Category Archives: RestrainedElegance.com

Stories and scripts

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So, it’s the last evening of my “Creative Retreat”, two weeks spent away from the usual run of processing photos, editing videos and answering emails that are the day-to-to running of a website.

I set myself the challenge to come up with ten log lines – I did, see previous post.

Then I set myself the challenge to come up with a screenplay, either one feature or several shorts. I did. I wrote three short scripts, half a draft “hour-long” hybrid that might have the kernel of a feature in it, one fully worked out idea with dialogue to be improvised at the shoot (like we shoot now) and a whole stack of index cards which might one day turn into a dense 90-minute feature.

As I thought, the shorts proved more fertile. I want to get more experience working with stories framed as screenplays, with their pared-down style, stripped dialogue, three act structure, etc.. So I’m going to make some of the shorts into films and release them before embarking on a feature.

So now I have…

Bondage Intern – Ditzy blonde intern must run business when boss breaks his leg. Only trouble: business is running a bondage website. This one I decided needed the improv. touch to deliver humour, I’m not at all confident that I can write funny dialogue! That’s now a full story outline, in usual RE style.

The Face Of Metal Bondage – Too old & too tall, lifestyle BDSMer Audrey must defeat the horrid fashion models to be crowned million-pound face of metal bondage fashion. 8 page short screenplay.

Good Time Girl – Good time girl provides service: perfect embodiment of any fantasy. Kidnapped by mob pimps, she must escape; her only client is her husband! 13 page short screenplay.

Friendly Fire – a military intelligence officer kidnaps his cynical civilian superior to prove to her than the interrogation techniques at which she sneers are no walk in the park. But can he defend his honour and integrity when she attempt to seduce her way out of the situation? 20 page short screenplay.

A partial draft of Dating Epic Fail. Ditzy girl installs Bad Idea Bear app to make all date decisions for her. Ensuing adventures lead her to sub identity BDSM. 22 pages, but needs either sharpening up and condensing to a snappier 15 minute short, or expanding to an hour allowing more time for character development. I have extensive notes but the main thing I am missing is the hot BDSM scenes (which curiously are usually the bits which fall into place most easily). If I can think of lots, it’ll become a longer film. If I can’t, I’ll try to make it a super-pacey 15 minute short.

A LOT of index cards and notes for Journalist mistakenly invited to BDSM scene. She goes, intending exposé, finds own fulfillment. Now she must battle tabloid exposé herself. This one I really see as a feature, and one which might be able to appeal to a more general audience… if I can make the characters and the storyline compelling enough. So this is one I’m going to work on steadily and see how far I can develop it, and maybe even look for mainstream involvement down the line.

What of the two most popular ideas from the log lines?

Wile E. Coyote bondage. Incompetent kidnapper keeps trying to grab her victim with bondage traps but keeps trapping herself in bondage instead. This is a great comedy idea, but I decided the first thing that needed doing was trying to figure out some practical ways of actually making the bondage traps. I decided to wait until I had bondage gear (and Ariel!) to hand so we could experiment. Might need to recruit some bondage engineers to get very far with this! I still love the idea but the feasibility/safety on our budgets needs testing to establish.

Nymphomaniac Zombies. Contagion turns young women into sex fiends. Capture and bondage the only option until a cure is found! I wrote a detailed outline, but the more I wrote, the more frustrated I became with the scale on which we’d have to shoot it. My original idea had LOTS of sexy women on screen, and that’s likely to be a budget buster.

I explored a few of the standard horror film ways of making the budget smaller- isolation is the big one. So… a hotel, on an island, with a small group of characters and (say) a convention of makeup sales-girls to bring up the babe quotient. The more I wrote, the more it felt like a less-good remake of The Evil Dead… and there have been enough less-good remakes of The Evil Dead already.

So this one will have to wait until a lightbulb moment which makes the original sexy vision fit in a “zero budget” filming story.

One good thing though is that I’m now confident that will happen, I just need to mull it over long enough. The reason I know that is that I’ve had the Friendly Fire film idea running around in my head for a couple of years. I had some very strong images, a basic story arc, and the main character sitting there… I just couldn’t write down the framing story in a way that a) made sense or b) was possible for us to shoot.

The way I’d originally thought of it, she would be a business bitch character, and the central idea is hatred as a powerful aphrodisiac between her and the dom in the story, who I had down as a policeman investigating her committing a massive fraud in the city. No matter how I sliced it, though, the story didn’t hang together. The things I thought a policeman would do, the things the two characters would have access to, any sense of urgency as the plot unfolded.

When the idea came to me of making them intelligence officers, rivals at a similar level, used to dirty tricks and with a lot more resources to call on, I knew I had it. (Note to self- going for a walk is definitely the best way to solve story issues. Subconscious delivers).

It remains to be seen if these screenplays are any good. Next step is a read-through and re-edit with Ariel, to see if they really do hang together. The dialogue certainly needs tweaking- I’m sure most of the characters talk too much like me, for example. And it remains to be seen whether we can film these more ambitious story lines (and if anyone can/will learn the lines I’ve just sweated over writing!)

The main thing is that I’m very happy at having come up with several stories which have actual third acts, endings, not just fade to black while she’s in bondage. The bondage scenes have somewhere to go, and hopefully it’ll give them more impact as a result because the characters have an emotional arc through the hotness, as well as just the hotness.

It’ll also allow me to do more detailed visual planning before we shoot them, which should help produce beautiful images as well.

Right. Must pack my bags. Hopefully the next you’ll hear of my ramblings is that we’re about to make one of these into a movie you can actually watch!

Which of them sounds most intriguing to you?

Bondage Scripts

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For the last week I’ve been on creative retreat, taking time out from the day-to-day running of the websites. It sounds pompous but it is hard to concentrate on writing whilst editing films, processing photos and answering emails. Some dedicated time was in order.

I want to figure out how to make our films better. For the bondage and fetish work specifically, I want to make the films more intense, more compelling, better stories (and hotter, too).

I also want to make some movies with fetish elements that will appeal to a wider audience.

Firstly, to send to the British Fetish Film Festival. It was clear from the producers’ screening that the stronger the story progression, the more compelling the film.

Secondly, I’d like to make a film showing BDSM as we think it is: positive and fun, one part of a fulfilling sex life if it happens to be your kink, not something to be scared of. The portrayal in mainstream media is lamentable- even laudable ones like Secretary have to have a self-harming, slightly broken sub and a dom with so many personal issues he can hardly function.

I’d like to make films with stronger story lines for Elegance Studios and sometimes RE and SS, too.
(Only sometimes. Not every film needs a big old wodge of story. There’s nothing wrong with short, sharp, sexy BDSM videos with lots of hot action and we’ll still be making plenty of those, and improving the quality and the impact of those too.)

I think the element that’s most lacking in our longer storytelling efforts to date has been the ending. We do OK at beginnings- we’re quite practiced at sketching characters and situations quickly without a ton of exposition. We do good middle sections- that’s where all the sexy stuff and the fun stuff happens. We just usually tail off with a fade to black or a “girl gets too tired to struggle” instead of a proper ending.

The obvious ending for bondage is either the tied up person gets untied (which is not very hot to see) or the characters have sex (which would turn into hardcore porn, which we don’t want to make). So we need to figure out how to make impactful endings which bring the film to an emotional, satisfying conclusion without seeming lame or a let down.

The tool I most need to do that is a script, a proper screenplay.

We’ve been getting closer and closer to that with the shoot plans for our longer and more complex films anyway, but so far we’ve stopped short. We’ve worked from shot lists, shot lists plus a few storyboards, and written essays which are plans for screenplays but with the dialogue to be improvised on set. And again, that’s a great way to work for some things.

I’ve concluded already this week that I can’t write comedy screenplays, but comedy comes about naturally with improvisation. So my bondage comedy ideas are going to be done in the “story plus improv” mode.

What I’m really settling down to do now is to flesh out some ideas into proper, fully-scripted format so we can shoot them that way. I think the advantage will be that with tighter control, you can plot more tightly. And you need the end written, so you have to think about it before you start shooting. That lets you feed the set-up more tightly so that the beginning leads inexorably towards the emotionally satisfying ending.

I set myself several challenges.

Stage one was to come up with ten log lines. A log line is a one or two sentence summary of what the film is about, to try to explain why it is a good idea and why I would want to make it (and hopefully why you will want to watch it!) I decided to tweet mine, so they have a 140 character limit, which is STRICT.

Tick: here are the ones I came up with

  1. Too old & too tall, lifestyle BDSMer Audrey must defeat the horrid fashion models to be crowned million-pound face of metal bondage fashion
  2. Wylie Coyoye Bondage. Incompetent kidnapper keeps trying to grab her victim with bondage traps but keeps trapping herself in bondage instead
  3. Autocratic ruler tries to be good man. Only indulgence- sadistic fantasies with captive slavegirls. Until he meets true love among slaves…
  4. Good time girl provides service: perfect embodiment of any fantasy. Kidnapped by mob pimps, she must escape; her only client is her husband!
  5. Some day my prince will come. But when he does, he’s an arse- I think I’ll stay with kinky evil captor.
  6. Journalist mistakenly invited to BDSM scene. She goes, intending exposé, finds own fulfillment. Now she must battle tabloid exposé herself
  7. Nymphomaniac Zombies. Contagion turns young women into sex fiends. Capture and bondage the only option until a cure is found!
  8. Dating Epic Fail. Ditzy girl installs Bad Idea Bear app to make all date decisions for her. Ensuing adventures lead her to sub identity BDSM
  9. Ditzy blonde intern must run business when boss breaks his leg. Only trouble: business is running bondage website!
  10. Service orientated sub girl must learn the difference between affection and abuse to escape the prison of “I don’t deserve anything better”

Some of these feel like short films for RE, some longer ones for ES, some mainstream-ish, some not, one or two may even be worth considering at feature length.

The intern one I had a go at, and discovered I couldn’t script funny dialogue, didn’t know where to start. But I can see that as soon as I get the right people on set, comedy will ensue. So that one has become a “standard” shoot plan.

The fashion world one I’ve turned into a short script. Two drafts so far. It’ll need tuning, but I quite like it. It feels satisfying.

The Good Time Girl one had the strongest number of hot mental images associated with it, so despite the fact that no-one on twitter liked it, and that I thought the logline was poor, I’ve written a short script for that one too. It’ll need revisions.

I’ve made quite a few notes on several of the others.

Which ones sound most interesting to you?

“More cinematic” is not “better”. But it is difficult.

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I should say that there’s nothing inherently superior about “more cinematic”. It is one of the standard styles in which moving pictures are presented, and it suits some stories very well.

Other styles suit other stories.

Hand-held crash zooms looks like a newsreel live broadcast: ideal for disaster movies and alien invasions.

I love music videos and the the “MTV” style – lots of jump cuts, extensive slowmo. It works for a story that can be crammed into a three minute music track. That’s not “better” than the “Hollywood blockbuster” style, it is just different.

There is a recognisable “website video” style that has come about through practical considerations of how we shoot. As did all the other styles, incidentally.

For example, smooth camera movies came about because movie cameras used to weigh a ton, and you couldn’t shoot shaky-cam with them if you tried. The mass of the camera would have defeated you. And you couldn’t shoot your home movies on them, because they wouldn’t fit in your house. When light cameras came along, they were also cheap- people used them for home movies and newsreels. Which is why we associate shaky-cam with home movies or news footage, and large crane and dolly movies with big budget films.

The website video style is usually two cameras, one wide angle, one getting detail shots, cutting between the cameras like a live mixer on a live TV broadcast. Long rolling takes, exposition largely done through dialogue, fairly brightly lit, continuity edit.

It conveys some stories very well: as people have commented on my previous post, it has a feeling of reality and that the action is all happening in real time as we watch. So if you are capturing a BDSM scene bring played out “as live”, it’s just the ticket. Scenes shot this way aren’t actually any more “real” than scene shot in a different style. There’s a real girl, tied up with real rope, whatever style we happen to be shooting.

Sorry to disillusion anyone, but the actress’ “model character” is almost always a role, just as much as if she’s playing a captured spy. Most models use a stage name, and that stage name is also the character they play by default on screen.

She might be more practiced at the role, and the style has associations which we take to mean “this is really happening to someone”, so it might be easier to suspend disbelief. But I assure you that nipple clamps hurt whether you shoot with two cameras one rolling take, or one camera and cinematic angles and camera moves and storyline development. So in the same way that the cinematic style isn’t “better”, the website style isn’t “more real”.

They just have different connotations and suit different stories.

The website style isn’t an especially glamorous style, for the same reason that super-8 handheld film footage isn’t an especially glamorous style.

If you want your captured spy to look like a Bond girl, rather than a girl in a house in suburbia, you might want to pinch style elements from the Bond films. If you want your maidens carried off by Vikings, you’d do well to look at historical epics.

We have particular associations of grandeur, drama and style associated with the Hollywood big-movie style. Many reasons for that, not least of which is that it is a damned expensive way to make films!

Since that’s a look and feel that appeals to me, I want to pinch elements of the cinematic style for SOME of our website videos- the ones whose story suits the style. In doing so, I don’t think the films are inherent better. One can make boring stories in a cinematic style and they’ll still be terrible. But if one do want to borrow some of Hollywood’s glamour (which with a website calling itself Restrained Elegance, I’d like to), the cinematic style might be a very good match.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to achieve. That’s because the way it is done usually involves big budgets, big sets, big crews, lots of equipment, and even bigger budgets. And did I mention big budgets? Not just big in a “ten times what we spend on a film” sort of way. Big in a MILLION times what we spend on a film sort of way.

It isn’t better.

But objectively, it IS more difficult to achieve.

That gives it a glamour and a cachet and is why it has a mystic fascination for many low budget film-makers.

Hywel