>HI All,

I’ve added Elegance Studios to our links system, so the site now has some links pages. It is a little clunky at the moment… for various arcane technical reasons, I can either have a webpage with a lot of blank space at the bottom, or a scrollbar in the middle of the web page. I’ve chosen the former. A neater solution may be found eventually!

Surfnet tech have fixed the FTP problem, so I have been able to upload the Amelia’s Sunday Spanking ZIP file containing the DVD version. Acquiesce is encoding now and I will be uploading it in the next few days. Then a little more prettification and thinking about site navigation…

Cheers, Hywel.

>Hi All,

As you may notice, we have a lovely piece of artwork for our front page! I commissioned this from the very talented Morgan Cauthers-Knox, asking her to deliver me something inspired by the style of Mucha… and she has absolutely come up trumps! I really love it! It may seem weird given that I’ve been running a commercial website for almost a decade, but it still amazes me that it is possible for such a tiny cottage-industry production house like us to get artwork custom-drawn by people with more artistic talent in their little fingers than I have in my whole body. Cheers, Hywel

>Sigh. I should have learned by now. Never, ever say something is nearly done. Only say it when it is actually complete and tested and running! Having chirpily asserted that we were on course in my last post, I couldn’t actually upload the first DVD image to the shopping cart. Not sure why- I could upload the MP4 version OK, but the crappy web-based FTP client just baulked at the ZIP file. Maybe it was too big??

Anyway, tech support are looking into it.

I hope it will not delay the launch- I guess we can get started with the MP4s and upload the DVD images when the issues are sorted. Hopefully that will be before launch day, not after!

>Hooray, just put the final scene for Amelia’s Sunday Spanking together. Burnt a test copy of the DVD and watched it on telly in the living room. Slightly surreal sitting on your sofa looking at yourself sat on the sofa in the same room- like a Kafaka-esque mirror.

Learnt a lot from making this film, hopefully you will all enjoy it and we’ll know what to look out for a bit more next time… stuff like blank expanses of white wall (which you simply don’t see in Hollywood movies). Interesting how much difference the product design makes to the overall “feel” of scenes.

We’re planning to launch Elegance Studios properly in April – we’re looking like we’ll get there, barring major snags! Yay!

>Whew, finally shot the last scene for Amelia’s Sunday Spanking. That’s a month’s worth of domestic discipline scenes captured on camera! Editing is the next step of course- hopefully ASS (as it has inevitably  been christened) will not be too far behind Acquiesce, to bring us up towards launch day!

Learned some valuable lessons shooting this time. The main one is that shooting complicated scenes is just better with more crew. Since Amelia and I are a real-life couple living together, the original pure concept was that we’d shoot everything on our own.

It turns out that just leaving the camera rolling is trickier than it sounds. Either you have the monitor pointed towards you- in which case you can’t help but look at it, and you end up with some very strange looks to camera which break the intimacy of the scene or… you have the monitors turned away from you and THIS happens:

This was MEANT to be Amelia’s face-cam. Not Hywel’s back-cam. Of course, when I composed the shot, I thought I’d be standing further to the left. D’Oh. Fortunately, the bum-cam got a great view of all the action, and Amelia kicked and wailed enough to from out behind me for quite a few of the strokes 🙂

Nonetheless, there’s a good reason why we’ve been tending to have more crew to shoot video for the last year or two! The ideal is probably a camera operator, a sound recordist and a director, so that’s what we’re hoping to have on most of our video shoots this year!

Cheers, Hywel