I found some forgotten old sets from the first run of SilkSoles.com and will be uploading them every Sunday, one set a week until we run out again. Hooray!
Many thanks to the member who asked what had happened to the Petra Morgan banana set and a few others from the first run of the site- a bit of detective work turned up a directory of old Silk Soles sets I'd forgotten about. So I'm uploading them for you all to enjoy!
Continue Reading →Hi All,
If you are in the appropriate hemisphere, I hope you’ve just got back after a long and pleasant summer holiday, refreshed and ready to go to work.
We’ve actually just got back from a very intense few weeks of shooting, so I’m planning to have a few days off to recover. But I think you’ll agree our “summer holidays” were very productive when you see some of the things we got up to!
In the last few weeks we’ve had Hannah Claydon back for three days of shooting, worked with new (to us) models Katie Thornton, Samantha Bentley and Jenny Smith, run a tutorial for a lovely photographer from the USA who is just starting out making his own site, had a week away in Spain shooting with the gorgeous Natalia Forrest, had a couple of days shooting with just Ariel and me, and another with our kinky neighbour Zoe Page, then three days with the ever-cheery Penny Lee including shooting the outdoor scenes for new Elegance Studios video Pony Girl 3, again sponsored by the lovely custom video chap who helped us fund and shoot the first two parts, and ably assisted by our other kinky neighbour, Michael Stamp. It’s been a busy summer!
Here are just a few samples from some of those shoots to give you a taste of what’s coming your way on SilkSoles.com, RestrainedElegance.com and EleganceStudios.com this autumn!
Cheers, Hywel and Ariel
Hi Everyone,
Bit of an experiment today with a humiliation video that doesn't have bondage in it. I'd be very interested to know what you think. RE is a bondage site, but Ariel and I thought this pure humiliation idea was very cool. What do you reckon? It is ages since we shot a more experimental BDSM film without any bondage in it. Did you like it?
I'll take the opportunity to reassure nervous types that we'll only ever shoot this sort of thing occasionally. What do you think? It is a good idea to cast our net a bit wider once or twice a year?
Continue Reading →Oh, LOL. Ariel has been chasing up an idiot who has been posting our pirated stuff around and managed to get a response from him on Twitter. This is what he said:
“Dear Ariel usually i don’t remove any content but you are one of my top favorite models. i like your beautiful face i respect you and i will remove your content but we need a deal. i will remove your content and you give me a free account on all of your websites.”
I’m sure most of you can immediately seen the looniness of this. But I’m a serious-minded chap and I can’t resist the urge to explain just in case anyone out there genuinely doesn’t get it.
Our websites are a traditional small business, an artisan cottage industry. We’re almost exactly the same as a small local bakery producing hand-baked cakes. Like the bakery, we pay for our ingredients. We buy our flour and sugar and jam and fruit (pay our models and crew, buy ropes, handcuffs, gags), we have to have premises to work and we pay our gas and electric bills to run the ovens… and we had to buy the big ovens as well in a great big expense (buying the cameras and lights). We have to pay our accountant to help us keep track of everything so we can pay our taxes, and all of this is funded by kind customers buying one cupcake at a time.
Imagine you are the bakery. One day you find someone who has stolen a shed-load of your cupcakes sitting on the kerb outside the bakery giving them away to your prospective customers. When asked to stop, their response is to say that they will, but only if you give them all the cupcakes they want for nothing. And so they don’t trouble you, they ask for a key to the bakery so they can drop in and take free cupcakes any time they feel like it.
They are even putting people off from coming and looking in your shop window, so your potential customers don’t even find out the other great things you have to offer- like custard slices, the weekly pudding club, the tea and coffee mornings to help local good causes, the community that they could be joining that you’ve worked for a decade to build up around your bakery. Because of course people will be tempted by the free cupcakes from the thief on the street- so tempted they might not ever make it past him to your bakery.
The thief will even complain how much WORK it is for them, how long they’ve spent collecting your stolen cupcakes. They’ll get very angry with other thieves who steal cupcakes from their stolen pile and set up in the next door pitch on the street. They’ll say how they’ve taken lots of effort to remove your pretty “Ariel’s bakery” cupcake boxes and shove the cupcakes into their own shoddy, stolen boxes. (Stretching the analogy a bit, but that’s what cropping the URL from our images does).
They even whine that they are doing you a SERVICE and that you should be grateful that they have chosen to steal YOUR cupcakes, not the cupcakes from the big supermarket down the road, that you’ll somehow benefit from their industriousness when they give your stolen cupcakes away to any even slightly hungry person who walks within five blocks of your shop. After all, they personally are a huge fan of your cupcakes. When they eat a stolen cupcake, it is ALWAYS one of yours.
What would you say to the cupcake thief sitting on your doorstep? Would you give them the key to the bakery so they can help themselves to freebies?
Exactly.
That’s why we occasionally get the urge to shout at these people “BUT THEY ARE MY FUCKING CUPCAKES YOU FUCKING BANDIT! I know this because I made them with my own two hands. You didn’t make them, not one little bit. YOU ARE STEALING *MY* FUCKING CUPCAKES!”
Every photograph we make costs us money to make- an appreciable amount of money. About the same as a cupcake from a local bakery, actually.
Let that sink in for a moment. Every single photograph we make costs about the same as a cupcake from a local bakery. So a photoset is like a whole catering pack of cupcakes.
The only difference between us and the bakery, business-wise, is that the bakery can only sell an individual cup-cake once, whereas we can sell multiple identical copies of a photograph (which is what happens when you download one- you’re getting a copy of the photograph identical in every way to the original on the website).
These copies cost substantially less than the original photograph costs to make. They’re not entirely free because we have to pay bandwidth charges- a single photo costs fractions of a cent when someone downloads it. That cost is so small that you can find web hosts who cover those costs for you in exchange for selling adverts. It is like the cupcake thief covering the cost of his petrol to drive to your shop every day by handing out leaflets advertising other local businesses (including some of your less-scrupulous competitors). And it doesn’t cover the actual cost of making the photograph- the models, the lights, the camera, the bills.
We can afford to charge significantly less per photo than the bakery can charge per cupcake, which is why website memberships give you 50,000 photos for a $40.
But this relies on enough people buying the photos to cover the “price of a cupcake” amount of money it costs us to make EACH AND EVERY ONE of those 50,000 photos in the first place. So long as hundreds of people are kind and honest enough to buy the photos, everyone wins- the creators can afford to make more photos, and the buyers can benefit from the low cost of each individual photo.
Dear Mr. Pirate. I have an alternative deal for you. Why don’t you buy a camera, some lights, some bondage gear, hire a studio, a rigger and a model (all at your own expense) and shoot some photos yourself? Then you can give them to us to use on our site. Or give them away for free. Whatever the hell you like, because those photos are yours and you paid for them. Properly paid for them- covered the costs of making them.
Or hire Ariel and me to shoot some for you, our rates are very reasonable considering what we provide. We’ll send you the photosets and you can do whatever you like with them- post them anywhere. We’ll see how you feel about that when you’ve actually paid the real cost of making them.
P.S. The same applies to video, of course. Costs are a cupcake every few seconds of footage.
Hi Everyone,
We've just started shooting a new round of tutorial videos, drop by on the forum thread to let us know of anything you'd particularly like us to see.
How to handle stills in post production, doing the colour correction and other tweaks that give shots the final polish is a very popular suggestion. I've just shot one on focal length choices and will do one of depth of field and aperture choices as well soon too.
Are there tutorials you'd like to see on the bondage, rigging or modelling sides?
What about the video side? Is there any interest in a video showing how and why we do the colour grading for our films? It's the same process as stills in some ways but the tools are rather different, would you like me to cover the basics of how I approach it in a tutorial video?
Cheers, Hywel & Ariel
Continue Reading →This is just a brief post to explain why there are user interface and layout changes going on at Restrained Elegance, especially on the free preview area.
As you've probably heard, the UK has a strict new censorship regime. Well, we just received a tap on the shoulder from the censor. I can't say too much more publicly at the moment, except to say that we are taking legal advice. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the changes on the site.
It's not all doom and gloom- I'm going to take the opportunity to roll out a minor facelift to bring the site up to date and to make the browsing experience better on a range of devices like mobile phones.
Please bear with us, and we will be more forthcoming about exactly what's happening when we've finished legal consultations and we're further along the process. We are NOT going away. We are proud of our silly little website and our silly little community of photographers, film-makers, models, bondage enthusiasts and fans and we are going to do everything in our power to preserve our online community.
Continue Reading →Hi Everyone!
Very excited to announce that online registration is now open for the British Fetish Film Festival! The event is being held on 27th & 28th February 2015 in Welshpool, Powys, Wales, UK.
CLICK HERE for full event details and online registration via PayPal.
Continue Reading →You’ve probably noticed some hand-wringing about the rights and wrongs of using real-world inspiration for our BDSM stories. I’m probably a bit hyper-sensitive at the moment, as the UK authorities have placed considerable restrictions on some aspects of BDSM art. If I’m going to stand up for my work, I want to make sure I feel that I am on defensible ground, morally. Here are a few more thoughts about that.
As you’ll see from our stories, inspiration for our bondage and BDSM games can come from many places. One of those places is the real world, from events which in and of themselves were horrible.
And as you’ll also see from the “Hywel’s notes” attached to many of those stories, I often wonder whether it is OK to do that. It’s good to wonder, to cross-check ones thoughts and moral choices and make sure one continues to be happy with what one is doing, but I’m aware I’m worrying about it a lot more than usual just at the moment. I guess I want to make sure of my moral grounds in my own head in preparation for possibly having to defend our work.
I’ve just typed up a story for January which is a perfect example- an aristocratic French noble tied up by a mob led by her own servants during the revolution.
In my opinion there’s no black and white for something as messy and bloody as a revolution, but as revolutions go, the revolt against the feudal system in the late 18th Century was one of the more necessary ones. There were doubtless nice people and nasty people on both sides, bad stuff was done by people on both sides, and it would be wrong to make too light of that because real people died and that’s no laughing matter.
But equally comedy has long recognised there’s a rich vein of inspiration to be mined in the French revolution: Blackadder, Mel Brooks and the Carry On team just for starters. The French aristocracy was SO decadent that it lends itself to farce. And also to BDSM- check out the stylings of Eyes Wide Shut and the Story of O and tell me that they’re not drawing inspiration from that time.
Ariel and I are introverted and introspective by nature and we can’t help wondering about these things. Ariel has a note pinned to her board reminding her to ask “is this desirable behaviour in a human being?” We talk about this stuff a lot, especially when it comes to BDSM. Both of us were troubled by the moral implications as being kinky as teenagers, and still feel the need to wonder and cross-check that we feel OK with what we’re doing.
As always it boils down to play, to intention and to personal taste.
To play: because it is vital to bear in mind that BDSM is a consensual game, for fun, played by responsible adults. The community has evolved things like safewords to make sure that the line between play and reality can be blurred for experience during a scene but is kept there in absolutely sharp focus by the existence of the safeword to immediately snap everyone back out of the game. Many other games have a stop signal too- like a referee’s whistle.
To intention. It is possible to place so much burden on oneself for always being moral and upright that one can no longer take any pleasure from anything without feeling guilty. It’s not actually possible to be alive without causing consequences- negative or positive. (Even vegetarians have to eat, which might be a bit of a bugger for a plant killed in the process). But intention counts. Asking a married gay male couple which one is the husband and which is the wife is different if the question comes in all innocence from a child as opposed to being asked with venom by a bigot who in insisting on making life difficult for the couple in question.
To personal taste. For most kinksters this sort of thing isn’t much of an issue. It is different for us as we make a living from transforming our personal tastes into art for other people to read, watch and enjoy. If you and your partner(s) want to dress up in school uniforms in private, that’s a matter for you and only you.
It is a bit different for us because we share what we think. The inspiration for every story we feature comes from me, or from Ariel, from the model, from a member of the site or from a friend helping at the shoot- but it is personal taste laid out for the whole world potentially to see. I guess that’s why we’re a bit nervous about it sometimes. I don’t want to give uncharitable people a stick to beat us with, but even more so I don’t want to make charitable people feel like we have done something immoral or distasteful – at least not without thinking about it.
Of course, we won’t always agree. I disagree with the poster some while ago who considered a white girl in a kimono to be distasteful. I am more comfortable drawing on things which happened a long time ago for inspiration than things which happened in living memory, but I know that this is just personal taste. Viking raids were probably every bit as horrible for the victims as the events of World War Two, but I’m more comfortable making silly little stories making light of the vikings.
Anyway, I hope my frequent soul-searching on “Hywel’s notes” isn’t too annoying. I think it is good to wonder about the probity of one’s work and keep challenging oneself.
Hopefully once the period of examination by the UK authorities is over I’ll be able to concentrate more on the playing and having fun with the ideas and less with the soul-searching again! I’m looking forward to it, as if I’m honest it has had a bit of an inhibitory effect since we got the tap on the shoulder from the censors. I’m really looking forward to feeling the inspiration flow and just having fun with it all again!
Hi All,
On 1st January 2015 I set myself a project: document the changing seasons on the top of Plynlimon, a mountain local to me in the Cambrian range in mid-Wales.
I thought I’d try doing a video 360 degree panorama every month through the year. It sorta ballooned into a 12-month video diary come visual poem about the mountain.
If you have 20 minutes and feel like a bit of a chill-out and relax, please take a look and let me know what you think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lceUIPvaDVs
I started with a wobbly mini plastic tripod on top of the trig point; by the end of the year I was hauling the biggest tripod Gitzo would sell me plus a fluid head plus a motorized pan platform up the damn mountain to get some decent footage. Turns out Plynlimon is WINDY and that’s why the footage is a bit shaky at the start! I know it is a little slow to get started too- I wanted to keep the purity of the 360 panorama concept for January, and besides I didn’t have any other footage from that month and didn’t want to cheat.
I know it is not BBC Nature Department quality but I had a lot of fun shooting it, including a few summer nights spent camping out at the top with the whole mountain to myself. Heaven! 
I could upload a higher-quality version here for RE members rather than living with the YouTube compression, let me know if you’d be interested.
Cheers, Hywel
Hi Everyone!
If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you might have noticed that Ariel and I have both been having lots of fun making custom videos.
We realised that with both of us offering customs, people are probably confused about what the difference is, given that we’re married to each other and live in the same house and everything. Then we realised that even we were a bit confused, too!
Who should you book your custom through? Ariel or Hywel?
So here is a post which we hope will clarify.
For simple videos starring Ariel recorded in one or two long rolling takes, get Ariel to shoot them via AskArielStudio.com.
For grander or more complicated films shot in cinematic style, contact Hywel via EleganceStudios.com.
Hywel shoots customs with the full apparatus of a RestrainedElegance.com shoot. That means using the RED digital cine camera which is capable of some absolutely awesome results (the same camera is used for Hollywood feature films shown at your local cinema).
Along with that goes stylish lighting, microphones on boom poles, and a very cinematic shooting style- lots of short takes, lots of camera angles, great closeups- very dramatic and stylish. It looks more like a film or a high-end TV drama than fetish videos you usually see on the web.
But this style is also slow to shoot, needs a fair bit of planning in advance and a lot of time in post-production to colour grade the RAW footage and edit the films together.
That means it is more expensive to shoot this way. It takes more people and more time. The results, as I hope you’ll agree, are stunning. But it takes time and therefore money to get there.
If necessary we’ll hire locations, hire other models, hire crew, buy specific bondage gear, or hire a van to take us all to the locations, and organise everything. We often shoot customs with models other than Ariel, too. On those days, Ariel’s usually doing the bondage rigging and Hywel is doing the camera work. Sometimes we have friends help out as extra crew too if the shoot is particularly demanding.
Hywel’s customs are designed for high-end productions for when you are after the very best quality bondage that anyone will make you on the web today. But they are not cheap.
Hywel can give you a break on the cost if the resulting film is suitable for him to put up on his websites. That means elegant, barefoot bondage (RestrainedElegance), bare foot fetish (SilkSoles), or long dramatic feature-length BDSM films like Pony Girl (Elegance Studios).
Hywel can shoot your film for you even if it doesn’t fit on one of the sites, but then he has to charge to cover his time, rather than making his money from selling the film afterwards. This adds even more to the costs and may stop it being a cost-effective option for you. But if you want the best quality that’s definitely the way to go.
If you want the best quality, especially if your custom video features elegant bondage, bare feet or a complicated story, Hywel is your best bet.
CLICK HERE for details at AskArielStudio.com.
Ariel shoots customs on a Panasonic bridge camera, with no boom mic, in whatever light happens to be around. She originally started shooting customs that she could film in her bedroom at home or in her hotel room when she is on tour.
She usually shoots them herself, which means that the style is more one-rolling-take with her talking to the camera rather than the very cinematic style which Hywel’s shoots use.
She also shoots bondage stuff (with Hywel stepping in to do the tying and the camera-work) or shoots with our kinky neighbour Zoe, but it is still shot by pointing her camera at the scene and hitting record.
This is a less labour-intensive and time-consuming style in which to shoot. So even where she does need to have other people involved to help out, the shoot can usually be done more quickly, with less pre-production planning and less post-production time as well.
As you’ll see from her Clips4Sale store, Ariel also sells the films afterwards sometimes.
But because her films are so much quicker to shoot, she can probably do you a better deal on a film which is more personal, too.
So if you want her to talk to camera as if talking to you, mentioning your name, or wearing a combination of clothes that wouldn’t sit well on Restrained Elegance, or stuff that Hywel’s sites just doesn’t cover… like Ariel dominating the camera, or pantyhose fetish, or brushing her hair… Ariel will be able to shoot it for you much more cheaply than Hywel.
If you want something more personal or specific which Ariel can shoot for you, and you don’t need the full cinematic treatment, Ariel is your best bet.
If you don’t know, you can always contact either one of us, describe your idea, and we’ll suggest which of us would be better to make it for you and how much it would cost
Myles Jackman (the UK’s foremost legal expert on matters of censorship, obscenity law and sexual freedom) has kindly agreed to come along to the British Fetish Film Festival!
He will be leading a session on Sunday morning and will talk about the recent abolition of ATVOD and the absorption of their role back into OFCOM (their parent regulator).
What does that mean for UK producers and film-makers? Myles will give us a talk and take questions at the festival.
There is still time to book, you can see the full program and sign up online right now: BritishFetishFilmFestival.com
We need to know number for catering THIS WEEK so don’t miss your chance to find out the latest developments!
Oh, and we’ll be having a great fun weekend shooting and editing a Bondage Film Noir fetish film together, and chilling out watching some great kinky films at the Festival too. Be entertained! Be informed! Be there!
Hi All,
Just a quickie to say that we'll reach the end of the archives on 24th April... we've run out of sets to re-post from the first incarnation of the site, so there's o more to put up. We've got loads of lovely brand new stuff coming your way, of course!
Hywel
Continue Reading →Today I heard that fellow UK bondage producer Dave Simpson recently took his own life because of the collapse of his business due to piracy. Rob from Rope dreams posted:
This message from one of his models was posted on a forum: "I was a close,close friend of Dave Simpson for several years. He was responsible for me being introduced to the wonderful world of bondage. Last year we lost touch, He drifted away from me and fell into a state of utter despair as a result of seeing his website business destroyed by the whole nature of the internet stealing everything he'd worked on. In the last months of knowing him I saw him slowly being torn apart by the thieves who thought it was OK to ruin his hard work. Last week I got a call from his sister who told me he had taken his own life. "
Nobody goes into the business of producing kink niche erotica for the money; any serious business-person would look at the potential market and go straight into mainstream porn instead. So you can guarantee that anyone running a little bondage website is doing it because it is their passion and their love. And that they are doing it as a tiny cottage industry on razor-thin margins. If there ever were days when bondage websites raked in millions, they're VERY long gone.
The world has changed in the 15-ish years since Dave Simpson started his sites (and I started mine). Censorship is certainly a threat, but the threat of endless fucking piracy in one we've just had to get used to. As I posted recently in my cupcake analogy, stealing porn isn't a victimless crime. And nor is watching stolen porn. If you like it, pay your fair share to the people who created it, so they can make some more.
So thank you again to everyone who has been kind enough to support the community of small cottage industries across the world that is the online bondage community. It is you, the honest people who have made it all possible.
And the pirates? You can fuck right off. R.I.P Dave Simpson.
Hywel
Continue Reading →I think there have been three major revolutions since I first launched Restrained Elegance back on 1st April 2001.
From 35 mm slide film to Canon D30, D60, 5D, 7D, Hasselblad H3D, Sony A7RII. Panasonic camcorder to DVX100 to HVX200 to dSLR to RED, iPhone, GoPro, GH4 and A7RII. The capabilities of cameras today are like science fiction from 2000 when I first shot for the site. RE would not have been possible without: high quality, low cost, fast turnaround, and the ability to control the images as a one man band and still produce five updates a week. Fortunately there’s nothing but upside to this. You can buy a camera today for a pittance that will shoot images which were beyond the reach of professional photographers and cinematographers fifteen years ago. Enjoy it- make something for yourself! Go buy a bottom end digital camera or make a movie on your phone.
In 2001, the web was the wild west, and open and exciting frontier. Now it is a utility, an infrastructure as vital as electricity (and considerably more so than fixed-line telephones, which will be gone in a generation).
This transformation hasn’t been the unreserved good thing that the digital camera revolution has, but the promise of the internet is still there. The information available on a smart phone in your pocket wandering around town is STAGGERING.
We’re just not sure how to handle it as a species. How to balance the positive side of individuals and small communities getting their voice online with the fact that abhorrent people will do likewise to further their ghastly aims and objectives too. How much surveillance can we live with? How much control are we willing to outsource to multi-nationals? How much access should the state to have us, and all our personal data, communications and meta-data? There’s not an obvious right answer. I hope I am open-minded enough to accept that my own left-wing but very libertarian views may not be the best compromise for the human race- although I do note that every time human beings come out the other side of authoritarian regimes, they try to bake the rights of the individual against the state and the powerful into law. Which suggests we’d better watch it when the authoritarians suddenly get HUGE amounts of data and personal insight into all of us.
The third revolution is most emphatically not a good thing. It’s the fight-back of the fundamentalists and traditionalists, especially when it comes to sexual matters. In 2001 when I launched Restrained Elegance it was a matter of quirky interest, at least in the liberal, middle-class, college-educated bubble I live in. Even the most reactionary right-wing press treated sexual matters as something of a joke back then. Right up until the point they decided to savage some poor public person for daring to have an ACTUAL sex life, rather than a Carry On Film slap and tickle, anyway.
Somehow, the Mary Whitehouse tendency got armed up and organised and pushed and pushed their agenda and used every scare tactic in the book until the whole idea of “sexual freedom of the individual” sounds a bit scary to modern ears. “Sexual freedom” oh doesn’t that mean
paedophiles and priests and celebrities and freaks and weirdos that AREN’T PEOPLE THEY ARE MONSTERS.
I profoundly hope that my analysis which follows will prove to be correct: I think the war is won. Generations have grown up with the internet and have seen EVERYTHING that has entered their heads to go looking. I doubt government will manage to put that genie back in the bottle, even if they go full Big Brother. My hope is that the kinky community are in the position now that the gay community were in back in the 1980’s. Under
attack from the conservatives, but an attack born of desperation, trying to turn back a tide that already turned.
Our niece is a film student. She knows what we do. She came to help out as an intern in her gap year. A few weeks ago she brought
her student film-maker team to make a mini-documentary about us. The film is excellent even though I say so myself (we hope to be able to
share it with you soon).
But the main thing I took away from the experience was how utterly unfazed a bunch of nineteen year olds were sitting in on a custom video shoot where I tied up Ariel and gagged her with a ball-gag over a pair of pantyhose over her head. How unfazed the removal men who moved us to our lovely weird house in Wales packing up the whips and chains and gags. How little the stocks on the landing bothered the alarm service guys who came to fix our burglar alarm last week. They find it funny, because it IS funny- a fun game we play. And that’s all. It isn’t a threat to our children or our pure Christian Aryan heritage.
There is a cultural war going on and victory isn’t certain. As Myles Jackman pointed out, one might say the same thing about the chemical generations. Most reasonably chilled out streetwise people from the sixties onwards know that not all illegal drugs are the same. The traditional mild forms of cannabis in particular may have some harm for vulnerable people but seem to be a damn site less harmful than other legal intoxicants, and have a clinically proven efficacy against some pretty shitty conditions. And yet the chemical generations have not managed to get it legalised. Indeed, the fear-and-flogging branch of our current government have already legislated to make everything with any sort of psycho-active effect illegal! (It’s being held up in implementation because even civil servants have figured out how hard to adjudicate that is). Woe betide the discoverer of the next coffee, or chocolate.
I didn’t mean this to turn into a self-pitying whine about censorship. But it is important that people like Restrained Elegance stand up and show that you can be into BDSM without being a freak, a weirdo, a danger, a criminal, a pervert. Kinky people are kinky, but still people the same as everyone else. Kinky teachers are not unfit to teach- any more than heterosexual married teachers or homosexual single teachers are unfit to teach.
The people who aren’t fit to teach are the ones who can’t distinguish right from wrong. Not the ones who like to tie up their partner for consensual fun every few weeks, any more than the ones who sometimes have a few too many glasses of wine with their partner every few months are unsuitable to ever stand in a classroom. You can be kinky and sane and safe.
I didn’t expect to have to fight this battle. I thought the internet and kinky websites and the growing acceptance of kink in society was a done deal. I’m a reluctant activist and I devoutly hope this will eventually go the hell away so we can just post kinky fun stuff.
So those are the revolutions. Of course in fifteen years there have been innumerable small changes, less revolution, more evolution. I wondered what the main ones I could think of might be.
I went back to my emails from the early days of the site. In 2002 I had four inboxes worth thinking about- a day email job one, a Restrained Elegance email one, a personal email one. The fourth was not strictly speaking an inbox but served much the same function: a Yahoo groups/clubs account. A lot of the interesting fetish-related discussions had moved there from Usenet, and I used to check and reply to messages there regularly.
Total number of emails on the RE plus personal inboxes: about 10 a day. I can’t consult my particle physics inbox any more (the accounts have long since been deleted) but my memory was of a similar amount. Of order of ten messages a day, covering University business and research and all the communications I needed to be part of as part of the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC. Yahoo traffic was the same order of magnitude: maybe ten messages per day. I’d say there were of order of 30 messages which someone had typed and specifically intended me to read.
Most required a small amount of action on my part, but not more than a few minutes to read through the information and possibly quickly reply.
Today I have six genuine email inboxes, but Twitter and twitter direct messages effectively two more. Facebook ditto. Purpleport for models and shoot stuff. The RE forum. Comments on my blog. Yahoo groups have more or less died, but I follow various technical forums to keep up to date about stuff, and sometimes reply to, so they count as inboxes, too. Fetlife. Texts on my phone.
So the number of inboxes has proliferated.
Furthermore, the number of messages has increased. On a typical day I now get over a hundred messages of direct personal relevance to me.
I’m not counting likes/shares/ats/mentions here, just things a fellow human being has typed intending for me to read it. Most still require only a small amount of action on my part, but there’s an order of magnitude more of them than there used to be from the website emails, and more inboxes to check. I was shocked when I worked that out just now. No wonder I have to keep tweeting about being behind on my emails. I have at least triple, and by some measures ten times the load I had in 2001.
Related is the fact that because I can check my emails in the middle of the night if I wake up and need a pee, I do. In 2001 I had to switch on the computer, dial up, download the emails. I could then read them at leisure.
Now most of my inboxes would push notify me on my phone if I let them.
Ariel and I call it the cycle of doom. Twitter -> Facebook -> Email -> Fetlife -> PurplePort -> Texts -> Twitter -> repeat. It now takes a positive effort of will to create enough time offline to function.
At least people have got a bit used to delays in replying so I don’t get “hey you haven’t replied yet what are you doing you are a crook I am calling the FBI you bastard” emails quite so often now. (When I get them, it is invariably from an American who clearly doesn’t realise that if you email me at 3 o’clock in the morning UK time you will NOT get a reply within the hour).
But this is a big change in the admin load for running the website and having a life in the 21st Century. It is genuinely harder to make clear air time to think about stuff. I’m fifteen years older, of course, which won’t be helping. But it was only when I went and did a count of typical messages per day that I realised that objectively the load is a lot higher it was in the early days.
When I started the site, the main way to get video content was still on video tape. Home-writable DVDs rose briefly but despite the better quality could never compete with the instant hit and uncensored nature of online video. Peter Ackworth flooded the web with free pictures to make his analysis that people will only pay for high-definition video and community into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Print magazines are dead in the erotica industry and are heading that way in the rest of the media too. Television has lost its monopoly, file sharing and pirate sites mean that all content creators are struggling to maintain any sort of business model in the internet age.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Whilst membership sites no longer bring in the money they did, it is still possible to launch a new site with energy and enthusiasm and bring in enough money to make it a very cheerful business. I think the “pay a little for a lot” model is still very attractive- personally, I love paying a small amount to access a huge amount of creative work from some photographer or model’s back catalogue!
What clearly has set the world alight is personal or bespoke service online. You can’t pirate an interactive experience, which is why webcam is huge.
But if you’ve ever tried to google your fave storyline idea for a bondage movie, you’ll find that for all the low-quality pirated crap out there, it’s simply not true that you can find anything you like for free on the internet.
If you like barefoot satin-clad blondes in elegant ballgowns tied and tortured, and you want to see a specific storyline, you’ll probably have more luck at the Restrained Elegance archives. But if you want to see your fantasy properly brought to life in detail, you simply will not find it pre-existing online.
And that’s why custom video has got so big. We noted it a couple of years ago at Fetishcon- pretty much every US producer we spoke to said that custom videos now financed all their shoots. You book the models and locations you need for the custom, cover the direct costs from the shoot fee you charge. If you’re really efficient you might be able to slip in an extra set or two for yourself at the end of the day, and put those up along with the customs on your membership site. The fees people are willing to pay aren’t always enough to pay the producer directly, so you’re usually working for free, but you can generate your own pay from selling the videos afterwards.
Customs are often be REALLY fun to shoot. Challenging, because you don’t have access to the scriptwriter on set to clarify questions, and obviously most commissioning customers aren’t professional scriptwriters. So it can be a tricky reading-between-the-lines guessing game. Shooting customs is a privilege- we get to see inside someone’s head, to their fantasies. Which are often imaginative and fun, at least if you have customers as fab as ours.
The only downside is that it can dilute your own vision, turn you into a cameraman rather than a writer/director/cameraman. I really hope there’s still room for us to shoot our own vision, and that people will still be willing to pay for it. Maybe we need to crowd-fund some of our more ambitious projects to get them off the ground? It is so hard to turn down hard cash to make customs to have enough time to devote to writing our own scripts!
But hell, that’s a really NICE problem to have. Too many people wanting us to make elegant and imaginative films for them? Yes, I think we’ll take that!
So what might the future have in store for Restrained Elegance?
We’ve certainly got some challenges. Censorship, changing spending patterns and administrative overload are just obstacles to overcome. The fact is that in fifteen years the site and you lovely people who follow it have given me the opportunity to bring out the pictures in my head for all to see, and have helped me find a gorgeous super-model wife and partner in kink, and a weird studio house in Wales as the cottage studio in our cottage industry.
The possibilities are endless! I’ve just bought an infrared spotlight and infrared full HD video camera, for next to nothing. We’ve got a dungeon which is closed off to external light. So the first big experiment in our sixteenth year is going to be to see what we can do with a genuinely sense-deprived Ariel in the dark.
We’ve got shoots booked in a fab urban apartment, a spacious and well-equipped dungeon, a uniquely lovely converted farm with sublime colour co-ordination, and an industrial/warehouse space. Those things tick off a few items from a list I never dreamed would have already had 4500+ ideas done and dusted on it.
We’ve got not just one or two but multiple long movie shoots coming up, funded by custom video sponsors which will make our Elegance Studios lineup much more active this year (and it is only the damn time pressure which has stopped me releasing a couple of ES films which are already mostly finished).
We’ve run a film festival and tutorials intend to do more. We’ve got several new people coming to help out on crew, broadening the RE crew family. Fifteen years ago I’d never have believed that the “crew” listing on RE would include fifty people, some of whom are friends and some of whom are even family.
I’ve not gone to volcanic islands or filmed a really long pirate extravaganza. Assuming the censors don’t totally screw us over, I really want to get back to Scandinavia soon and get some more of that amazing six hours a day of golden hour, fjords and mountains and trees and cool blue northern skies. I’d love to shoot more with Claudia from Falcieri designs. I’ve never really shot Steampunk bondage the way I’d like to. We’ve got mountains and lakes all around us now which we’ve only scratched the surface of as far as locations go. I’ve had a “business bitch” epic film in my head for ages which needs to be developed, and I’d really like to film a proper bondage romance, too.
With the huge sensitivity of modern digital cameras, there are lighting situations to be explored that you’d have had to be Hollywood to simulate fifteen years ago. Now we can just shoot them for real. I’m about to book a new round of shoots and there are some models I’m really excited to shoot for the first time- and I’m even more excited about spending a week on location with some of the muses who have inspired the site since the beginning. Ariel has so many dark and kinky fantasies to film that we’d need a staff of a hundred to even scratch the surface. There are future RE members we haven’t met yet who will inspire us and come with us on shoots, or drop us a line on the forum which sparks an idea which turns into some romantic bondage images we’d never have been able to imagine on our own… and which fifteen years ago we’d not have had the skill or resources to bring to life even if we’d had the vision.
It’s going to be a hell of a ride!
Hi All,
I was sad to hear that Fred Gunn, who had not one but two of his films shown at the British Fetish Film Festival, has decided to close down his video sites. The final straw was ATVOD/OFCOM and the spectre of censorship- a vivid example of the chilling effect that censorship has above and beyond the actual damage to people they censor.
He has very kindly decided to run a closing down sale, with all proceeds going to Backlash, the organisation which is fighting for our sexual freedoms in the UK.
Find out more on his blog post here: https://umd.net/forums/could-you-all-help-save-britai and check out the sites:
http://www.retropinuptease.com
Continue Reading →Hi Everyone,
For the next few months I will be offering a massive 50% discount on custom bondage videos… so long as it is a BAREFOOT bondage video. You can find out about our custom videos here.
So if you’d like to commission your own bespoke fantasy, filmed in stunning cinema quality, email me at webmaster@restrainedelegance.com today!
Here’s why…
Ahhh, suncream on sexy soles. So much more suggestive than actual foot jobs!
Faye Taylor
Website economics have changed since I started the site, and especially they have changed a lot since the financial crash in 2008.
Broadly speaking, fewer people are choosing website memberships than before. For a while one wonders if it is something we’re suddenly doing wrong- but from what I can gather from other webmasters, it’s pretty universal.
Casual viewers and those who just want a quick wank and don’t care about the quality go to the pirate sites and tube sites.
Fans are kind enough to still join, but as spending power still hasn’t got back to the pre-crash peak, everyone (including me) is a bit more parsimonious with their porn pound these days.
The thing which has saved websites is the rise of customs, especially custom videos. I was shocked to learn from US webmasters a couple of years ago at Fetishcon that customs were essentially the only thing keeping them in business: essentially all their productions were now customs.
It’s not at that level for us, but customs are becoming increasingly important in funding shoots for us too, especially on the video side. The economics are impossible to ignore: doing a custom shoot means that someone else pays the models and the shoot expenses. If we’re efficient on shoot days we can get some RE ideas of our own, shot effectively for free. So went the story from the US webmasters.
If we need to take our time getting customs right, we do so. That’s what we budget for. So we end up with a very polished and high production value custom video that we hope will really tick all the boxes for the kind customer who commissioned it. Because we take our time and do it right for the customer, we don’t always end up with time to shoot a barefoot bondage video at the end of a custom shoot day. It’s nice when we do, but I’ve realised I mustn’t bank on it.
The volume of those customs is currently such that it’s dominating the RE update schedule. Since the end of last year and the ATVOD tap on the shoulder, I’ve been scared off shooting too many self-funded old-school RE videos ourselves. I typically run RE with over a year’s worth of content on disk, to help ensure good variety and make sure we keep our unblemished 15 years never missed an update record intact.
I just couldn’t afford to spend tens of thousands of pounds shooting videos that I might not be able to sell.
So as a double whammy of financial incentive and the chilling effect of censorship, I have quite a lot of videos on disk but they are mostly customs.
And I would have no problem with that except for one thing: the custom video customers do not generally want bare feet. They do not have anything like the usual RE levels of barefoot bondage, nor do they have the variety of models we usually shoot (because a lot of people love Ariel in customs and have commissioned to shoot LOTS). So at least for the next few months while we ramp up other shoots again I’m left with an unusual and unrepresentative selection of videos to put up for you.
Who knew that custom video people wouldn’t want barefoot bondage so much? But I have customs with high heels, with ballet slippers, with boots, with stockings, with pantyhose, even one which has just come in with (shudder) socks. (They do get taken off in the end).
I’ve never quite known how many members are here specifically for the barefoot element which runs broad and deep through RE. But I know *I* am here specifically for the BAREFOOT bondage.
My question is- what should I do about this?
I have a few ideas but would be very grateful for your input.
As you’ll see, we have a bit of a “roadblock” of non-barefoot videos coming up in the very short term because we shut down all non-custom video production for a few months when ATVOD tapped us on the shoulder. I don’t want RE to turn into a “barefoot stills, non-barefoot video” site, even if that’s the direction the market forces us via custom commissions.
The first and most obvious thing to do is to go back to shooting more of our own ideas, and make all of those barefoot and play up the barefoot element, so at least the “value factor” of the barefoot videos goes up, even if not every video is barefoot. We are going to do this at our forthcoming shoots. But it is hard to balance this against the “whole shoot paid for” financial incentive of the customs.
Second thing- offer an incentive to people to shoot barefoot customs. So here we are- I’ll give you a 50% discount on any custom commissioned in the next few months which has a strong barefoot element to its storyline, or which offers the chance for plenty of quality barefoot bondage.
We’ve tried inserting barefoot sections at the end of shoes-based movies and making two edits, one for RE and one for customs, but that’s not really very satisfactory (feels like we might be shortchanging both- for example if the tie endurance is the limiting factor of how long the video can be).
Is there anything else you think I should be doing?
Do you, personally, care about barefoot vs. stockings vs. shoes? Are you liking the current (custom, not much barefoot) mix of videos better than the old 100% barefoot mix?
Cheers, Hywel
Hi Everyone!
I haven’t posted about this except from a few of self-pitying tweets because moaning about stuff publicly isn’t very attractive or interesting. But as it seems to be taking me a while to recover, I thought I’d better let you know what’s happening.
At the start of June I had a nasty bout of gastro-enteritis. Nothing too dramatic or serious, but I was totally out of action for two weeks, I didn’t eat for a week of that and lost over 7 kg body weight. Fortunately I had the stored fat to cope I took medical advice, all is well, I’m mostly recovered from the direct effects.
But it took a lot out of me, literally and figuratively, and there was a two week gap in my work schedule as well so I’m very behind.
It is taking a long time to build myself back up. My stamina in particular is lamentable right now. Ariel has been an absolute super-heroine in fielding a bunch of stuff I would normally have done, the most important being the longest and most complex custom bondage video shoot we’ve ever done which she stepped in to direct at the last moment, assisted by local camera-person and all around star Katie and our cast (Natalia Forrest and Zoe Page).
Yesterday I walked with Ariel and a visiting photographer through town to the castle, and by the time we got home I was wobbly and tired and needed a rest. It looks like it might take a while to get back to my normal mountain-walking form, since the castle walk is normally one I stride around in a lunch hour in the middle of a working day, not one that makes me have to go have a lie down afterwards.
Similarly, my endurance for shoot days, editing, and even just standing up is not what it was four weeks ago. Some days I’m managing two hours work, some days eight hours, but I’m currently incapable of the ten to twelve hour days I usually put in to catch up when I’ve got behind with stuff.
RE and Silk Soles updates are already done as far as end of July, but we have multiple multi-day shoots coming up and it might be a scramble to get August and September updates ready. We will – nothing has higher priority than keeping the RE and Silk Soles update schedule. I’ll hire extra helping hands to get through the shoots while I edit if need be, and the hell with the profit margin for the moment.
But some other stuff will have to go on the back burner while we prioritise the most important jobs that potentially impact the maximum number of our customers.
Specifically, emails and custom videos. Apart from the mega custom shoots, we were due to shoot a bunch of smaller videos, mostly with Ariel, in June and July. I’m very sorry but these will likely have to wait. I’ve not been feeling competent to rig, shoot and act in a film and do a good job (and indeed some days I’ve been so out of it that I’ve not even felt safe to rig bondage or drive a car at all). And if you are waiting for an email reply from me, please bear with me. It may be some weeks before I catch up.
So I’m sorry if I’ve gone quiet on you, or if we aren’t going to be able to deliver custom videos we hoped to shoot this month for a while. As I said, RE and Silk Soles updates are top priorities and I’m confident we’ll meet those obligations. And I’m definitely past the actual illness, it just may be a while before I’m fully recuperated. And in the meantime I’m not as productive as usual, so clearing the backlog may take several months.
Cheers, Hywel
Hi All,
Well, it’s been quite a week here in the UK. Politically, we’ve just shot ourselves in the knee-cap. It’s all a bit too depressing, so I wanted to post a few bits of good news.
OFCOM, the UK regulator, over-turned the ruling by the over-zealous and now abolished UK video on demand regulator, ATVOD, banning Pandora’s site Dreams of Spanking, which is now back online and accepting sign-ups again. YAAAAY!!!!
You can read her thoughts about it on her blog. We had a chat about it with another friend producer a couple of weekends ago and all admitted that getting the tap on the shoulder from the censorious dead hand of the state is more stifling of one’s kink and creativity than any of us had expected. We’re so glad Dreams is back! None of us know what the future holds for the censorship climate in the UK- given the political turmoil this week, nobody knows.
So we’ll just have to keep chipping away and putting our points logically and rationally and make sure that we are heard (even if they go ahead and do it anyway). To this end, I’m supporting Pandora’s Patreon campaign to support her advocacy- and if you want to help kink survive online in Britain, please chip in a little too if you can!
As I mentioned in my last post, I had a nasty attack of gastro-enteritis at the start of June which is taking a long time to get over. Yesterday I managed to walk up one the local hills- one of my fave local walks, around two hours round trip. This is much more than I managed last week, even if I was a bit tired and achy the next day. But OMG, progress! Very very happy!
Watch CINDERS trailer on YouTube
I’ve always liked computer games, from the first ones I played on Swansea University mainframe computer when I went in to see my Mum at work in the holidays through to modern extravaganzas. Having been ill in the last few weeks and needing some non-physical amusements, I played a few. I finally got through BioShock Infinite, which is OK- lovely visuals, intriguing if horrible racist 1900’s dystopia background, and some story.
Trouble is by the time I finished the game I felt like going and checking myself into a high-security prison for mass-murdering psychopaths. My word, but there was a lot of killing and gore and blood. And as far as I am aware, I got to make exactly one decision during the whole game that had much impact beyond the end of the scene.
So I went looking to see if there was a different sort of game out there, and discovered a whole new genre!
Parenthetically- I don’t mind the odd bit of violence in games. I just prefer a lot less of it than BioShock Infinite, which is why I don’t usually play first-person shooters. I really appreciate games like Thief where there’s at least an option to resolve things by less-lethal means when you can, or sandboxes where you can play the game with a less-murderous characters (Elder Scrolls games like Oblivion and Skyrim have good plot threads for stealthy characters, which require less slaughter than some other story paths).
A bit of a Googling and searching of Steam turning up the visual novel genre, which I’d never heard of. Apparently big in Japan, popular with female players, there’s a huge number of these things revolving around high schools and dating and a lot with pretty linear stories… but also some stuff that looked really interesting.
I like games where what I choose to do makes a difference through the game and to the game’s ending (which is why I like BioWare games very much). Add that to a non-violent storyline and GORGEOUS art-work and I settled on my first purchase of the genre: Cinders, a game by Polish indie development studio Moa Cube.
It takes a little getting used to. There’s a LOT of talking, quite a few decisions, and not much else. It’s like a Bioware game with all the running around and killing stuff and levelling up removed, and just the character interactions remaining. Since Mass Effect 2 is probably my favourite game of all time, I’m good with that Makes a change from a LOT of killing, a few conversations and a very small number of decisions, which is what the routine fantasy and sci-fi RPG genres favour.
It may or may not appeal to you- playing Cinderella and trying to get one over on her sisters, step-mother, get the guy or get the hell out of Dodge, trust the Fairy godmother or really not. But if it sounds even faintly intriguing, I’d really encourage you to give it a go. Have I mentioned how gob-smackingly beautiful the artwork is?
It’s not a long game- I got through it in one long-ish sitting. But it will bear re-playing, trying to achieve various different endings (I gather there may be “dead in a ditch” as one ending…). And the studio have another, larger game called Solstice which they just released, which I just bought and will start on once I have caught up on RE and SS stuff as I finish recuperating. The premise is really intriguing from the first scene, though.
Of course being nerdy introvert scientist Hywel, I had to look into visual novels more. I discovered a few game engines which look like they’d help a lot in setting one up. There’s an active community building them and sharing them, and a fair number commercially available.
Sad to say though it looks like MoaCube might not be making another soon. Well, unless we all go and buy Solstice and Cinders anyway!
Sounds like the indie games industry has hit the same market maturity issues as the porn industry. The studio head has blogged about how everything seems to have narrowed down onto Steam as a monopoly distribution channel, and how hard it can be to make a ripple with an indie game there. I hear that (try making a ripple with a single long, high-production-value movie on Clips4Sale if you don’t already have a fan base or channel in that genre).
And I hear the same thing from indies on the App store and musicians with online sales channels via iTunes and Spotify. All of these things have their wild west period, like membership websites did around 1997-2001, then settle into a small number of big players. At least the games guys don’t seem to have quite the industrial levels of piracy to contend with that porn does. (If you watch something on a tube site, know that it is 99% likely to be stolen. And the thief is making money pushing tacky adverts at your eyeballs while you watch someone else’s stolen work).
But still… I love the genre, and will be checking out more.
And better yet, even as polished and glorious a project as Cinders was made by a small team in a year and half… a few person-years of effort. That means it should be possible to do something interesting on a smaller and more modest scale in one’s spare time. There are some good tool-kits like Tyranobuilder and Ren’Py around to support it, too.
At this stage Ariel is probably rolling her eyes at me. We’re wildly over-committed, as the big work backlog following my illness shows. The last thing I should be doing is thinking of future projects, especially ones outside the core business. But what can the harm be in having a little play around with these tools in the odd hour before bed? After all I’ve got quite a head-start in terms of creating artwork and storylines… maybe a BDSM visual novel (well, let’s call it a visual short story) might be fun?
The mega-four-hour custom film we shot a few weeks ago is done! It’s the longest and most ambitious single project we’ve ever done, and it would totally have fallen apart without Ariel, Zoe, Natalia and cameraperson Katie.
I’ve still not decided 100% whether to put it up on Elegance Studios or serialise it for Restrained Elegance: it is a single story, and it kind-of sits as a companion story to Slave Auction and Pony Girl in some ways (the customer liked those films so much he wanted us to incorporate elements of those into the story for him).
But pragmatically distributing it as a single 9 GB MP4 file is going to break the downloads of anyone not on a fast internet connection, and any hiccup in the stream might see you back to square one. The shopping carts system isn’t really built for downloads that big. So I think serialising it on RE is the way to go: look out for it on the members’ area soon! It’s absolutely EPIC- Natalia Forrest sent as a secret agent into the depths of a slave-trading gang! Forced to learn how to be a perfect slave, how strip naked for her master or mistress, the positions a slave must adopt, how to talk dirty… and much, much more!
Just in time to shoot the SECOND film commissioned by the same customer this week! (Fortunately not quite such a gargantuan undertaking!) Should be fun!
All the best everyone!
Hywel
Hi Everyone!
We are going to be on the telly! UK Channel 4, 10 pm on Monday 11th July.
I’m hoping that a few newcomers will find us this way- if you’re one of them, hello and welcome!
For that reason I’ve temporarily revamped the site index page (as you may have seen on your way in) to make it easy for people to find our stuff that was featured on the show. I’ll probably leave it like that for a week or two.
Check out the show if you get chance! We saw a rough cut which was pretty good- we’re just hoping Channel 4 haven’t added their trademark sneering voiceover in the mean-time… I’m going to be watching the show from behind the sofa, under a duvet with the sound turned down!
All the best
Hywel and Joceline… who is also using this as a push to “come out” completely- she’s modelled under three modelling names her whole career (Joceline, Ariel Anderssen and Amelia-Jane Rutherford) and hasn’t exactly gone to huge lengths to keep anything secret or separate, and Ariel and Amelia have taken on lives of their own as characters. Hywel took the decision to always appear under his real name right from the start of running the site, whereas models traditionally have stage names to keep a bit of distance (mostly for safety from rabid fans, in all honesty). But still, it’s a bit of a scary step to finally be on TV as ourselves!
