10 minute rough cut

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And at the end of a day of editing, I have a rough cut of the first 10 minutes of the film. At this rate it’ll take me the whole of next week to do, which is a shame as I have an exam and a few other minor things to do that week!

Still, it usually goes more quickly the further through it you get. I now have the basic soundscape sorted- orchestra and choir, quite dreamy for the more sensual sequences. Katy’s character has a fairly brash, blues-y theme, Janey’s starts off with a LOUD rock chick but will show her softer side. Ariel gets to be overblown and indignant like a movie trailer with full orchestra (Drama! She’ll like that 🙂

Just editing an insert showing Janey making music videos of herself… self-referential multi-layers of flashback starting to do my head in, but hopefully it’ll all make sense when you see it!

Hywel

Music for a slavegirl…

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HI All,

Just managed to get the Restrained Elegance July updates done, freeing up a few days to get started editing Slave Auction. The automated stuff getting the footage in is all done, looking through it all now. The first thing one always has to do when editing is to look through all the raw footage- which for Slave Auction runs to a couple of hours. I’m looking for the best takes, the best angles, beautiful shots but also for shots that didn’t really work.

Here’s an example- a lovely framing of Ariel in the mirror, about to get flogged:

As a standalone, this is a lovely shot- good enough to open the film with, I initially thought. Unfortunately, because the shot doesn’t show enough content of the room to reveal where Ariel actually is, when you cut to any of the rest of the footage we have of that scene, it gives unpleasant “jump” (for techies, the mirror causes a line cross for Ariel when you cut to another angle. If you flop the shot, it causes a line cross for the rest of the room geography).

I’m still attached to the shot, it is a lovely one, but I’m not sure it will even make it to the rough cut.

What I’m doing now is adding the latest batch of Audio Network music to my hard drive. These most awesome people supply the huge music library on which all our RE and ES productions depend. 564 CDs worth at present time, to be exact! Waiting for the latest batch of 11 DVDs to copy over suddenly made me realise I should blog 🙂

With big productions where the music is scored afterwards, it is common to edit first, then fine tune the music to the movie. For small productions, using music which is fixed, we often work the other way around. Dramatic moments in the film work so much better if they come along with a crescendo in the music, so much so that it is worth stretching and trimming the scene to make sure the most important bits happen in time to the music.

So before editing a rough cut, I usually like to have a clear idea of what my soundtrack is going to be. So this morning’s job (after copying all the new DVDs) is to audition dozens of tracks and decide which ones “feel” right for a couple of key scenes. That will give me a theme or two for the movie, and also set the overall musical style.

Which leads me to wonder… what SHOULD the musical style be? I sort of imagine the Slave Auction story being a bit retro, even though it is clearly set in modern times it has a lot of look and feel of the 1950’s about it already. Should the music emphasise that? Should I go with classical and orchestral music, or something a bit more intimate feeling? I don’t think I want anything pop/rock/indie feeling, but maybe solo piano would be a good timeless way to begin? I’ve not done much with Jazz, maybe some classic-era Jazz would sit well?

So excuse me, must turn up the volume and listen to a few dozen music tracks along with some of the shots and see what floats my boat!

Hywel

Teaser Trailer for Slave Auction added

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Hi All,

Just added a page for Slave Auction, with links to a first teaser trailer and some production stills.

The trailer is just a bit of fun, very quickly cut together using iMovie’s built-in “trailer” feature, but it gives you some idea of what the film is going to be about!

I’ll keep you posted on the movie’s progress through post production here on the blog.

Two new films in production

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Hi All,

We just got back from a week-long location shoot in Norfolk. We did the shooting for our next two Elegance Studios videos: the Slave Auction idea we’ve been discussing, and Ariel Anderssen’s “Haunted” script (which as you might expect has lots of sexy damsels in distress in a haunted house).

I’ll let you know more about these projects as they start to come together (shooting the footage is really just the beginning of the film making- we’ve got a long way to go from the scenes and shots we filmed to make a finished movie, the editing is likely to take me a few months). But for now, here’s a teaser photo or two…

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Amelia’s Sunday Spanking

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I love being a model, but I’m not a natural producer. My new project, which I’m going to try to talk about now, has actually been available to download for a few weeks, and I’ve put off saying anything about it. Because, while I’m confident about telling you about films I’ve appeared in made by other producers, this one feels pretty personal and I’ve had all sorts of producer-related anxiety about whether we should just re-film it all over and over again until it’s a Hollywood Epic with crane shots and extras and tailored Roman Centurion costumes….

Well, it doesn’t have any of those things, and I’m going to tell you about it anyway.
The BDM (Boyfriend/Dom/Master, who owns the site I help him run) and I have always loved spanking. And while we do shoot a fair amount of CP-related action for Restrained Elegance, that’s not really the focus of the site. So last year when a friend of ours suggested that we maybe branch out into making feature-length productions as well as videos for Members of our site, it seemed like a brilliant opportunity to widen our fetish horizons a bit.
Which is why the BDM has launched Elegance Studios. We want to have a go at shooting fetish movies with the highest standards that a niche producers budget will allow. Have a look at the trailer for the first movie to see what I mean. My experience of the fetish film industry is that locations, camera work and editing are quite often a lower priority than the quality of the BDSM action, and while that’s totally understandable, we like the idea of aiming for something with the highest production values we can achieve without the BBC’s budget (though, naturally, if anyone would like to give us the BBC’s budget, we’ll try not to blow it all on catering).
So once the first movie was edited, we had a go at Amelia’s Sunday Spanking which is an idea we’d wanted to do for ages. I love the idea of formalised discipline sessions, and I also really liked the idea of shooting a whole spanking movie where all the punishments were on unmarked skin (which obviously isn’t possible if you shoot multiple scenes in a day, unless your model is made out of enamelled tin or similar). So for a month, we spent consecutive Sundays catching up with all the spankings I’d earned according to the punishment diary I was keeping.
The result is an hour-long domestic discipline movie, with loads of spanking, a number of rather brazen negotiation attempts, and an awful lot more strokes of a leather strap than I’d have agreed to if I’d had director’s control! I think it’s probably a one-off; future CP movies we produce are likely to be multi-location, more film-style productions with a less close-to-home storyline. But I’m really hoping that some of you might like it; it’s by far the most personal project I’ve been involved with, and while that felt a bit uncomfortable at times, I hope that the result justifies the rather difficult and painful month I spent involved in production. Which is now, blessedly, over; and I can concentrate on my work over the next few months. Which, OMG, includes no fewer than 7 full-day spanking shoots. Which has to be a record for me.
A/a