Earning a Name

Did you earn your name?

If you haven't read them yet, you really need to head over to the Haven and read Mistress Simone's recent caps "The Glamour Games".  They are all there now, or you can wait as she is posting one each day to her blog.  She even included me in this wonderful series of caps.

As if getting included in a multi part series from Simone wasn't wonderful enough, she also made a stand alone cap for me that was just pure wonderful.  So I knew that I wanted to make something special for her return caps.

When I went to fuskator to look for images, I quickly keyed onto this series.   First, its from one of my favorite sites.. X-Art.  They make sets that are both 'dirty' and wonderfully photographed.   I've used enough of their sets now that I often find myself recognizing them before I even see their watermark.  If you love beautiful erotica, then head over to their site.  It is so worth it!

Back to the cap... so I found these images, and loved the idea of a slave talking to her Mistress.  I picked out the image in the last panel and started to write.  I realized quickly that I had a couple problems.  First, I was writing out a longer story than I initially intended.  Second, the dialog format that I was using wasn't going to be the easiest to format.  I would have to distinguish between the voices, and some of the lines were just to short.

As I sat back and considered these issues (as well as where the story was going), I recalled a conversation I had had with Simone recently.  She commented on my newer style used in "Evie's Fantasy" and "For you Baby".  At first I wasn't aware of what she was talking about because of the way she refered to them.  But I have to admit that her term is now firmly stuck in my head, and will be how I refer to this style going forward.  Kinetic Text.

I figured I could use that style with this cap, and just make it a series.  I had about 15 images to use, so I went ahead and finished writing the story.  But I came across another problem when I started to input the text... there was a LOT of text to fit into this style.  You see in my two previous tries at this, I wrote the story inside the cap... so I just utilized what space was available and got a single point across in each panel.  But this time... well I had the slave character going on some longer descriptive paragraphs.

I MIGHT be able to fit it in.. but I would almost certainly need more than 15 panels.  But as I was unwilling to give up that easily, I started playing around.  I realized I could combine this style with a more standard 'text in a text box' format.  I re-read what I had written, and saw that the 'Mistress' voice never spoke in long sentences.  In fact most of her character is developed in the slaves telling of their past.

So I started working and playing and fidgeting and got four panels done.  I was still a little worried though, as I didn't know if it really worked.  And I would hate to deliver a return cap that didn't hit on all cylinders.  Thankfully smitty was online, and willing to give the first few panels a once over.  He gave it a positive review and that set my mind at ease.  At least at ease enough to finish putting it together.

But as I neared the end I saw another problem.  My first thought was to make this for Mistress Simone's 'Chloe' persona.  I had made a cap for 'Simone', and even made one for both 'Simone' and 'Chloe' together, but hadn't yet made one for just Chloe.  The problem though is that I was writing the Mistress character with a voice that I associate with Mistress Simone's 'Simone' character.

So I had to sit back and consider that some more.  I actually bounced an early idea off of smitty.... I could post the first few panels without mentioning either name.  I would then have Simone read it, and tell me if she wanted this to be a 'Simone' or a 'Chloe' cap.   But after a bit more thought I dumped that idea.  It just didn't feel right to put that onto Simone.  It's like having the birthday girl make her own birthday cake.

So instead I asked her before she could see any of it.  I just simply asked which she would rather have... a Simone cap (without photos of Simone), or a Chloe cap.  After talking it over she decided on Simone.  As this was now about Mistress Simone playing with a slave, I named the slave.. me.  Hey... I put myself in as a guy often enough!

The Kinetic Text format normally doesn't require much touch up.  It's mostly just reading it over and over a few times to make sure there aren't to many typos.  And in this case that was actually easier because I pre-wrote this in Word.  But about halfway through it I changed something.  Wanting to make even more of an emphasis on the difference between the Mistress' strong confident voice and the slave's quiet meek voice I decided to make the Mistresses font all caps.  Thankfully that was as easy as highlighting all the text, and pressing a button in Photoshop.  But I also decided to make all of the slaves letters lower case (except for 'Mistress').

Sadly there isn't a button for that in photoshop, so I had to go in and manually change all the caps into lower case.  Once that was done, I also had to go through and redraw each text box.  You see while making the design I just copy the text box layer over for each now iteration of it, and then resize it as I need it.  But when you take a perfectly drawn box and resize it 24 times, it gets sloppier and sloppier each time.  At least the sizes were all correct... so all I had to do was pull out four guides (one per side) and select the area inbetween the guides.  Fill in that space, make its opacity match the previous version (49% opacity if you are curious), and then delete the previous text box layer.

Neither task was hard.. but doing it so many times over and over was rather tedious.

I think in future attempts at the Kinetic style I'll have to stick to the original idea of writing out each panel as they come up.  I know I could have changed the text to fit better while designing it... make it flow better... but I just didn't.  I had spent so much time writing the story that I didn't want to risk ruining what I thought was rather good already.  But looking at the last penal.. I could have made the last words from the Mistress more interesting. Instead of "You have truly come a very long way, and you have earned your slave name.  You will forever be my pretty slave... Caitlyn"  I could have written that as "You've come a long way... Caitlyn".

That differnce would have freed me up to be more creative with the layout of the text.  Maybe making 'Caitlyn' much bigger, and then lining the other text up around it, instead of three similarly sized lines.   But.. live and learn.  I'm obviously still working on how this Kinetic Text style will work, and I still think I've got a cap here that Mistress Simone will like.

And having her like this is the most important thing.