out there. Hopefully we can shoot some of her character’s later storylines soon! We’d love to get other models and producers involved- there’s a style guide and some storyline suggestions which I can email to you if you’re interested. Or just shoot something BDSM-themed and post it under the hash-tag #GameOfSlaves and you’re good to go!

Game of Slaves : the full story in 2017

Watch this space as the storyline builds and we explore our new kinky setting in 2017!

Good News and Visual Novels

9 Replies

Hi All,

Well, it’s been quite a week here in the UK. Politically, we’ve just shot ourselves in the knee-cap. It’s all a bit too depressing, so I wanted to post a few bits of good news.

1) Pandora won her appeal

OFCOM, the UK regulator, over-turned the ruling by the over-zealous and now abolished UK video on demand regulator, ATVOD, banning Pandora’s site Dreams of Spanking, which is now back online and accepting sign-ups again. YAAAAY!!!!

You can read her thoughts about it on her blog. We had a chat about it with another friend producer a couple of weekends ago and all admitted that getting the tap on the shoulder from the censorious dead hand of the state is more stifling of one’s kink and creativity than any of us had expected. We’re so glad Dreams is back! None of us know what the future holds for the censorship climate in the UK- given the political turmoil this week, nobody knows.

So we’ll just have to keep chipping away and putting our points logically and rationally and make sure that we are heard (even if they go ahead and do it anyway). To this end, I’m supporting Pandora’s Patreon campaign to support her advocacy- and if you want to help kink survive online in Britain, please chip in a little too if you can!

2) I’m feeling a bit better

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a nasty attack of gastro-enteritis at the start of June which is taking a long time to get over. Yesterday I managed to walk up one the local hills- one of my fave local walks, around two hours round trip. This is much more than I managed last week, even if I was a bit tired and achy the next day. But OMG, progress! Very very happy!

3) I just discovered a whole new genre of thing!

Watch CINDERS trailer on YouTube

I’ve always liked computer games, from the first ones I played on Swansea University mainframe computer when I went in to see my Mum at work in the holidays through to modern extravaganzas. Having been ill in the last few weeks and needing some non-physical amusements, I played a few. I finally got through BioShock Infinite, which is OK- lovely visuals, intriguing if horrible racist 1900’s dystopia background, and some story.

Trouble is by the time I finished the game I felt like going and checking myself into a high-security prison for mass-murdering psychopaths. My word, but there was a lot of killing and gore and blood. And as far as I am aware, I got to make exactly one decision during the whole game that had much impact beyond the end of the scene.

So I went looking to see if there was a different sort of game out there, and discovered a whole new genre!

Parenthetically- I don’t mind the odd bit of violence in games. I just prefer a lot less of it than BioShock Infinite, which is why I don’t usually play first-person shooters. I really appreciate games like Thief where there’s at least an option to resolve things by less-lethal means when you can, or sandboxes where you can play the game with a less-murderous characters (Elder Scrolls games like Oblivion and Skyrim have good plot threads for stealthy characters, which require less slaughter than some other story paths).

A bit of a Googling and searching of Steam turning up the visual novel genre, which I’d never heard of. Apparently big in Japan, popular with female players, there’s a huge number of these things revolving around high schools and dating and a lot with pretty linear stories… but also some stuff that looked really interesting.

I like games where what I choose to do makes a difference through the game and to the game’s ending (which is why I like BioWare games very much). Add that to a non-violent storyline and GORGEOUS art-work and I settled on my first purchase of the genre: Cinders, a game by Polish indie development studio Moa Cube.

It takes a little getting used to. There’s a LOT of talking, quite a few decisions, and not much else. It’s like a Bioware game with all the running around and killing stuff and levelling up removed, and just the character interactions remaining. Since Mass Effect 2 is probably my favourite game of all time, I’m good with that 🙂 Makes a change from a LOT of killing, a few conversations and a very small number of decisions, which is what the routine fantasy and sci-fi RPG genres favour.

It may or may not appeal to you- playing Cinderella and trying to get one over on her sisters, step-mother, get the guy or get the hell out of Dodge, trust the Fairy godmother or really not. But if it sounds even faintly intriguing, I’d really encourage you to give it a go. Have I mentioned how gob-smackingly beautiful the artwork is?

It’s not a long game- I got through it in one long-ish sitting. But it will bear re-playing, trying to achieve various different endings (I gather there may be “dead in a ditch” as one ending…). And the studio have another, larger game called Solstice which they just released, which I just bought and will start on once I have caught up on RE and SS stuff as I finish recuperating. The premise is really intriguing from the first scene, though.

Visual Novels for the Future?

Of course being nerdy introvert scientist Hywel, I had to look into visual novels more. I discovered a few game engines which look like they’d help a lot in setting one up. There’s an active community building them and sharing them, and a fair number commercially available.

Sad to say though it looks like MoaCube might not be making another soon. Well, unless we all go and buy Solstice and Cinders anyway!

Sounds like the indie games industry has hit the same market maturity issues as the porn industry. The studio head has blogged about how everything seems to have narrowed down onto Steam as a monopoly distribution channel, and how hard it can be to make a ripple with an indie game there. I hear that (try making a ripple with a single long, high-production-value movie on Clips4Sale if you don’t already have a fan base or channel in that genre).

And I hear the same thing from indies on the App store and musicians with online sales channels via iTunes and Spotify. All of these things have their wild west period, like membership websites did around 1997-2001, then settle into a small number of big players. At least the games guys don’t seem to have quite the industrial levels of piracy to contend with that porn does. (If you watch something on a tube site, know that it is 99% likely to be stolen. And the thief is making money pushing tacky adverts at your eyeballs while you watch someone else’s stolen work).

But still… I love the genre, and will be checking out more.

And better yet, even as polished and glorious a project as Cinders was made by a small team in a year and half… a few person-years of effort. That means it should be possible to do something interesting on a smaller and more modest scale in one’s spare time. There are some good tool-kits like Tyranobuilder and Ren’Py around to support it, too.

At this stage Ariel is probably rolling her eyes at me. We’re wildly over-committed, as the big work backlog following my illness shows. The last thing I should be doing is thinking of future projects, especially ones outside the core business. But what can the harm be in having a little play around with these tools in the odd hour before bed? After all I’ve got quite a head-start in terms of creating artwork and storylines… maybe a BDSM visual novel (well, let’s call it a visual short story) might be fun?

4) The mega-four-hour film is done!

The mega-four-hour custom film we shot a few weeks ago is done! It’s the longest and most ambitious single project we’ve ever done, and it would totally have fallen apart without Ariel, Zoe, Natalia and cameraperson Katie.

I’ve still not decided 100% whether to put it up on Elegance Studios or serialise it for Restrained Elegance: it is a single story, and it kind-of sits as a companion story to Slave Auction and Pony Girl in some ways (the customer liked those films so much he wanted us to incorporate elements of those into the story for him).

But pragmatically distributing it as a single 9 GB MP4 file is going to break the downloads of anyone not on a fast internet connection, and any hiccup in the stream might see you back to square one. The shopping carts system isn’t really built for downloads that big. So I think serialising it on RE is the way to go: look out for it on the members’ area soon! It’s absolutely EPIC- Natalia Forrest sent as a secret agent into the depths of a slave-trading gang! Forced to learn how to be a perfect slave, how strip naked for her master or mistress, the positions a slave must adopt, how to talk dirty… and much, much more!

Just in time to shoot the SECOND film commissioned by the same customer this week! (Fortunately not quite such a gargantuan undertaking!) Should be fun!

All the best everyone!

Hywel