Callidus

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.

I really wanted to bring that idea to life in a more overt way so, I started doing some research to try and track down the source of the animation. I was lucky in that someone on Tumblr had tagged the photo with the title of the film it was taken from and after a bit more digging, I’d managed to find video of the scene in question.

After that, I did some work creating a looping animation which, ironically, did not include the drowsy eye-blinking of the original. The more I worked, the more taken I was with the notion of Sasha’s eyes being lidded, but constantly open and riveted to the hypnotic prop holding her attention.

And speaking of props, I descended into madness a bit with this piece. I really couldn’t decide what sort of prop to use. I originally created a nice swinging crystal for the hypnotic focus but I couldn’t shake the idea that a translucent brainwashing visor would also be quite striking. So, in the true spirit of overkill, I ended up doing both.

What’s interesting is that I first thought I’d leave the caption the same and write it such that it would work for either prop. However, I quickly realized that I’d have much more fun writing two completely different story-lines for each animation…and it turns out I was right. I loved the smoking-to-cure hypnosis twist on the former and the (unsurprisingly) trilby-inspired internal drama of the latter.

I’m also quite proud of the scratch-built brainwashing visor. I didn’t have any stock images of sufficient resolution to drop in so I had to just create something to fit and I’m very, very happy with how that turned out. I also though the headphones and cables turned out pretty well…which hasn’t always been the case in the past.

The last piece is another project-of-opportunity in that I thought the source image was just perfect for some kind of ‘wicked therapy’ story. The large chaise would let me drop in whatever or whomever I needed to in the background. I ended up recycling the latex-clad Domme from my banner animation as I thought the sleek, black attire would contrast well with the blonde subject and soft-feeling room.

On a final note, I’ve been playing with some embed options that I’d appreciate some feedback on. I’ve long been trying to find a true cross-platform way of sharing animations that would work on mobile devices and would be much smaller in file-size than my older Flash animations.

I’ve hit upon the practice of posting a static jpg, an embedded looping video, and an animated GIF for each image. I’m hoping that this will allow everyone, no matter what device or platform they’re on, to view and save any animation. Please let me know how this method works for you.

That’s it for me. Happy new year, thank you for stopping by and, as always, your comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome.