Blog – Page 18 – Callidus

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

Tabico 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

Welcome 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

Welcome 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

Greetings 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

The 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.

I’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.

Dreams

January 20, 2010

I don’t have that many mind-control dreams (and I typically do remember my dreams), maybe three or four in my adult life. Even then, its usually a small facet of something else going on. Last night though, I had probably the most overt mc dream I can remember. I had come across a picture archive last night and found a particularly interesting set featuring a domme in a black leather trench coat with matching opera gloves . I saved the pics in question just before I went to sleep and as I was drifting off, I was thinking how much I wish Alina were still here to share them with…she would have gotten quite a kick out of them.

My memory of the dream picks up post-coitus. The leather-clad domme from the photos took off her trench coat and told me to put it on. She said she had something she wanted to show me downstairs. As happens often in my dreams I’m seeing myself in the third person, my body walking around with ‘me’ trailing behind. What’s odd is that my body never bothered to get dressed and ‘I’m’ the one wearing the trench coat. So both of me get on an elevator and go down (typical right?) to the basement.

In stark contrast to the large manor upstairs, the basement is abuzz with people in white lab coats filtering in and out of rooms into a small hallway. I suddenly feel very meek and submissive; lowering my head and avoiding eye contact. One of the lab coat people sees me and gets very interested. He leads me to a room at the end of the hall. When we enter, I’ve lost track of my body and its just ‘me’ who goes inside. Like the hallway there’s a number of the lab coat people inside a classroom. A couple dozen people sit in front of laptops in the rows of tables and chairs that fill the room. I’m directed to a seat at the front.

I sit down and headphones are placed on me; I’m told to listen to the music; I know it has subliminal commends embedded within. I listen. I don’t like the music; fucking techno. I’m disappointed there’s nothing on the laptop screen to look at, just the music player. After a minute or two I don’t care anymore, its like the music isn’t even there, just this throbbing wash of sound. I stay that way for little while, floating. Then, the headphones are being pulled off me by a real-life friend (who has, coincidentally, just instant messaged me as I write this; weird). I’m suddenly aware I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting there; it feels much longer than I’m aware of.

I sense there’s more I’m supposed to listen to; something my friend is sparing me from. I stand up and my body feels impossibly heavy; I was sitting in front of the laptop a very long time. My head feels strange, like my brain is congested. I walk towards the door of the classroom. I focus on the door handle and suddenly my vision explodes with line after line of repeating text telling me I’m obedient to Goddess, must serve Goddess, and the like. Its all written in the font I do my manip captions in. I have an overwhelming urge to return to the laptop and put the headphones back on. I stand frozen in place trying to decide what to do and then…I wake up.

Waiting for Azreal

August 21, 2009

No, not that Azreal, I’m thinking more Kevin Smith’s revisionist variety: Inspiration. I want to work on something and I really can’t find anything that’s speaking to me. I’ve got a huge folder of ‘To Do’ images and in the past I’ve just made myself crank something out. The problem is that, usually, the resulting manip sucks; big time.

So I find myself in the dilemma of really wanting to write a post but having nothing to write about; wanting to work on a pic but having nothing finished to show you. So, as John Lennon once did, I’m going to take my lack of inspiration and try to use that as a backdoor to creating something. Bear in mind, its not going to be nearly as fun to listen to and in all likelihood will not include one of the greatest guitar solos ever played on a Fender Stratocaster…but the effort will be equally as sincere.

Today, I thought I’d give you a peak behind the curtain at my process; what goes in on my mind as I look at a pic and the (often slow) development of an idea to a finished manip. Ready?

The pic linked above is one of hundreds (maybe thousands) of images I’ve saved on a whim. Often I see something and I know exactly what it could be; other times I just have a sense that there’s a workable idea somewhere and save it in case inspiration strikes. Here, I found the image to be quite striking and dramatic; erotic but not overtly explicit. I love black-and-white photography and so, for me, this pic already has a special quality owing to that. But there’s more here and the longer I look, the more I see.

Congratulations Tera

August 11, 2009

In the event you don’t know, my friend Tera is quite a remarkable lady. Last week, she crossed quite a milestone: 40,000 posts at the Hypnopics Collective. While my own efforts aren’t quite as impressive as the manip she made to commemorate the occasion, I thought I’d put together a little something to help celebrate the event.

The source pic I found recently, during a particularly fruitful day of scouring for images. I didn’t know quite what to do at first, but a little succubi inspiration was all it took to get me going on the image. The story, I wrote this evening while tinkering with the last few aesthetic details. A bit wordy perhaps, but I never seem to be as pithy as I’d like to be.

Besides, its not about me, its about Tera: the woman who’s far too humble to acknowledge what a cornerstone of the mind control community she really is. Tera: who whips htaccess files in to submission and bends php to her will (and probably looks quite saucy doing it <wink>). Tera: who, I am honored to say, is my friend.

<big hug>
Congratulations Devil Woman.

Callidus

Mind Control Fetish Art