Manip Musings

January 25, 2011

They say the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one. I have a problem. I want to do so many things and I don’t always manage my time well. Compacting that problem, is the fact that I’m a perfectionist to an unhealthy degree at times and, in the past, when I’ve felt like I couldn’t do something spectacular, I just ended up doing nothing.

Alright, so I’ve admitted my problem, time to move on to a recovery plan.

I really enjoy posting and wish I did it more. I know it would give you all a reason to drop by a few times a week (instead of a few times a year) and I’d feel more productive and so and so forth. But I’ve had a very basic problem in reaching this goal. I have no idea what to write about. Or, more precisely, I need to find something to write about a few times a week.

I’ve always really enjoyed thrall’s posts wherein she highlights various fetish-photos from around the web. So I’ve been giving some thought to adapting the idea. The one mc-fetish related thing I do with consistency is hunt for new images to manip. Since, I’ll never actually manip everything I have saved, I thought I’d just start pulling some notable images from my ‘Watch Folder’ and sharing them with you all.

Maybe it will lead to inspiration for me and an eventual finished product, maybe it will lead to inspiration for you and we’ll play a ‘everybody write a caption’ game in the comments. Maybe it will just be a cool collection of pics with mc-possibilities. Whatever the case, I’m excited to write the first installment, so let’s get started shall we?

Continue Reading…

New Animated Manip – Alpha

January 19, 2011

Welcome back true believer! Tonight, I’m pulling the curtain back on the long-teased super-secret-manip-project that’s been in the works…well a very long time. I think this one may have taken longer to complete than Orientation, which was relatively straight forward by comparison. But for all the starting and stopping, working and re-working, Alpha, is finally complete. For those of you who can’t stand the anticipation any longer, click on the image to the right and godspeed. For those who’d like to get the story behind the story…well, I’d still recommend clicking to the right and watching it; there will be spoilers ahead. Go ahead, I’ll wait here and have a celebratory beverage until you return.

All done? Well, I hope you enjoyed it. Putting it together was quite an interesting journey. It all started a little over two years ago when I came across an image set of Tera Patrick in a mosaic-tile shower. I took one look at the first image and had this vision of all the individual tile pieces flashing and spinning as though the whole shower was a giant hypno-trap. I saved the gallery and marveled at my good fortune for finding such juicy material to work with. I was looking forward to a challenge with this new piece; as it turned out, I got exactly what I was looking for…and then some.

Continue Reading…

So Close…

January 18, 2011

While formal employment hasn’t allowed for much progress over the weekend, I thought I’d post tonight anyway and let everyone know that its going to happen this week. The manip I’ve been working on for twice as long as I’ve been teasing it is ‘this close’ (you can’t see my finger and thumb, but they’re really close together) to being finished. I’m finishing up the writing along with some final tweaks to the images and putting together the flash file. This is the final stages of work, once the flash file is complete with the latest media and text…I’m done!

So since I’m teasing you (you know you like it) I’ll drop some non-specific facts that won’t spoil anything but will hopefully whet your appetite. This new manip will be titled Alpha and will feature 16 panels; most of which are animated. There is an appearance by a character who was introduced as an unseen hand in a prior manip and if you happen to be familiar with said-manip, you’ll see that while the method is quite tech-heavy this time, Her strategy remains true-to-form.

As I write this, I’m having a flash of inspiration regarding this character. I think She’s the sort of serial-enslaver whose methodology isn’t determined by what is most efficient or effective, but rather by very powerful compulsions. I think She has a process for enslavement that She needs to (must) follow; She finds a target, develops a plan, sets the pieces into place, and then puts the gears into motion. The actual act of enslavement does not satisfy Her unless it comes about by the ritualistic machinations of her process.

I want to write more but I think I’ll stop there and save the rest to actually put in the story. Don’t worry, I promise it won’t delay the grand unveiling.

See you soon.


Why Did It Have To Be Snakes?

October 13, 2010

Welcome back dear reader. As promised lat night, I’m presenting a new project this evening and I’m actually finished ahead of schedule (take a picture it doesn’t happen often). So what’s it all about? Well, I won’t rehash yesterday’s post, but I’ll simply say that I’m currently working on an animated manip of epic proportion (in terms of complexity and work-load) and, frankly, I needed a break from it.

I came across a picture set a week or two ago that reached out from the monitor and slapped me in the face screaming MANIP ME, MANIP ME STUPID MONKEY!!! I love to work on those pieces that come together in an instant. Its not always the first time I look at a pic (though it was in this case), but when the story and the imagery leap into my mind in a single instant of inspiration, that’s a project worth taking on.

So, having had this sudden burst from the muse, I decided to take a break from the behemoth manip, and just put foot to pedal and complete this one in record time. In in that regard, I’ve succeeded. You’re bound to notice spelling mistakes. The compisiting isn’t nearly as polished as I usually prefer it to be. But, that wasn’t the point in a sense. The point was to do something fun and inspired and, again, in that regard I succeeded.

When I did my first snake-on-woman hypno manip, it was born out of a feeling it was a sub-genre lacking in representation. Since then, I’ve found numerous artists on the Collective that have done work along similar lines and, of course, Kaa from Disney’s animated Jungle Book film is usually in a starring role. In looking back on my original effort, I realized that I hadn’t really nailed the animation with the eyes. Looking at the film again, I realized that I just whipped up something that seemed correct, but I’ve been thinking about doing another snake-hypno piece, if for no other reason, to take another swing at nailing the distinctive Kaa hypnosis look.

So, that too was on my mind when I sat down to tackle this side-project and, again, I’m quite happy with the results.

Lastly, I’ve been anxious to try out a new tool called Adobe Flash Catalyst. Its designed as a UI to Adobe Flash and (in theory) would allow a person to develop simple Flash applications (like a picture gallery or slideshow) quickly and without writing code. I’ve been desperately searching for a tool like this for months and this project was a great chance to do some testing and see if it lived up to the tag-line.

Which by-and-large it did. I was able to very quickly assemble all my finished panels into an animated Flash slideshow in far less time than it took me to research, code, and troubleshoot the Action Script for my last animated manip. Its not feature complete; I would have desperately loved to include a soft music track playing with the images* but this software is very exciting as it will allow me to assemble interactive manip projects in a matter of hours instead of (literally) months.

So, going in to this new piece, I had a lot of things on my mind and, for what its worth, I feel enormously content with the end result with respect to each of the qualities I’ve mentioned. As for whether or not YOU enjoy it as a reader? Well, I should probably shut up and let you see it.

I do hope you enjoy Kia and Kaa.

-Callidus

*If you’re curious about what music I had planned to include, it was this haunting rendition of ‘Trust in Me’ by the Soul Flutes. Give it a spin as you view the manip for full effect.

New Manip Tomorrow

October 12, 2010

Greetings and salutations dear reader. Though I can’t imagine why would you check this space with any regular frequency (as I am apparently incapable of updating it as such), on the off chance you’re out there, wondering what I’m up to, I thought I’d tell you. I’ve been creating. The super secret project is still underway and I’m making very good progress there thank-you-very-much, but I came across a set of pics this week that got me really inspired and I decided to take a break from the aforementioned big manip project to work on this.

I remember seeing the Coen brothers interviewed once and they said that in the midst of writing Fargo (I believe) they needed a break and wrote The Big Lebowski. At the time, that struck me as incredibly daring and unconventional. Work on a new project while another lies unfinished? Blasphemy! But as I’ve considered it, I realize that part of my perfectionist mentality that cripples me at times is this instinctive need to finish one thing before moving to another.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about finishing what you start (and perhaps this attitude is my way of overcompensating for not completing things in the past), but if you don’t feel like working on one thing, and you disallow yourself from working on something else, then you end up doing nothing; and, just in case its not clear: (flawless Agent Smith impression) I haaaaate doing nothing.

So, with this new found freedom in-hand, I just finished the manip work on a new short-series. I still need to write it and do some tech stuff, but I anticipate that I’ll have the finished version posted tomorrow evening. Since I’m teasing you and everything, I’ll also say that its an animated manip and that it involves snake hypno (which I’ll talk more about once I post it).

Fruitless distraction or rejuvenating detour? We’ll find out tomorrow; hope to see you then.

The Enemy of Good

August 31, 2010

panel_03_oldTabico once told me not to let ‘perfect be the enemy of good.’ Which is another way of saying that its important to know when you’ve taken something far enough and that expending any more energy at that point may not pay off with additional quality in proportion to the time spent. Since she’s quite intelligent, I tend to listen when she talks, but this piece of advice is difficult sometimes because its in my nature to be a perfectionist.

With my current secret project being so complex, I find myself constantly triaging my work; there’s so much to do I can’t get hung up on the little details the way I might if this were a single manip. So, I find myself in a constant struggle to know when I’ve done enough and that its time to move onto the next thing.

Last night, I had one of those ‘forest for the trees’ moments and realized that one of my characters didn’t match across all her images. I had the same model, on the same set, but the images weren’t from the same photo series. The lighting was different and, more to the point, her clothing was different.

Disaster. Calamity. Despair.

I considered my options. The effort required to fix things of that magnitude would be enormous. The only alternative would be to replace the images and totally start from scratch with this character. It seemed an impossible choice. I had spent so long finding this series of images; how could I just let them go now and find new ones? It made more sense to work with my existing images; however long it took.

Somewhere over my shoulder, I heard Tabico whispering sage advice.

In a true moment of inspiration (as in the thought lept into my mind fully formed), it occurred to me that I had a set of pics I’d been saving for a rainy day that might work with just a little photoshoppery. I did a few quick tests…there was a heartbeat here! I got to work and here a few short hours later…well I’m back where I started. But it was a necessary detour and really the only choices were scrap the whole project, spend another week just fixing my mis-matched images, or take an evening to retrace my steps a little (but only a little).

In the end, I’m happy with the outcome and happy with myself for not letting my perfectionism throw a wrench in the whole affair. For a person like me, that’s a profound thing. I’ve quit more things in my life than I’ve finished; all because I felt some shame that it didn’t represent my best effort. I’m really happy to have not let that happen here.

The compromise I made will have consequences; the new model is such a stark departure from how I had intended the character to look, I’m going to have to write my way around her appearance. But, and this just occurred to me this moment, that’s just opens up another opportunity to be creative; why would I cheat myself out of that?

Fitting the Pieces Together

August 4, 2010

grid_previewWelcome back dear reader. As we move into August, I am juggling more freelance work than I can shake a stick at, and yet, somehow, I’m also making measurable progress on the animated manip project I’ve been telling you about. So, I’m back with another quick tease of my latest venture and a little peek behind the curtain at the process of putting it together.

As I’ve hinted at previously, this new manip is quite complex. In the past, I’ve done plenty of photoshopping in order to make elements fit together the way I need. Once or twice I’ve even pulled a character out of a photo and dropped them into an entirely new background. However, in order to really achieve what I want with this new manip, I’ve had to go a step further and create an environment from scratch.

As you can see in the teaser image above, I’ve completely removed the original background from behind my subject. The next step is to place her in a virtual set created in 3D and set up my virtual camera to recreate the perspective from the original photo. I’ve got some temporary grid walls standing in for the background so you can’t see them, but I also have to use virtual lights so the new background I’m creating will match the direction and quality of light that’s hitting the subject.

The immediate goal that I’ve been working to achieve has been getting the virtual set created and integrated with a 3D model that will be visible in several frames. As a proof-of-concept, I’ve selected one panel from the series and completed a full set up with camera and lights just to verify that everything I’m planning to do will work properly. I’m very pleased to tell you that I crossed that milestone this evening and am now ready to proceed, full steam ahead.

From here, I have to create similar set ups (camera, lights, etc) within my virtual set for each of the panels in the series. Once that’s finished, the work shifts to masking all the subject’s poses from my source pics to drop her into the virtual set. Finally, I integrate the animations that I mentioned previously and tackle the detail work, special fx, etc; then, finally, write the caption for each frame and drop those into the completed panels.

Its still to early to give you any idea of a release window, but things are really moving under their own power now. I’ve crossed the two biggest hurdles in the whole process and from here on out its just using the assets I’ve created to start fitting all the pieces together. For now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief glimpse behind the scenes and I’ll see you again with another update.

Progress at Last

July 7, 2010

tile_colorWelcome back faithful reader. Last time I teased you with an image and the news I was working on a new manip. I’m practically jubilant at the moment having just overcome a major hurdle to the project. Allow me to explain…as I said last time, this new series is an animated manip and the particular animation(s) I had in mind are not especially easy.

Again, it all comes back to this geometric design that I showed you last time (and which I now unveil in all its full-color glory!); a person with a better grasp of programming or mathematics would probably breeze through it in an afternoon, but alas that person is not I. So, I have had this major hurdle out in front of me for several months now and frankly I didn’t even want to get started because I knew how much work it was going to be.

This week though, I was able to get caught up enough on other things to finally dedicate some time to it and although its taken three days of intense work, I’m happy to report this particular milestone is now in the ‘completed’ column. Now the manip itself isn’t done, but a very significant portion of the groundwork is; from here I move on to more traditional photoshopping and writing. Still no release date yet, too soon for that, but I’m motivated now and I tend to get impatient when I get that way.

So stay tuned for more and if my workload continues to cooperate, I may just have this thing finished before the summer is over.

Just a Little Tease

May 10, 2010

tile_template_maskGreetings faithful reader. Life these days is busy and breaking away to indulge this site isn’t always easy (though it is often on my mind). I find myself frustrated at not having adequate time to work on spicy manips, animation, and video but ‘real life’ duties must take priority. However, while my time is sparse, I have been able to chip away at a manip project I’ve had in the works for some time now. Its a multi-part animated manip not too unlike my last big outing: The Room.

I’m not ready to say more at this time, but I thought with a “I’m still alive” post, I might at least tickle your imagination with some abstract imagery that will factor into this manip in a big way. So, at this point you may have been asking yourself about the geometric construct pictured above; I can only say that it is the key to this new series. While I have had the story and base images for this manip series finalized for many months, the technical requirements of this image you see now have proven to be quite an undertaking. Perfectionist though I am, I’ve considered several times just going with a non-animated version to put it out there and be done with it.

But, we all know I love a challenge way to much to do that.

So, while that delays the final unveiling, I do think it will make the wait all the more worthwhile. I’ll tease you again sometime as I get a bit closer to completion; until then, know that I’m just as eager to share this with you fine folks as (I hope) you are to see it.

-Callidus

MC Erotica at the Mall

February 10, 2010

IMG_0196mcThe day after Christmas I found myself at the local mall with some friends who were anxious to spend several gift cards they had received during the holidays. There are many things I expect from a visit to the mall; pushy vendors of hand cream products, annoying people, and a full-blown mc-junkie on mannequin duty at the newest trendy fashion outlet.

Okay, I lied about that last one but it was a welcome surprise nonetheless. While my friends pretended it was completely natural (and the shoppers around us made sure I knew it wasn’t), I snapped a few photos of this delightful, tranced plastic lady. If the designer of this window display wasn’t thinking about a pocket watch or crystal swinging in front of her face I’ll eat shoes…or something.

IMG_0198mcI’m repeating myself a bit here, but the part of me that wishes I’d studied anthropology in college, can’t help but look at perfume ads,  fashion photography, and displays like this and wonder what it is about the mind control fetish that keeps it an unspoken yet consistent staple of media. Content that plays into fetishes concerning various parts of the female body are rampant. The last several years have seen latex-clad dommes and candid reference to D/s & BDSM used in television commercials to promote parental awareness and pistachio consumption. Yet, to me, it still feels as though people are quite reticent where the sexualization of hypnosis and mind control is concerned.

Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I want it to feel more present in mainstream media to alleviate some latent embarrassment at being turned on by an ‘odd’ fetish. Maybe I’m just biased. But maybe the person who designed this mannequin did so just for us; so we could wink at each other as we pass by; so we could share the silent joke that this display is far more lurid than the Victoria’s Secret counterpart next door.

In any case, it made the trip to the mall quite worthwhile; we’ll see if next year’s visit lives up to the precedent.