Callidus

Well, it has been a little while hasn’t it? Welcome back friends, forgive my absence but I have been (the good) sort of busy lately. However, I’m equalizing my workload and have a new animation to share with you today. In terms of source material, they rarely come better than this; it really is a fantastic find. This is a pic I’ve had stashed away for a few months but on a recent image-safari, I wandered across it again and decided I just had to do something with it, now-ish. Click here for the animation and read-on for my director’s commentary.

I knew exactly what I wanted to see from this pic the first time I saw it, so the manip process was really just working through the hurdles to reach that goal. The hurdles in this case were creating imagery that wasn’t in the picture to begin with. The original prop was a pair of grapes and, as small as you think two grapes may be, they were hiding a considerable amount of the sub-model’s face. So the first challenge was erasing them and then recreating that side of her face, with the proper perspective.

At some point while doing all this clone-stamping, I had the notion that I’d like to animate the jewel that would soon be filling the model’s vision. I’ve done this sort of thing before with a prop hand extending out-of-frame; but never with the hand of a second model in the picture. Although much easier in execution, this ended up being the same process as removing the grapes. I needed to isolate the domme-model’s hand and forearm, then create enough of her shoulder that I could rock her hand back and forth a bit without seeing any gaps behind it.

With all that complete I got started on the animation and fx work. Although I was quite happy with how everything was turning out, there was some floaty quality that wasn’t quite working for me. In the end, I realized that everything was just moving too slow. I sped up things 100% and found that everything gelled and I finally had my finished piece.

As for the writing, that went quickly (for once) and really I was just trying to convey that sense of heat and drama that I saw in the image the first time I laid eyes on it. As for how successful I was? Just Watch, and see for yourself.