A Bad Idea : A cartoonPMV
A while ago I started seeing video clips with a cartoon filter, like the one on the left. I liked these a lot, but I didn't know what had created them and I tried to get a similar effect using After Effect's cartoon filter. The results weren't good but I noodled about with making an animated cuckold cartoon. I didn't like the overall effect though and I abandoned it ... until ... I saw that the filter was from an app called prequel.
I downloaded it onto my phone and tried it on some clips. Very, very nice. The only problem was that it's only available on phones and I could find no equivalent plugin.
But i was so pleased with it that I started a new cuckold animated comic thing, painstakingly selecting clips. moving them to the phone, applying the filter, saving and moving them back.
But I really, really liked the effect.
To begin with, I made pretty basic 'pages'. When I was noodling around I'd tried to animate the frames themselves and that was (a) massively fiddly and (b) confusing to read. So I kept it pretty simple.
Initially, I'd made actual pages, which flipped over, but I abandoned this too, making parts more like scenes which moved the story along.
For the (very tropey) story - man visits domme, develops cucky fantasies, admits it all to his wife, turns out she's cucking him all along - I intercut the scenes with his wife with ones with Crystal Knight - the domme. For those, there are only clips of crystal staring down the viewer, usually full-screen.
But for the scenes with Kimber, I needed more than just sex. I had to have some talky scenes and ones where she interacts more-or-less normally. That was why I'd chosen Kimber, because I had several such scenes with her. In retrospect, although Kimber is lovely, if I was doing this again I'd go with one of the stars from MyWifeIsMyPornstar, ideally one who did a HouseWife 1 on 1. Allie Haze springs to mind.
That's not to diss Kimber, who is outstanding and amazingly pretty but I found myself hunting for more scenes rather than having to re-use the couple of minutes of footage I had.
Since I'd been concentrating so hard on getting clips and moments from the stock I had, I just let the story wander along as I usually do. Scene suggests text which suggests next scene and on and on. Being able to switch between Kimber and Crystal was great as I could make the story develop without having to make everything match up. Also, variety.
At the start I'd assumed all this would be silent, but as I moved into the sec scenes I felt it would be better to have those scenes with some kind of moaning sex from the actual scene. Which meant music for the rest. Obviously having dialog and lip movements match was impossible but I reckoned the viewer would be able to just ignore that. In any case, the text is mostly narration. But with the Crystal scenes - where she's playing a Domme, encouraging our hero to be a cuck, well, half of her stuff is exactly that. So it was too tempting to take some sections of her speech and incorporate them. I tried not to do this too directly, as I wouldn't be able to make it work for the whole story and then it would be confusing.
But adding sound was a new burden on editing and sine I hadn't done this from the start I had to go back and fill in more. Plus. while I'd just let some low-key techno be the background, if the sound was more of a thing, now I wanted to make sections match the mood of the piece, emphasise the impact of scenes and play more of a part like a PMV.
In truth though, the real difficulty was the text and video matching. text requires time to read before the next piece appears, and some time needs to remain to appreciate each visual element too. Ideally, these line up in a logical flow, hopefully adding impact to the text with the visuals. So I'd estimate that 50% of the editing time had been spent adjusting the timing and length of text, slowing or speeding up visuals to make them match and moving text around the screen so the viewers eye can follow it logically, but it doesn't obscure important parts of the visual. Plus, to keep some of the original comic book panel style I didn't want to just blat out screen-filling video and plonk text on it. I wanted insets and transitions which were visually interesting and added to the scene. Hours were lost fiddling with boxes and speed ramps and animation to make this work and inevitable compromises had to be made.
So why do it? Because for some reason, I think the comic-art effect makes the visual better somehow. It's hrd to explain, but somehow those clean lines and smooth tones make it all sexier. If I'd done exactly this with the original, non-filtered video it would look okay, but it wouldn't pop like it does. That's partly because I like these kind of cucky stories and having the text boxes and panel-style art makes it work as familiar format. Making each scene feels very satisfying and I'm really making these things just for myself.
Back to the story. This is the kind of thing that I've landed on now. Kimber is casually cruel but there's always a possibility that she really loves our hero. She knows this is what he wants and she's happy to give it to him. She's never going to leave him. In fact, she goes to a lot of trouble to make him happy, even though that means being incredibly mean to him, cucking and humiliating him.
His sessions with Crystal and his memories of them make it a bit fresher than the standard cuck story and being able to match text with images so exactly is kind of what makes it fun. I learned a new respect for those layout and lettering people you see in comic credits. Positioning the text so it fits well with the images is damn tricky.
To be honest, it all got a bit out of control. I was at 20 minutes duration with no denouement in sight, partly due to me going back and adding more into the earlier sections as ideas struck me and I found more suitable clips.
I hope I didn't take too much of a cop out at the end. I've always preferred a happy-ever-after ending and I think going further would just have been more repetition.
If I go again, I want to find sources where the star has done as many interviews as possible - need scenes of her talking to camera. Eye-to-camera sex scenes, and ideally some femdom scenes too. There's probably a few stars who've done that. AJ Applegate maybe. Or maybe Allie Haze, especially as she's got three of those MWMP videos.
The story leads inevitable to a scene with Kimber and her boyfriend where our hero gets to watch. As usual, there's places the story could go afterwards but these are never quite as satisfying as the build-up. So I just ended it there, with our hero ind of blissed out by the whole experience. I don't really see myself going back to it.
I did, however, start on a new one in the same vein with Emma Lux in the domme role (though in this case she's our hero's bitchy sister-in-law) and Eva Lovia in the wife role. Eva has loads of scenes from Naughty America and Digital playground with a several-minute long setup which can be easily adapated for the talky and normal-life scenes. Plus, she did a whole bunch of interviews which are great. Who knows if I'll finish this, but I'm four-for-four so far on Eva Lovia PMV completion so who knows.
