Erika Thorkveld's ' The Black Boots '

SL is a wonderful creative outlet that lets creative minds grapple with many forms of arts, such as photos and movies, with minimal production costs and logistic troubles. It's a world with its rules and limitations, of course, but that makes even more tempting to use the vaste means and potential avalaible to take something we liked and admired in 'RL' and do it ourselves , 'SL style' !

It's the case of many incredibly well made productions, including the award winning 'Legs wide spread', and recent examples of outstanding quality we covered or will cover on the blog very soon. Such as...



Erika Thorkveld in this case, paid homage to a production she credited, and did it in a beautiful way.
I'd have to spend so many superlatives for this work, pointing out the atmosphere, the excellent quality of the B&W photography, the pace and overall atmosphere of the movie, the sound quality, style of the setting, etc etc, that I could go on for so long and not be as effective as 30 seconds of this movie. Just do yourself a favour, start watching, and even if Bdsm, fetish, etc etc, are not your thing ....You will just feel compelled to watch it till the end.

But as I said, I am such a big fan of clever technical solutions and workarounds to SL's deficits (especially in the animations department) that I just HAD to go a bit more in depth with all this, and Erika is the best at that sort of stuff. So, here you have a little interview with madame Thorkveld herself, about the movie and how she put together all this well oiled, and waxed, mechanism. Aaaaand some other things too I really wanted to talk about, and if you are a filmaker, you probably are sadly familiar with.

Enjoy, and don't forget to check her Blog Post about all the other movie details not covered here!



- Obligatory question: the inspiration for the movie. When did you first get the idea about making a movie inspired by the fetish movie "The Black Glove" by Maria Beattie, and what made you finally do it ?

" I guess the idea has always been in my head since I started to make movies in SL. Maria Beattie's movie had really impressed me by its pure sensual eroticism so it was somehow the ultimate movie to do as a SL porn and erotica director for me.
As for what made me finally do it, there are a few things, I guess. First me getting interested again in BDSM, which I had given up on during some time. Then the evolution of the techniques I could use to make movies. And finally… getting 'won' by Rachel in an auction. *chuckles*

True story: it was the auction for Moonie a few monthes ago, I auctionned myself and Rachel won. One of the possible rewards was a movie done by me if the bid reached a given amount. It ended up not being enough at all for that, but we decided to do the movie anyway. "



- How was working with Rache and do bad things to her? Which WAS your favourite one to put her through, in particular, if any ?

" Well, I wasn't actually doing bad things to her 'for real', you know. *grins* And I actually tend to be very focused on how to do things when I'm shooting, so this isn't really something I was thinking about. There was something that made me giggle when I planned on what I would do though, and that ended up being some kind of running gag between Rache and me: it's simply the burlap bag.

In the original movie, the sub is actually tied to a chair covered with some kind of silk cloth or something like that. This would have been very difficult to do in SL, I needed some rougher and tougher fabric that would be more likely to keep its shape when somebody was in it. And I finally thought about a burlap bag, which sounded perfect. But the idea of being packed in such a bag isn't really sexy. I think Rache has developed a phobia about those now."

- Your movie takes a different path from the original video. Tell me a bit about (some of) your original choices for your version, and also if there is something in particular from the original you wish one day to be able to make in SL, or that definitely you won't do because it's not in your area of interest

"There has been things I would have loved to do from the original movie, but I just couldn't find a way of doing it that would make it look nice enough. One of those is the Domme buckling her corset, which is a very erotic sequence: she does it slowly, while the buckles click and the leather squeaks as the straps are stretched… Just writing about it almost gives me goosebumps… *chuckles* But doing that in SL just doesn't seem feasible for now, it would just look crappy. So I had to give up on it, sadly…

I've given up on other things from the original movie completely deliberately though. The main thing is the third character in it: there's a kind of fat old half-bald tranvestite wearing a long curly wig in it, I just could never figure out what he was doing there." *chuckles* "



- You employed in the movie ' lots of weird techniques ', to quote your blog. Talk us through some of that clever trickery!

"The two main ones are moving poseballs and fake anims using AnyPose adjustments, I'd say. I used moving poseballs mostly for the caressing sequences: I'm actually on a poseball, often up in the air, with my arm extended towards what I'm caressing, and a script moves the poseball - and therefore me - very slowly. Doing a close-up on the caressing hand and speeding up the action a bit during editing ended up looking like what I wanted.

I used AnyPose driven fake anims for little things such as opening my jacket, or taking it off, or grabbing the dildo, or putting my foot on Rachel in the bag in the corridor, also to make her suck on my heel. I'm sitting on a poseball, and I trigger an AnyPose adjustment via the main chat, and sometimes get back to the original pose after that. I found out that this gave quite a smooth movement which almost looked like a 'real' anim. It's quite limited though, because you have to rely on an existing pose: when switching from a pose done with AnyPose to another one, it actually resets everything between the poses, so it doesn't look smooth at all."

- Finally, do you have some nice words for your fans, especially the one who found appropriate to flag your video and have it removed for a few hours from Xtube? :-)

" I won't respond to this kind of provocation. *grins* Nah, what can I say? To my 'fans', if there are any out there - or any at all actually -, I always have a hard time saying how much I appreciate their support, because it's a bit beyong words. We're all doing this for fun of course, but it's really heartwarming when you see people really enjoy what you're doing. And it's not even a question of numbers: I know I'm doing things that aren't really 'mainstream', if that means anything, so I probably won't please the average porn viewer, and certainly not all of them anyway. But I've got some reactions that just made me melt, like people I hardly know contacting me out of the blue to tell me how they loved the movie. This really makes you feel like you've done something that touched some people, and I really feel honored when I manage to do that.

Now of course, there are all the others… And some of them can be very noisy about their dislike, or even mean, like the one who abusively reported my movie on XTube. To those, I'd just like to say they should remember that doing such a movie is quite a piece of work: I spent weeks preparing it, then hours to shoot it and edit it. Just having someone looking a couple of minutes of it and rate it one star because he doesn't like it is awfully unfair: a movie is not bad because *you* don't like it.

If it's not your thing, move on, go watch something else, but at least, try to realize the work there has been behind what you see. *This* is what you should judge when rating a movie, not how you like or dislike it. And if you can't do that, nobody's forcing you to rate. A bad rating is very visible, if it expresses only *your* opinion about it and is not an objective judgement on the quality of the movie, it makes it appear bad to people who might like it, and with no real reason. "

Thank you so much to Erika for this interview, and what can I add to that? A wise person once told me, "when people say Mozart is crap, it tells more about them than about Mozart", or something like that. Now, not that I am comparing Erika to Mozart, of course. She's so much sexier! Enjoy the movie, after the jump.






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