Saturday, March 01, 2008

Bambi vs. Taylor?

This should be interesting. Bambi has been the only actress brave and enthusiastic enough to shoot inflation videos on a regular basis. But Mistress Taylor just showed up on bodyinflation.org to check out the community and announce her intent to cater to our fetish. (She currently caters to many others.)

This can only be good. Fresh content from a fresh perspective is always awesome. It's clear from the sample clips that Taylor and her team are semi-pro, and while they don't have Bambi's expertise or excellent costumes/props, even the creative workarounds in the BE trailers proved pretty effective. I'm eager to see what they wind up creating. And, like Bambi, they were eager to talk to the community and find out what they wanted to see. That's a good sign.

To be honest -- and it pains me to say this, because of the family feel I have always preferred in our community -- I've been wondering how long I'm going to keep paying for Bambi's work. It seems like the videos are posted less frequently, contain more filler (I felt last year's experiments with the second actress was a mistake), and aren't getting better in quality. I've always accepted that Bambi's films were humble homemade productions and more about use of cool props than the improv acting -- I knew that when I signed up and I have paid for it because, well, there's nothing else out there even close to what I'm looking for, and she's certainly dealing with the right subject matter. I'm still paying about $30 each month for access to her two sites. But I really did think by now that the performances and productions would have naturally improved, but they've kind of stayed the same -- a ten minute film opens with the same credit treatment, spends a long time setting up a disposable story (which is often hard to hear -- no mics are in use), and when the inflation comes around, the film is abruptly cut off as "part 1." When part 2 is posted (which used to be the following week but now has become unfortunately a lot more...flexible), the remaining four minutes of the scene are basically Bambi moaning. Meanwhile, there's oodles of dialogue in story archives just waiting to be read for inspiration, several common recurring phrases that really do have power. I download the next video and the next video hoping I will hear some of that stuff, but I rarely do.

What Bambi does is hard. It takes effort, it takes planning, it takes time, and it takes money. And it's not personalized content -- I certainly don't expect that every film is my personal fantasy scenario. But am I the only one looking critically at this stuff?

So if someone else is coming to town to try their hand at it, I say, good. If we get one good new outlet and one existing outlet breaks out of its ruts as a response, everybody wins, and I'll be happy to give my money to both camps.