It’s funny, that statistically speaking, the most comments on this blog is about music. I intentionally put the graphic representation of my Last.fm music profile to the left column, interested it it’ll bring some reaction. It seems that the spankers worldwide have pretty compatible music taste.
Well, not all of them. My Lupus colleague, Honza Žáček, told me, that even pure sight of my playlist constitutes sheer torture for him ;-)
I think that musical portion of movies is very important. In our movies we have used numerous original soudtracks, composed by Johan Bruner. One day I’ll probably make a compilation of the best tracks and publish it.
One of cases when he was able to unleash his creative genius was the Stalin series, or in more general, all the Czechoslovak 50’s series.
I generally like the revolutionary and political songs. Being them communistic, Nazi, whatever. They are strong. They must be, if they can force people to fight and die for ideas expressed within. I experienced that power myself, some ten years ago, when I organized a demonstration and we energized the crowd by music…
There is a song with very eventful history. It was used as anthem by almost anyone – socialists, anarchists, communists, the Soviet Union as well as a rally song by students at the Tianmen Square. The Internationale. The song is 120 years old and of French origin. The original lyrics were written by Eugène Pottier in 1870 and set to music of Pierre De Geyter in 1888. I have found French and Russian version for you.
We have used the Internationale two times in our movies. First it was in The Anarchy, story from The Headmaster’s Study. The left-wing anarchist student’s spirit is unbroken by the birching she endured and at the end of the movie she’s humming the tune in protest, being joined by the Headmaster, who catches the tune saying that’s a nice song.
The darker version is in the Stalin series. Johan rearranged The Internationale so that the energetic song becomes terrifying and implies the dreads induced by the communistic regime who accepted the song as its anthem. He also similarly rearranged various other songs made popular by Czech Communists, with the same result.
I’m now offering you the two soundtracks as free download:
More about roles of music in spanking movies next time.
Current mood: sweaty; Current music: Within Temptation - Caged (album: Within Temptation - Live Tilburg 13-03-02).
I speak three languages: Czech, English and Very-Loud-Czech. The last one is used in Pratchett’s way to communicate with aliens; if they don’t understand, repeat the sentence again in your primary language and more loudly. By the way, according to my experience across the world, it works surprisingly well, especially in Spain!
They tried to force-learn me German in school for some seven years. That’s why I know only “Guten Tag” and “donnerwetterkrucifixhimmelherrgotthimbajselement”. Actually, the second phrase I use as a curse word and is probably not proper German anyway. But it basically resonates with my feeling that German language is well-suited only for orders and cursing. Maybe, if Ms.Honalová, my German teacher in elementary school, would use another teaching methods than pained expressions on her face, the results would be different ;-)
It seems that Ludwig’s caning method worked pretty well for teaching Niki Flynn German numerals! He describes the event in his recent blog post. In a vain attempt to divert attention of international spanking community from his own well-earned punishment, he published video recording of the above mentioned session.
Lupus Pictures helped him with hosting the video on our download servers, so you may enjoy it for free:
By the way: I should probably expand the list of good uses of German by ancient incantations and metal music lyrics. For example in songs of German band In Extremo. They use traditional medieval lyrics in various strange languages like Occitan, Gaelic, Icelandic, Old Swedish, Old French, Middle High German, Old High German, and Latin. And they mix traditional medieval instruments and arrangement with modern metal and rock, which seems strange at first, but the outcome is surprisingly great.
In the video above you may see their live performance of “Ai vis a lo lop”. It’s the right song for a spanking werewolf, because it’s name means “I saw a wolf” in Occitan language.
But I still don’t understand, what the singer says in the video ;-)
Current mood: musical; Current music: Kivimetsän Druidi - Pohjoinen Mahti
I just processed photos from shooting of our latest movie this weekend. I’ll not go into much detail, the movie hasn’t got even a final name yet, but I’ll share several carefully selected photos with you. Then you’ll discover why we love our photographer so much!
It was hot weekend here. Outside temperature was 304 K (and I’ll give one free movie download to person who will post in comments how much it’s in degrees both Celsius and Fahrenheit). The inside temperature was outside the scope of our thermometers. The studio must be soundproof, and that unfortunately means also that’s well thermo-insulated. Add some big studio lights and lots of persons on set and you’re done.
But even in such heat, we didn’t failed in bringing you the most beautiful actors and actresses in spanking movie business. And in case of any medical emergencies, our faithful nurse was prepared to give first aid:
Several other memorable moments from our latest shooting:
Current mood: sweaty; Current music: Disturbed – Land of Confusion
Here in Lupus Pictures, we strongly believe in that you should be careful what you wish for, lest it come true. We are well known for fulfilling the requests of spanking models.
For example, when Niki Flynn wanted to explore her darkest fantasies, we wrote Stalin II for her. And when she expressed wish for a spanking movie set in madhouse, well, we wrote its sequel, Stalin III. Of course, the movie is set in state-sanctioned madhouse, so we gave Niki the most bizarre of gifts, as she called it afterwards.
We’re preparing a shoot for late summer, which will feature a maid, portrayed by Adele Haze. Poor Adele suggested, that the maid should be properly tormented, humiliated and punished, as much as possible.
What we wouldn’t do for a friend. So I was browsing the local flea markets to find a unique spanking tool, perfectly suitable for stern punishment of maids.
It’s almost hundred years old whip, made by sewing two strips of strong leather together with a wooden handle.
The whip was obviously living in caring home, because is in excellent condition. It’s not damaged, was well cared for. I just imagine the poor person, who is carefully oiling the tool of his or her own punishment, while kneeling naked on a cold floor…
Of course, that damn thing hurts like a hell, as I personally tested, first on myself an then on one volunteer. Well, kind of. Teasing me when I have new addition to my collection of whips and riding crops effectively equals volunteering ;-)
Just for illustration, this is part of the aforementioned collection, within easy reach in my office (the non-Lupus one, I’m software developer in the other life). Having some argument nearby can significantly speed up various kinds of negotiations, as I discovered! Which one would you like to use or be used on you?
Current mood: sadistic; Current music: In Extremo - Merseburger Zaubersprüche
The launch of new website of RGE Films, our movie distribution partner, allowed me to unleash my geek power. So we employed several bleeding-edge technologies for me to play with. So, if you are interested in what technology is powering you favorite web site, you can read here.
The new generation web site we launched before few weeks is codenamed “Shadow” – it’s a nice wolfish name, I think. The main servers running Shadow are running in two-node cluster. Each node server has quad-core processor, eight gigabytes of RAM and almost one terabyte of disk space available.
We are using the HP ProLiant DL 320 G5 servers. I’m not too happy about that, because I have previous bad experience with Hewlett-Packard servers (I’d prefer IBM or Dell servers instead). On the other side, the hardware isn’t my problem and it was chosen by my friend’s company who will take care of it. As a developer, I’m generally not interested in hardware.
The cluster is running on 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition, which is the highest edition of newest Windows server system available now. Entire infrastructure we have for Shadow (web servers, secure download servers, database etc.) is virtualized using the new Hyper-V technology, which is part of Windows Server 2008.
Virtualization allows us to host several servers (with different operating systems and purpose) on top of single physical machine. This allows us to better utilize computing resources, electricity and space in data center. In virtual servers we are running mixture of different operating systems, but generally we are running on Windows Server 2003 and 2008.
There is a bunch of other less-interesting servers used for support services (like e-mail, name servers, public download servers for static content etc.). In our studio, we have another pack of computers caring about production, video editing, encoding and movie authoring – maybe I’ll tell you more about them next time!
The web application itself was developed in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 using the latest ASP.NET 3.5 and Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0. This new version of IIS is great! Is extendable and can be easily modified to suit our needs. Entire secure download site is built using custom IIS 7 modules and handlers. That means than unlike in the previous version you should be able to use download managers to download movies from our secure servers. For database we are using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 now and we plan to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 as soon as possible.
So, that’s what you are “talking” with when browsing our web sites. Sorry for not having any pictures of cute girls with red butts in todays post. I was unable to sneak any of them into the datacenter ;-) Anyway, I’m probably the only person finding combination of powerful computers and naked girls exciting and blinking lights of rackmounted switches (the computer kind, not the wooden ones) romantic…
Everyone is blogging now. Spanking models, spanking reviewers… So it’s time for spanking movie producers to start blogging as well, I think.
So, let me introduce myself. I’m Michal Altair Valášek and besides other things I’m executive producer at Lupus Pictures, the world’s best spanking movies company! My job is to ensure that the movie will reach the stage that can be distributed on DVDs or online to you, our customers.
Besides that, I’m the man running all the web sites you know and love. So if something ends with the popular “500 Internal Server Error” message, I’m the one who gets the whipping. Well, not quite. Thomas isn’t in M/M and besides I’m much bigger than he is ;-)
For having the sharpest tongue in the company, I’m now supposed to do the PR thing. So I started this blog, to allow me less formal communication with our fans all around the world than the official news like “we have new movie” and “we have 20% off sale”.
Oh, by the way, we have 20% off sale on our online download web site and 30% on DVD site, until Monday, if you’re interested.
So, watch this space. I’m going to gratify you with some unpublished photos, little dose of gossip, some special blog-only discounts and answers to interesting questions I will get from you in comments.
To put a face to name, I’m the “big geeky-looking fellow” (as Adele Haze once described me) on the photo (taken on set of The Deep Impact).
The hairy looking fellow on the other picture is Esta Kanýčo, my Czechoslovak Wolfdog. She’s the “Lupus” from Lupus Pictures (although she has technically only about one quarter of wolf blood).
Now for the aforementioned gossip: The wolves are howling that one of movies now in planning will cast as a special guest star one spanking blogosphere celebrity (other than well-known Niki Flynn and Adele Haze).