Blog – Page 13 – Callidus

Catching Up

April 6, 2014

Hi all, hope all is well with you. I’m checking in today with a brief update that’s mostly geared towards getting my gallery here updated with all the new work I’ve done recently. I started actually posting to my tumblr blog a month or so ago and ended up being really motivated by the experience.

As a result, I turned out a surprising amount of work in a very short period of time. I’ve actually completed one more entry in the first four months of this year than I had all year in 2013. Or course, one of last year’s manips was a twenty-plus-minute video so…that may be a factor. In any case, the gallery is now stocked with all of the work I’ve done over at tumblr in addition to a brand new piece that I just finished!

Cultivate is inspired by all the best sci-fi mind control fiction that shows us what happens when pretty girls get too close to nefarious-flower-type-things. Its taken from a photo series featuring the lovely Justine Joli and has some of the best trance faces I’ve seen from her.

I’ve often talked about stealing facial expressions from one photo to use in another, but this pic was really a difficult proposition because I had so many great options. Here’s a pic of all the faces I had to choose from:

See? A lot of great choices there. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the manip(s). I’ve got so many things I hope to get to this year, hopefully my spare-time meter stays in the green long enough for me to get to all of them. Thanks and, as always, your questions, suggestions, and comments are welcome.

And I’m Back

January 13, 2014

Happy 2014 everyone! Its been a while since I checked in but I’ve been hard at work behind the scenes on new material and I have four, count them FOUR, new pieces of work to show off. Three I actually put up before the new year but if you haven’t checked the gallery in a couple weeks, then they’re new-to-you.

First up is a little something I worked on over the holidays. Since the bound subject already had some electro-play nodes attached, I thought the pic would lend itself well to the addition of a VR mind control rig. I was also struck by the shallow depth of focus, which I thought would make for a fun challenge to match with the brainwashing apparatus.

Finally, I really enjoyed the contrast between the bondage and the sub’s muscular physique. That juxtaposition is full of interesting drama vis-a-vis mind-over-muscle tropes. Trilby explored that idea a number of times and its something that always struck a chord with me.

Next up is an interesting two-for-one kind of thing. I was wandering around on Tumblr a while back and happened across an animated GIF of Sasha Grey lying on a couch and blinking in a drowsy, maybe-she’s-being-hypnotized kind of way. In fact, I think the poster even captioned the photo to that affect.

Part 2 of My Interview is Online

November 3, 2013

Hi all, just checking in with a quick update to let everyone know that part 2 of my interview is now online. This segment deals with my various influences, my approach to my work, and a bit of advice for those looking to do their photo-manipulations.

Do check it out and please let thrall know if you enjoyed the interview. I had a great time and I’d love to see her continue on interviewing others in the mind control fetish community.

Quickly, I’ll also add that I’ve been fixing some bugs on the site today and trying to get everything back to 100% after the move to the new hosting provider. If you do spot anything that doesn’t appear to be working as it should, don’t hesitate to contact me and let me know.

Part 1 of an Interview with Me is Online

October 28, 2013

I talk a lot on this blog. I’ve never really mastered brevity. But, as much as I talk, I don’t think I’ve ever discussed how I became interested in erotic mind control; or how I first discovered the online emc community; or how I actually got started doing photo manips way back when.

I’ve answered these and many other excellent questions posed by thrall in an interview she conducted with me recently. The first part is online now over on her blog and the second part should be released this weekend. So, if you’re interested in knowing a bit more about me, how I approach my work, and why am as hopelessly kinked as I am, then pop on over and have a read!

Thanks to thrall for giving me the opportunity to talk about all this. I’m glad to have had the occasion to force myself to recall some of the details surrounding my early emc memories and getting involved with the online scene. I hadn’t really thought about any of that for years so it was nice to remember for it myself and to share it with her.

I hope you’ll have a read and learn something new about your humble artist and his kink. Be sure to let her know if you enjoy it.

Your Friend and Mine, A. Regina Cantatis

October 14, 2013

What’s that you say? You don’t know A. Regina Cantatis? Well, I bet you do. Ms. Cantatis is the pen name of prolific erotic mind control fiction author, and I’m proud to say my good friend, thrall. “But wait,” I hear you already thinking, “isn’t ‘thrall’ already a pen name?” Yes, that’s certainly true. But I think you’d also agree that its better-suited to the pages of The Archive or The Garden than the pages of say…an honest-to-goodness e-novel.

That’s right my friends! thrall has ventured out into the world of e-publishing and already has released three of her most imaginative tales of EMC-sci-fi-sexiness as downloadable e-books. Currently, she’s selling Love in a Silver Socket, one of my favorites from her back-catalog, and her most recent (and some of her finest) work: Sleepwalkers on Amazon. You can also pick up those titles, as well as her seminal squick classic Octopus Vulgaris over on her store at Smashwords.

Now, you didn’t hear this from me but… I bet if you wandered over to her blog and checked out this post, you might just snag a coupon code to save 25% off Sleepwalkers on Smashwords; good for the next two weeks.

Now, I certainly can’t speak for all of you and the e-reading devices you might own, but I can say, with some authority, that I, and my iPad, are really quite tickled to have a few titles from thrall sitting alongside my complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and a deluxe edition of HP Lovecraft shorts.

Every week I visit The Archive, I wish there were donation buttons so I could show my appreciation for the talented authors that I follow there. I’d love to be able to show them how much I value the time they invest in sharing their imagination and craft with all of us. I’m so very, very pleased to finally have the opportunity to give a little something back to support the writing efforts of one of our communities greatest authors.

The fact that she is a dear friend of mine is just icing on the cake.

So, I hope you’ll join me by checking out the Amazon and Smashwords store-fronts for A. Regina Cantatis and that you too will find a happy home for her e-books in your electronic reader of choice.

Forward: New Animation

September 27, 2013

Welcome back dear reader. I hope September has been as fun for you as it has for me. I’ve taken some well-deserved time off, enjoyed the company of friends, and, now, I’m back in the saddle and have several new pieces of work that I’m going to be unveiling in the coming weeks.

Tonight’s piece is one pulled from a large, unorganized folder of potential material that I call “Loose Art.” Its one of many random images I come across and save for a rainy day, I’ll explain more about all that in the rest of this post. For now, I hope you enjoy Forward and then read on for my director’s commentary.

Pretty much anytime I come across a pic that prominently features a TV or computer monitor, I save it. Many times, upon second glance, I decide I can’t really do anything with it after all. Of course there are times when I find a way to make even those types of images work. See Assignment as a case-in-point.

The long and short of it is that I have a folder filled with these kinds of random images, not because I have an idea of what to do with them, only because I think I might…one day. Such was the fate of tonight’s image. The laptop in the background certainly offered possibilities but I was very taken with the image of this pretty woman having her neck ravaged by another girl. Anyhoo, the image and a few others from the same gallery were saved and forgotten about.

This week, I happened across it again and the inspiration finally came through. I suddenly ‘heard’ the hypnotist, whispering hotly in the subject’s ear. Tempting and teasing her as she nibbled and sucked on the seated woman’s neck. That sense of tactile passion was a real driving force in the caption and something I hoped would convey heat and erotic hunger. That theme of hunger ended up being a big part of a relatively small narrative, but I was happy to be economical with a caption for once.

As for the actual work of manipulation, I did composite in the subject’s left arm from another photo. I was very smitten with the idea of her masturbating to help cement her hypnotist’s control over her. Tying the words being whispered into her ear with the pleasure of her own fingers. I think that final scene from trilby’s Bond was coming through there.

Beyond that, I just needed to create some kind of sexy-smexy hypnotic imagery for the laptop screen. Fortunately, I recently took the time to download a massive amount of animated backgrounds from a stock video site I subscribe to. It made the work go rather quickly since I didn’t have to create something from scratch myself.

I hoped you enjoyed and, as always, your questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome.

Maintenance, House Keeping, and Browser Compatibility, Oh My

August 21, 2013

As some of you are already aware, my site was down late last week. Fortunately it wasn’t anything too serious…other than an erroneous report of being infected with malware. Anyhoo, things are back up and running now, hopefully even a bit faster than before.

As part of combatting the strain on my web hosts’s resources (which is why my site was taken down to begin with), I’ve installed a cache plugin which should serve up pages more quickly than before while also reducing both the amount of CPU cycles my site burns through and the chances my web host takes me offline again.

Now on to some fun stuff.

As you’ve probably noticed already, I’ve redesigned the Gallery page into a single archive containing all of my work, sorted by year of release, with options to filter by the type of Manip (Photo, Animation, etc). I think this format will make it far easier to drop in and quickly see if there’s been any new artwork uploaded. It should also facilitate some future developments in being able to quickly find Manips with similar criteria such as quickly seeing all artwork featuring swinging pendants or headphones.

Speaking of finding Manips, I’ve also implemented a Related Manips feature. So, now, when you view the page for a piece of art, there will be thumbnails below it linking to similar Manips. This is a feature I’ve wanted to implement for some time but its taken quite a while to actually tag every single piece of artwork, behind the scenes, in order to make it happen.

Now, to some really fun stuff.

I’ve added some new header animations to the site. I’ve always enjoyed those as a design element and I appreciate those of you who have taken the time to write and let me know that you like them too. There’s four new ones that are now in the rotation (they come up at random) and I want to explain why they are a bit special.

The four you’re already acquainted with were my first venture into HTML 5/CSS 3 animated graphics. That is to say, all the animation is being done natively in your browser (as opposed to using some sort of plugin like Flash or Java). These new four go a step further: they are natively-embedded video.

I’ll talk more about this in my next blog entry, but the long and short of it is that, similar to graphic animation, html 5 supports playing video right in the browser without the need for plugins like Flash or Quicktime. This allows me to create much more rich animations that don’t require you to have additional software installed and will be better-positioned to support mobile platforms like iOS and Android in the future.

Being able to utilize video-embeds also opens up some other exciting possibilities, but I’ll talk more about that next time. For now, the site is back up with some new features and there’s more new stuff on the way.

Decisive Retrospective – A Word From Tabico

August 13, 2013

June 18, 2012.

That’s the date that Callidus proposed working something out of this
awesome footage he’d found.

No, I didn’t remember that off the top of my head, I just now went and
looked. I have the memory of an eggplant.

We had been working on this other set of photomanips – which gives me
too much credit, he’d been working and I’d been making a few useful
suggestions, as per usual – and that was kind of petering out, the way
these things sometimes do, and at the end of an email wherein we were
discussing video games, politics, life, the usual, he mentioned that he
had found this smexy video clip and had the beginnings of an idea about
what to do with it.

So all told it took about a year. We weren’t working fast, sometimes a
week or a couple would go between email exchanges. And of course he was
doing all the work, I was just saying “well what about this” and “what
about that” and “you know you misspelled ‘masturbate’, right?”

I enjoyed every minute of it.

Obviously, Callidus is immensely talented. As with any artistic
endeavor, the erotic mind control field has a whole lot of tyros –
nothing wrong with that and some of my favorite material is actually
either trite or riddled with grammatical problems – a fair-sized group
of decent writers, and a handful of real top-notch ‘what are you doing
here?’ creators. The same holds true in the visual, image manipulation
side of the house. And when it comes to visual effects Callidus is even
above that apex. He’s working at a professional, major budget level.
You’ve seen ‘Orientation’. Now you’ve seen this. Tell me I’m wrong.

So there’s that. It’s nice to know when you start that what you’re
going into will fucking rock. And it did – that computer desktop? He
made all that! I mean, the icons, the GUI look and feel, etc… It still
awes me a bit. And that’s just like one part of this work. But more
important than the startling technical chops, Callidus is fun. He’s fun
to correspond with generally, and he’s fun to work with. During
‘Decisive Results’ he consistently came up with really good ideas,
ranging from the hot dialogue between post-MC Holly and MsR3 to
hilarious little throwaway quips (“Twice the Doppler”). The kind of
ideas that make your mind smile – particularly if your mind savors
erotic mind control. And for being as good as he is, his ego is, like,
half the size of mine, so we could really dig into the work without
worrying about treading on each other’s feelings – shoot down ideas,
point out flaws, and yes also praise improvements without it being pure
ego stroking.

And like a good role-playing session, collaborating on this was a good
reason to find myself in constant dialogue with a really cool guy,
talking about fun stuff. Were it not for ‘Decisive Results’ (or
something similar) we might have exchanged a dozen or fewer emails all
last year. As it was, we talked all the time. And my life was richer for
it.

So I love working with Cal. I’ll damn well do it again.

As for ‘Decisive Results’ – it’s pretty fucking awesome, isn’t it? I
could go back through my email thread and suss out some places where I
did the writing or came up with the idea or whatever, because honestly I
don’t remember, but it seems like a foolish exercise. Callidus made it.
I helped. And hopefully you’ve enjoyed.

– Tabico

The Voice of Love

August 8, 2013

I received an interesting email recently. A hypnotic domme called Mistress Love messaged me to inquire about basing one of her audio files on my manip, Tera Bot. She said she liked the story and wanted to re-tell it from a first-person perspective, with some tweaks of her own.

I told her that sounded like fun and that I was eager to hear the audio once she’d completed it. Well, Love works fast, as it turns out, because it was hardly a day later when she was kind enough to let me have a listen.

I won’t spoil anything too greatly, but the premise of the file is essentially the same as my story. In this case, the listener steps into the shoes of a person lucky enough to have their own Love-Bot. A Love-Bot that knows about your submissive fantasies and is programmed to bring those fantasies to life.

Love has a very lovely voice (see what I did there?) and it was so enjoyable to hear her use it to tell her version of this story and to bring some of the dialog I’d written to life. Very fun.

So, if you’d like to hear this mp3 for yourself, she currently has it for sale on her site, along with a free sample, which you can find here. A few items of note: the file is gender neutral so its sexy fun for guys or gals and there are some light suggestions related to being submissive to Mistress Love and purchasing items for her from her Amazon wish-list.

I just want to thank Love for sending that note, it was a very fun experience to see her bring this project to fruition.

Decisve Results: New Video

July 29, 2013

Its not every day that I get to say that in a blog title: “New Video.” After more than a year of work, I am very happy to announce a new entry in the Videos section. You can read on for my director’s commentary, but first, on behalf of Tabico and myself, we are very pleased to unveil: Decisive Results.

This manip, like most of them, starts with me saving something to my enormous ‘manip material’ folder and then forgetting about it. It was probably May of last year when I came across it again and had that little voice in my head whisper ‘Do something with this, now!” So, I started doing some editing with the footage and cut together a scene that I thought played quite convincingly as erotic mind control. I knew with some visual-fx kung fu I could turn it into full-on hypno-fetish fodder (three times fast), but I wanted more than just a hot scene with EMC, I wanted a story.

At the time, Tabico and I had already been working together for months on a different project (in fact it was the ‘big collaboration’ I mentioned in the post for Nickelodeon). I had gotten burned out and needed to move on to something else or I was just going to stall creatively. Tabico completely understood and very patiently went along as I proposed shelving what we’d been doing and starting fresh with this video.

Callidus

Mind Control Fetish Art