Category Archives: SilkSoles.com

#GameOfSlaves

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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!

Silk Soles Server Move

Use a VPN

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Hi Everyone

Welcome to another episode of the UK’s slide into a right-wing totalitarian state. The government, cravenly unopposed by the supine opposition, just signed the Snooper’s Charter into law. This is a monumentally bad idea, and a worse one is coming in the form of the Digital Economy Bill.

The state, in the form of more or less any agency that cares to ask for it, can now find out every website you visited in the last year from your internet service provider. They don’t even need a warrant. Let that sink in for a while. Even if you have nothing to hide and are doing nothing wrong, the information that a junior civil servant can punch up about you is very worrying. And of course, the records will be hacked or sold corruptly to the tabloids or anyone who wants them.

If you live in Britain, the government have effectively just installed webcams pointing in through every window in your house.

I urge everyone reading this who lives in the UK to install and start using a VPN (virtual private network). Choose one that’s registered in another country, that doesn’t keep logs, and choose one that you pay for. British ones have to obey the same snooping laws to spy on you that your internet service provider does. Free ones sell your data, which is the opposite of what you want. And if the company doesn’t keep logs, they don’t even have the information to pass on.

This is not a panacea. It means placing some trust in the VPN operator, for a start. But if they make their money by running the service, it is in their interests to do a good job for you.

A VPN routes your internet activity through its internal network so outsiders can’t see where you are going. It also encrypts the data as it goes to make it hard to snoop on. All your ISP can report to the government is that you are using a VPN: they can’t tell them which sites you have visited or anything much else. They’ve been used by companies for years to allow people to connect to the company’s internal network whist working away so they don’t have to worry about security at random free wifi hotspots. They are a mature and well-integrated technology which integrates easily with modern devices (for example, iPhones bring up a little “VPN” icon when you’re connected).

This was already pretty good practice for protection against hacking and cyber-crime. State-sponsored intrusion into ALL our private lives is on a whole different level, though, and I really must urge everyone in the UK to do something to limit the information that a junior civil servant or policeman can find out about you. It’s only a matter of months before the records are hacked, too, and some poor celebrity’s choice of porn will be splashed all over the tabloids. The number of people suddenly having access to everything you’ve looked at online will be HUGE, and corrupt release of records or out and out hacking the database is pretty much a certainty.

If you are very concerned, you can use Tor. In fact you can use Tor over a VPN, but this slows things down a lot. A well-run VPN should have relatively minimal impact on your connection speed.

The state has just installed CCTV pointing in through every window in your house. A VPN is drawing the curtains. If you live in the UK, I strongly urge you to install and use a VPN right now.

You can find out some good ones here: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/test-centre/internet/best-vpn-2016-2017-uk-what-is-vpn-3641578/

Hywel

Silk Soles glitches

UPDATE: we’ve moved DNS back to the old server, testing the new server, will bring into service once tested (as we usually would have, you shouldn’t
have had to be aware that anything was going on). Hopefully will all be seamless from your point of view. Let me know if you notice any bugs or
odd stuff happening in the meantime.

Here’s the original post about the problem:
The company that operates the websites decided to move SilkSoles.com to a new server without warning. Something broke in the process.

Looks like it might have been a one-light configuration error, but they really should have checked with us before moving DNS to the new server! (Which is standard procedure and the way we’ve always done it in the past).

It looks like it may now be fixed; we are testing.

You can access the old server members area directly via this link if necessary: http://128.242.183.200/members/whatsnew.php

Hywel

What’s In Store For Silk Soles

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Hi Everyone

Hope you are all having fun at the moment. I wanted to take a few minutes to let you know what’s happening at SilkSoles.

It has been an odd year for us. Last autumn we got the tap on the shoulder from the then-censor-of-the-internet in the UK, ATVOD, telling us that there had been “complaints” about our bondage site Restrained Elegance and that they were going to investigate us. I’ll eat my hat if there was a genuine complaint from a genuine member of the public- they were investigating us because we’d spoken up about the censorship.

We weren’t going to go quietly but the possibility existed that we might get shut down. That would obviously have a drastic effect on us being able to make a living so we had to put contingency plans in place.

Cue Hywel frantically making preparations for converting his landscape photography in the mountains hobby into a possible business, agreeing to be in documentaries despite being a weapons-grade introvert, and generally shaking up the business.

None of this was supposed to have any direct impact on SilkSoles, which even the prudes at ATVOD could probably not find a reason to ban. But the indirect and knock on effects would have been considerable.

I’m probably not supposed to admit this in public but Silk Soles isn’t really a business. The sales have never justified the time and energy and money we put into it. The best it has done so far is to break even excluding my time and expenses. I keep shooting because I love it, and at least the site has covered the modelling fees.

I love telling stories about beautiful barefoot girls. I love the creative freedom it gives when the model isn’t tied up, which is one thing that provides the contrast with my “day job”. Fewer safety issues, faster to shoot, and I can just have fun with new ideas. If I think of a new lighting pattern to try, I don’t have to worry about getting it right while the clock is ticking on a tied-up girl who will have to be let out soon. I really enjoy shooting for Silk Soles!

But it’s probably cost me thousands of pounds over the years if one is to be brutal looking at the numbers. This is why we stopped the video updates last year- videos take a lot longer to shoot and edit than stills do. I was a bit burned out on video anyway with the increase in the amount of customs we were shooting. Silk Soles sales didn’t justify carrying on with a weekly video update, especially not in the absence of stories I wanted to tell. I love the videos we’d shot, but wasn’t coming up with ideas I really needed to shoot.

Silk Soles piggy-backs on Restrained Elegance for facilities- for example, the web hosting. Silk Soles gets its hosting for free because I run Restrained Elegance. If RE were to close down, SilkSoles would have to pay its own way, and make enough money for me to live on.

I know I’ve not spent the time promoting Silk Soles that it deserves, but nothing indicated that I was going to be able to multiply the membership by the factor of ten it would need to get to be a self-sustaining business that would let me pay the bills.

Hence the landscape photography franticness.

And hence the decision taken six months ago to stop shooting for SilkSoles, waiting to see what would happen, running down the stock of shot sets.

And also it must be admitted waiting to see if the inspiration would come back. I’d almost decided to stop updating Silk Soles completely and leave it as an archive site. A tough decision…

And a decision which I’m very pleased to tell you was completely wrong and which has as of this week been reversed in real style with shoots with Aria Wednesday, Faye Taylor, Claire Topaz, Tillie, commissioned shoots from my friend in Russia, and bookings to come with Ayla Rose, Ariel Anderssen, Sophia Smith and many more.

It feels GREAT, a new lease of life. For the site, and for me too. Really enjoyed the shoots this week, both the bondage and the foot fetish sets. I’ve got a new framing idea (stills sets as character portraits) that’s got me filling up my notebooks with ideas again. New ways of shooting, facilitated by finally owning a camera and lens combo that really works in available light. New light formers for shoots too. The latest newcomer, an octobox with fabric grid, immediately gained a permanent place in my travel kit bag and was fondly christened Doctor Octobox by visiting intern Philippa Clarke (who had a lot of fun shooting Silk Soles sets while she was here too). I’ve got shoots in the calendar which I can’t wait to get to- for the last six months I’d been dreading shoots because I was so drained of ideas.

I’m getting my mojo back after a year of what amounts to creative depression in the shadow of censorship. Never let anyone tell you censorship doesn’t matter: it bloody sucks. You start questioning everything about your work and your validity as an artist, and that’s insta-death for inspiration.

Somehow, coincidentally, there’s been an up-tick in signups to the site. Maybe it’s to do with us being on Kinky Britain, maybe some publicity posts have gone up somewhere, I’m not sure. But hello lovely new members, it is great to see you, and I hope you will enjoy the new stuff as much as we’ve enjoying shooting it for you. I’m hoping we can convince you to stay around- with a few more people sharing the expenses, we can shoot more ambitious stuff!

In celebration, I’m going to put up the first video in a long while- a very intense and sexual foot worship film starring Ariel Anderssen and Zoe Page which was commissioned as a custom video a few months ago. The first part will be up on Thursday. I do have a few other videos on disk which I never got around to editing- I’ll put them up over the next few months. I can’t promise a regular video update schedule, but right now I’m feeling very fired up and inspired, so who knows? Some of that may spill over from shooting stills to shooting more videos too.

I’m backing down the number of custom bondage videos we shoot for the next few months (because I’ve got a bunch of my own ideas I’m really burning to shoot) but if you wanted a foot fetish custom, now would be a great time to commission one. Email me if you are interested. And the more the merrier on the membership- if numbers are sustained, we can go back into at least semi-regular video production for the site as well.

I’ll leave you with a few teasers of what we shot over the last couple of weeks- these sets will be up on the site in the coming weeks!

All the best

Hywel Phillips (webmaster and photographer)

EleganceStudios.com : HywelPhillips.com

Cinematography – Photography – Fetish Fashion