Hostel III: Preparing for the Mood

(This is the third part of my behind-the-scenes report on Mood Pictures. The first two parts were The Hungarian Hostel and Hostel II: The Revelations of Guard #3.)

(Download the HQ version of the "Inmates - Part 1" trailer here)

The first part of my spanking film with Mood Pictures is out, titled "Inmates". It will introduce you to Harastopol State Prison, Eastern Europe, where corporal punishment is still used to this day. You can get the movie on DVD or as a HQ download. As it turns out, I'm not Guard #3 after all - the credits list me as "Guard #1" and "special guest star", ahead of Lady Jessica Lee. Not bad, huh? However, I don't have a lot of screen time in this one. I am in a couple of shots, taking a new prisoner's fingerprints and such, but you will have to wait a little longer to really see me in action - both of the thrashings I administered will be in "Inmates - Part 2", which will come out in the second half of March.

In the meantime, I can at least begin to tell you what it was like to swing the cane for Mood. I've decided that there will be a fourth part of my report after this one - I'm expanding the originally planned trilogy to a tetralogy. This way, I'll have something to accompany the release of the second video, and there is still so much to write about, anyway - easily enough material for two more (hopefully interesting) posts.

Part one dealt with the prehistory and part two with the filming of the non-action scenes, so this and the final segment will focus on the CP action. It was, of course, the climax of the shoot. Especially for me - since I didn't do any acting worth the name, the caning was my only real task as a top, and I wanted to do it well. Actually, it was inspirational to focus on nothing but this one activity. I approached it like a Zen ritual. Needless to say, I was greatly looking forward to the wicked sadistic fun of it. But I also relished the challenge to my technical skills.

It was a question I had often wondered about: could I dish out a thrashing at this extreme level of severity, and do it accurately? Some of the Mood or Lupus Pictures tops hit insanely hard, but their accuracy is shaky. I wanted to have both. My role models were caners like Pavel Stastny from the Headmaster's Study series, who is not only very severe, but also on target - and he looks elegant while he's doing it, which constitutes the third important ingredient. Could I do all of that? I hadn't even administered such a hard beating yet. I had done some pretty vicious stuff with Josephine, who loves strict, painful discipline, but never quite on this level. And not in front of a camera.


So I practised more than ever in the weeks before the shoot. I put a pillow over the back of a chair and beat the living daylights out of it for a solid hour at a time, hundreds of strokes, until my right shoulder was numb and my hand had blisters just from holding the cane. My dummy has a striped pillowcase, and three stripes together are roughly the height of an average girl's bottom from the tailbone to the lower end. You can practise aiming high, central and low. Or, if you really want to test your accuracy, you can try hitting the edges between the stripes.

When I started out as a top, I hadn't done any proper exercise, only toyed around a bit with a cane. It was alright at the time because I was careful and didn't hit very hard. But I still find it difficult to watch old videos like The German Lesson with Niki Flynn today, where my technique was utter crap (Niki insists it was okay, but she is far too nice to be trustworthy as a critic). I only got serious about caning skill later, when I realised that it took a lot more than simply watching spanking films. I practised while holding a book under my arm to focus on the elbow movement and the wrist flick that gives the cane its unique bite. It was the first in a line of "Aha!" moments.

Later, I started using my shoulder as well - if I wanted to measure myself against the true champions of severity like Headmaster Stastny, I would of course have to do full arm strokes like they do. The physical force is awesome - shoulder, elbow, wrist, all adding up. I destroyed a whole bunch of canes, and several pillows, too. The accuracy, on the other hand, was pitiful at first. But it improved rapidly when I stopped trying to imitate Pavel's posture and discovered a different one that came more naturally to me - left foot forward, striking at a low angle, really leaning into the strokes. I felt like I was finally beginning to find my style. More practice followed. By the time I boarded the train to Budapest, I was confident that I could do the job.

But you never really know until you try it on a living target. That was the challenge. There were other things I didn't know, such as what position the victim would be in. Mood Pictures use a wide variety of restraining devices. I only hoped that it wouldn't be the "diaper" position, with the legs up - some kinky people love it, but it does nothing for me, I just don't find it erotic or visually exciting at all. Sure enough, when I chatted with Pablo before the shoot, I found out that the canings were supposed to be in that very arrangement. Ugh... I asked him if the girl could just be tied while bent over in my scene, since I preferred that. Sure, he said, that is possible. But why didn't I like the legs up? "No good reason, to be honest, it's simply a matter of personal taste," I replied apologetically. "Different people like different things..." Pablo looked puzzled: "Okay, but everyone likes the Ferraris and Lamborghinis, no?" Not everyone, I shrugged.

It was agreed that we would use the more classical position I desired. "So, which one of them you want?" asked Pablo. It was clear that he was referring to the models sitting in the entrance room. Wait a minute, I said - do I get to pick the girl myself? "Yes. Which one you want?" I was surprised: "Hm, I haven't really looked at them in any detail yet... I'll tell you in a bit!" I grinned gleefully and walked over to the other room while Pablo roared with laughter behind me.


There they were, the whole dazzling bunch. I leaned in the corner and tried to look casual while typing some nonsense text "message" into my mobile phone. In the meantime, what I really did was observe the girls. Blonde, blonde, dark haired, blonde, dark haired... How do you pick your victim? Interesting question. Even in a shoot like this, where all I knew about them was what they looked like, it wasn't only about eye candy. I also watched how a girl carried herself, how she talked, how she seemed to relate to the others. I was trying to get some vague notion of what she might be like, as a person. The whys and hows are difficult to explain, but I just "liked" some of them more than others. I started making my mental list. I chose not to talk to any of the girls myself. I just wanted to decide as the detached observer (then cane her...).

Damn, what an exciting position to be in. I was teasing myself for enjoying this macho nonsense as much as I did, but it felt undeniably powerful. And it was intriguing, too. I knew how rewarding it is to make a video with a friend and a fellow spankophile, to plan a scene together, to collaborate, to connect. Now I found that picking a random, anonymous "victim" from a lineup had a fascination of its own - altogether different, but perhaps no less compelling. The slave market, the torturer at Hostel, the deranged kidnapper... It was the ultimate "hunting" fantasy come to life. How very interesting. I began to suspect that, in addition to the obvious sadistic fun, the shoot might turn out to be more psychologically memorable than anticipated.

Before I could make a selection, I was called inside to see Max Lomp, the man in charge of directing the tops. Back when I arrived on the set, the first thing he had done was examine all my canes with professional curiosity - he seemed particularly taken with a thick senior dragon cane which I had brought along for laughs, but without intending to use it (not whippy enough for my taste). I was making my first film with Mood, and the two young dommes playing other guards were still in "training mode", as Pedro put it. Therefore, the three of us now got the official walkthrough from Max. One of the models acted as a dummy target with a pillow tied behind her ass while he demonstrated how we were supposed to hit. It was pretty self-evident - not too high, not too low, and not too fast (Mood want approximately 5 seconds between cane strokes). Then he watched us following his example.

I did some full-arm swings and a couple of others using mostly the lower arm and wrist - which is lighter, but more accurate, to "fill in the gaps". I asked Max if it would be okay to use both techniques. He held a pillow behind his back and wanted me to do the wrist flick, to see how much power I could generate. Satisfied that it was hard enough, he said it would be fine. An assistant translated: "It's your technique, and it looks good. He thinks you are, what is it, a-some? Awesome, yes! And you will do it on a real person."

While we were beating the dummy girl, I had thoughtlessly placed one of my rattan canes in the corner of the room. The female translator brought it back to me and said: "What do you call this in English?" That's a "cane", I replied. She nodded: "Okay. Please do not take this... the cane... to the land." Confused, I asked her if she could say that again? "Do not take the cane to the land," she repeated earnestly. After some explanation, it transpired that she meant "don't put it on the floor" - because it was dirty and they didn't want a model getting an infection. The "contaminated" cane was immediately taken out of the pool of useable implements for the shoot. It was one of the little episodes illustrating that Mood Pictures are, in fact, very thorough about safety.


Nelly had been watching the training. She is a young brunette woman with glasses who does the casting for Mood Pictures, and she was also in the film as an extra. But while Nelly wasn't going to get thrashed this time, she is a genuinely kinky girl and asked me for a demonstration stroke over her jeans. Full force, please! Her wish was my command. Nelly screamed and jumped around the room, shrieking something to Pedro in Hungarian. He laughed: "She says you hit very well."

I don't know if it was Nelly or the "dummy girl", but someone must have talked to the other models. Three of them approached me with an assistant named Sarah. They wanted to know who I was going to cane. I admitted that I hadn't decided yet. After the translation, they looked at each other. Sarah whispered: "They are a bit scared of you." Noting my perplexed expression, she continued: "Well, you are very serious-looking... Maybe if you smile a little?" I really had to smile at that, genuinely. I asked her to let the girls know that I'm quite harmless, really. We chatted a bit. They seemed almost convinced, but not fully. Still scared? Sarah nodded: "But it will be good for the scene..."

It was almost too nice a compliment to be true. For an instant, I had the silly idea that the whole thing was a show designed by Pedro and Pablo to make me feel at home. But that was nonsense. The girls really were nervous, and visibly so. Again, I had to tease my inner sadist for feeling so intoxicated by it. I wondered how they would have fared at the sight of Pavel Stastny, with his bald head and piercing eyes. Would they have fled in terror or simply fainted right away? Who knows. They're scared of me... How cute was that!

I was getting apprehensive myself when the time came to film the CP. Gosh, I thought, I hope all the practice pays off. Don't let me screw this up... Victoria Young was the first girl to get it, a single-tail whipping from Max Lomp. The room was crowded by over a dozen people - Pablo and his assistants, the camera operators, the still photographers, the nurse, the makeup assistant, Lady Jessica and the two dommes, Nelly... Except for the other models, everyone was there, either at work or watching with polite glee. The tension was palpable. Had it not been for the crack of the whip and Victoria's monumental wails, you could have heard a pin drop. Max did a fine job. They had to pause and redo Victoria's makeup several times because she was crying so hard.

The whipping was recorded on the "prison cell" set, with Victoria tied to the bars. It was moved forward in the schedule because she had to leave early. We still had to do some non-action scenes afterwards, then all the equipment was moved to the next room where the other beatings would take place. When everything was finally ready, it was past midnight - Pedro told me that they usually got to the canings around 10 PM, but this was a bigger, longer production.

I didn't care, I had far too much adrenalin to feel any tiredness. I remembered the tension on the set when Max had whipped Victoria, in front of some fifteen rapt spectators. The voyeur in me loved it, watching the beating, and watching the others while they watched... Just being in the live audience was awesome. Now I couldn't wait to go under the spotlight myself. With the victim of my choice.

At the same time, I felt a surge of stage fright at the thought that all these eyes would be on me soon...

(Another cliffhanger ending, but this is the last one, I promise - you will read all the rest in the fourth part of my report, when "Inmates - Part 2" is released in late March.)