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#that cluttered background took so long to make because had to locate all the images for it
doppelneer · 1 month
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Me talking to my friend about my Season of Abyss AU at 3am
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Two versions because yes
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April fool's? More like I'm the one who is the fool.
Bonus backgrounds and things below :)
Mural with stuff behind it
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Just the stuff (have fun looking at my mess)
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The more elaborate mural
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The inspiration from other places board
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Bonus picture of my cat Sakura
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53 notes · View notes
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Imagine:
This is a request from @dashhoney25
Erik and his boo, London, make up for lost time. 😈
Warnings: LOTS of Smut, Rough sex, dirty talk. This shit...had me wet AF.
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There are four levels of assassins: the novices, dilettantes, journeymen, and lastly masters. The masters, men with military or paramilitary backgrounds who travel to their contracts have few local ties that law enforcement can use. They excel at their craft, and operate quietly and without incident. In theory, the whispered meetings will be held in secret, the job will be executed with precision and grace, and no one will witness the escape. As a class one type assassin, Erik Killmonger was genetically enhanced in order to perform physical tasks much more efficiently than an average peak-human. To keep his skills in balance, Erik Killmonger practices his combat, shooting, assassination, and stealth skills whenever he is not on an assignment. He has over his life become a myth in the underworld due to his skills. Many doubt Erik Killmonger’s existence because of his skills in completing impossible assignments to the point that the FBI and CIA denies his existence…
Erik Killmonger spawned on a beach in Miami from his F470 Combat Rubber Raiding Craft at approximately 9:30 PM. He’s wearing a Roka wetsuit that provides luxurious comfort and no restrictions. The ocean waters emit a bright blue glow as the waves crashed and the tide came in because of tiny organisms called Lingulodinium polyedrum. With him, Erik Killmonger has on a pair of thermal imaging goggles resting on top of his tapered locs. Frontwards, Erik Killmonger spots two armed guards pacing in front of the architect-designed luxury beach home. Erik Killmonger tugged on the goggles, bringing them down over his onyx eyes. Both of them are carrying a GLOCK 19 and wearing crisp black suits and polished black dress shoes. One beefy man and the other looking about his weight and height. Good. 
Erik Killmonger has mastered the art of stealth, being able to terminate multiple enemies in the same area one at a time and sneak up on almost anybody and quietly neutralize them. Erik Killmonger also has an expert level understanding of the use of disguises in order to access unauthorized areas of a location. He needed the disguise of one of the guards to get inside of the home so he could grab what he needed for his Nightcall mission. Keeping low, his body hidden by the Lyme grass that sprouted from the beach, Erik Killmonger spots a pool on the left side. Moving quickly,  He walks inside the pool room and finds a tool box sitting on a surfboard table. Walking back out, he went around to the left side of the house until he saw the garage. Erik Killmonger uses the screwdriver that he picked out of the tool box to short-circuit the signal box, which will allow him to open up the garage door for access. He rounded a corner and parkour rolled, finding a good hiding spot. 
“Man, this is a bust...what exactly are we guarding?” The beefy guard with a Glasgow smile and a clean shaven head says before taking a quick puff from his cigarette. He spoke with an Australian accent from what Erik Killmonger could pick up while hiding behind a cherry-red sports car. 
“All I know is I’m getting paid,” The other guard that sounded like a Florida native says before turning to grab the cigarette from his partner's hand. He runs a hand through his jet black hair that reminded Erik of how greasers used to wear it back in the 50s. Blowing smoke towards the sky, he chokes up a bit. 
“Are these M-Marlboro golds?” He says between coughs and slight wheezes. 
“Yep, the only kind I smoke...looks like you can’t handle it though,” The beefy guard laughs tumultuously. 
“I’m more of a codeine guy,” The greaser says before handing the cigarette back to the other guard, “I prefer my prescription drugs.”
“That shit will have you on the floor, man.” 
Erik checked the time on his G-Shock Casio Camouflage watch. He didn’t bring a lot of tech with him since this job is supposed to be silent, quick, and precise. He couldn’t leave any traces of himself behind. For Erik, these types of jobs were always the hardest for him, that’s why he took another week to survey the area with his Dragon X12 U11 Drone late at night before accepting the Nightcall mission. The two guards kept talking nonsense, wasting a breath with every word when Erik Killmonger could be in the luxury beach home. He only had thirty minutes left. Since taking out both of them will bring too much attention, he decided to take them down one by one. 
“Hey...what was that?” The greaser says mid laugh. He shared a look with his partner before they both went stony-faced. He pulls out his GLOCK 19, checking the magazine for rounds before turning towards the garage, “I’ll be back, you know we aren’t really supposed to leave this post. If Alma asks, tell her I’m checking for a noise.” 
“Gotcha, just hurry back, you know that bitch will have something to say,” the beefy guard reminds him. 
With his gun pointed straight ahead with a two-handed grip and unwavering eyes, the greaser walks slowly past the cherry-red sports car, Erik Killmonger’s body no longer there. Making a left turn, heading towards the pool room, the greaser aims his gun left, right, behind, and in front of him. It was dark and anyone could be hiding behind the many shelves filled with storage bins and other miscellaneous items. Erik watched the greaser walk far enough into the pool room before stepping out from behind a cluttered storage cabinet. 
Erik Killmonger got really close behind the greaser without being detected, grabbing him around his throat by putting him in a choke hold, the crease of his arm between his bulging bicep, tricep, and flexor, squeezing with ease before he went limp in his arms. He dropped him, getting down on his knees to remove his suit and get dressed. Once he was fully clothed and looking like the other armed guards, Erik Killmonger places the GLOCK 19 in the suit jacket pocket before taking a calm yet treacherous stroll out to the other guard. 
_____________________
London’s eyelids fluttered open with a hassle around 3:18 AM, just five hours before she had to be to work. London is a Cyber Security Analyst for CSOC, a five-star rated computer security company in New York City, New York. The high and wide windows within the bedroom of her Penthouse gave her a nighttime view of the Midtown Manhattan skyline and at its feet is the whole geometry of Central Park. The high end silk bedding duvet cover set in black has perfect temperature-regulating properties that would usually help her sleep but with the absence of her man there was little to no chance for her to drift off again. London scoots over towards the edge of the left side of the upholstered platform bed in black to effectively turn on the side lamp. After rubbing her tired eyes, London grabs her phone to see if she had any missed calls or texts from him. Sure enough, the busy man himself sent her a text almost two hours ago. 
Erik: I just boarded my private jet, I’ll see you when you wake up baby girl. I’ll be right next to you. 
London and Erik have been exclusive for a little over a year. They met because Erik was a longtime client of CSOC and London would personally work for him whenever he needed it. She picked up on his flirtatious cues and the way his eyes blazed every time he looked at her. It was her round, sparkling topaz eyes with sweeping lashes; glowing honey skin; high cheekbones every time she smiled; glossy full lips; bouncy blunt cut copper hair; and trim frame with a plump backside. London didn’t expect anything to happen between them since Erik could be a bit emotionally closed off but he had a deep, and in the beginning, unexpressed admiration for London. He very rarely showed a liking towards anyone around him but for some reason, London changed that. Beneath his bad boy persona is a charming, mysterious, and intellectual man. London fell in love with him before she found out what he did for a living. Erik is an Assassin. Killing people as an occupation of course terror struck her in the beginning but she couldn’t leave him alone no matter how much her conscience tried to sway her. 
The beginning of their relationship...let’s just say it was nothing short of wild. Erik used to take London on big trips to places like Dubai, Japan, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia whenever he had work. That changed when Erik almost had a near death experience when trying to escape from a mission. He ended up hospitalized in a secret facility for trained killers like himself somewhere in Arizona. London made up for his lack of being there by working more hours which led her to a position as a Lead Cyber Security Analyst. Her pockets swelled even though she didn’t necessarily need the money since Erik could afford to take care of both of them. London grew tired from working long and hard hours and whenever she would come home to find Erik there she wouldn’t feel up to doing anything sexually. He was always on the move and she was always at work back in NYC. A strain between them both began to form. 
Erik didn’t fuss much about it, knowing how demanding his job is but whenever London felt a certain way about their situation he would let her vent to him, rubbing his baby girl’s back, kissing her gently, whispering reassurance to her; that things are going to get better; that she should leave her job and stay home. As easy as all of that sounded, London couldn’t bring herself to leave all that she worked so hard for behind her. To top it all off, London is a strong, independent woman who has done almost everything herself before Erik walked into her life. Yeah, he’s her daddy, but sitting at home waiting on his FaceTime call, his text, or to even simply hear his voice wasn’t enough. Also, she had to keep in mind that the future isn’t promised for the both of them. If things didn’t work out, London would be on her own again. The lack of sexual attention was indeed driving London crazy. Taking baths alone turned into London using her waterproof rabbit vibe or the faucet to make her cum. Other times she would mount her suction cup dildo that is an exact mold of Erik’s dick on the edge of the tub to ride. If she couldn’t have daddy’s long, thick, veiny black dick, then the toy would just have to make up for that when he’s not around. 
London snatched the silk duvet from her body before walking to the master bathroom. With the lights on, London turned to stare at her reflection through the backlit vanity mirror. London gently touched one of the taps twice, the warm water flowing out and into the single copper basin of the bathroom sink. Cupping her hands, the white iced out diamond Cuban link 10k yellow gold bracelet on her right wrist twinkling beneath the lights, London watches with drowsy eyes as the water fills in her hands. A few times, London rinses her face with the warm water to calm herself down so she can go back to sleep peacefully without tossing and turning. Lifting her face from the sink basin, eyes closed because of the water dripping from her face, London blindly grabs a folded black cotton facial towel with gold trimming. She dabs her face, taking in the clean and soft fresh linen smell. 
“Why are you up so late?”
London blanched, when Erik startled her with his large hands grabbing at her waist from the back. To this day, London still wasn’t used to Erik’s stealth. His feet are like feathers hitting the floor. London is wearing a black Sheer Marabou Romper that has a cinched waist, fluffy feathery trim, and thin straps. One thing Erik loves to see her in any chance he got was lingerie or nothing at all. Looking up into the vanity, London took in Erik’s appearance. He’s wearing his usual all black from head to toe; black cable knit long sleeve top that clung to his hulking frame and black drop crotch destroyed jeans. The layered diamond tennis chains around his neck matched the bracelet on London’s wrist and the Rolex on his left wrist with its diamond bezel didn’t go unnoticed either. 
“I couldn’t sleep, it’s been that way for the past few weeks,” London rubs his strong hands with thick fingers around her waist, “How was this job?”
“Unnecessary, but I have another two million in my bank account so I can’t complain,” Erik’s thick lips circled London’s exposed neck, “You can’t sleep because of me, huh?”
“I’m used to you being next to me, yes, but I know you’re so busy,” London turns to face Erik. His hair from the dim lights of the bathroom looked almost raven, dreads messily resting against his forehead. London’s hands reach out to stroke his tapered waistline. She could feel all of the tiny raised scars beneath her manicured nails the more she lightly scratched him. 
“I’ve been getting calls for jobs left and right. Nothing else matters when I’m with you...I miss my baby,” Erik’s hand makes its way to London’s copper hair, slicking back the pressed out strands from her face before placing some behind her ears, “Haven’t been giving you the attention you need, and then you’re wearing my favorite too, probably waiting for me to come home and properly take it off of you.” 
“Properly taking my clothes off for you is ripping them to pieces,” London giggles before lifting to her tiptoes to kiss Erik’s thick, moist lips, “Why don’t you take a shower so we can lay in bed, I want you to wrap your arms around me,” London rubs Erik’s biceps. 
“Aight, ma, let me take a quick shower and I’ll meet you in bed,” Erik traced the pout of London’s bottom lip before giving her another kiss with a little bit of tongue. 
London walked back to the bedroom, pulling the silk duvet back and climbing back into bed. She propped herself up on her side to watch Erik undress. The standing shower system they have was London’s favorite. It has a square shower head with LED, remote-controlled LED, a detachable hand shower if you wanted to use it, and a thermostatic touch panel mixer with a digital display. The Rainfall mode made London experience the pleasure of a warm summer rain in her own bathroom. Her body was so tired but she couldn’t stop staring at him as he stripped out of each piece of clothing. Erik’s sinewy physique is so defined and well-built, so much so that you can even tell through his clothing. The raised marks on his torso, arms, and back caused her pierced nipples to grow taut as if she could feel his body rubbing against hers. 
Stepping into the shower, Erik puts it on Rainfall mode before standing directly under the square shower head. As the water sprouted from the shower head it trickled over Erik’s body making lazy patterns. He grabs for his favorite peppermint and eucalyptus body wash with a soap sponge to clean himself. He must have known that London was watching him because his ridiculously big dick was swaying back and forth with each movement of his body. London hasn’t had that big black dick in her for at least a few weeks now. When she first saw that fat dick in person she was sure she wouldn’t be able to take it. All that dick you’ll end up with no walls, tangled intestines, and half a stomach. She paid close attention to the way Erik grabbed his dick at the base, bringing it up against his lower abdomen to wash his balls. That heavy nut sack on him had her drooling. It had to have been almost 5 AM now. She was going to be extremely tired at work. 
________________
London arrived to work thirty minutes late with her daily homemade green smoothie in hand. She’s wearing a charcoal grey pencil skirt with a silk black top and black So Kate pumps on her feet. Her copper hair is swept to the side and bouncing with each step she took. When London woke up Erik wasn’t on his side of the bed. After freshening up and getting dressed, London went looking for him and found him in his weapons room unloading a few rounds to test out the new artillery. She didn’t want to disturb him too much so she gave him a quick kiss before leaving him alone until she made it back home. London walks past the rounded glass top receptionist desk before pushing open the commercial double glass doors to her work area. 
Having her own office means peace and quiet now. London gave some of her coworkers tight lipped smiles before entering her work space, allowing the frosted glass door to close behind her. 888 Seventh Avenue provided magnificent views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. London takes a seat at her modern black wood executive desk with a Mac desktop computer and other office supplies. She has two meetings to attend and one will be starting within the next hour. London checks her work email for any important information from clients while sipping her green smoothie. Time trickled by slowly and London hadn’t noticed that Erik had called her a few times. After receiving a reminder about the meeting via company email, London checks her phone. Erik sent her a voice message which was rather unlike him. London listens despite her confusion. 
“Hey what’s up, baby, how are you doing? I didn’t get a chance to really talk to you this morning since the new artillery came in, but...I’m sitting here just thinking about you and baby... I just want to see your face. Can you send me a picture or a video of yourself? I miss that pretty face….” he paused for a second, “I’m not gonna lie, ma...I’m feeling some type of way because I’m sitting here just thinking about you...thinking about tasting you...thinking about the other night when you watched me take a shower before you fell asleep…” Erik exhaled, “I miss that wet pussy, baby...I know that shit was wet last night...like goddamn...I know you’re panties had to be soaked, shit.” 
London was seated on the edge of her seat while her free hand gripped the handle of her seat. She couldn’t believe he was saying this to her in her voicemail. She instantly needed her man. 
“I’m saying...I’m not complaining at all because I love that wet ass pussy on my face and in my fucking mouth...grinding that pussy across my lips and my beard...Still tasting your pussy juices on my mustache...I wanna suck on that clit...that shit make you so goddamn wet, girl...spread them fat pussy lips and slowly guide my tongue up and down...up and down...fuck,” Erik hisses, “I miss that pussy gripping my fingers...you like that shit don’t you? Daddy’s fingers in your tight little pussy? Goddamn...fuck that I want you to take a picture of how wet your pussy is right now...yeah, I know that’s a little naughty but I know you’re my nasty little girl so you’ll do that shit anyway, right? I’ll spank that ass if you don’t send me a fucking pic, girl...I’ll spank that ass just how I do when I’m busting that pussy open from the back…”
London closed her eyes, praying to god that she would go through the rest of her day after this voicemail. She’s definitely wet alright; fucking soaked. If London pulled her panties to the side right now it would probably reveal a sticky, slimy mess. He had to be beating that fat ass dick right now. 
“Man...now you got me wanting to fuck the shit out of you, London...put my hands on your hips and start off nice and slow in that pussy...shit, we both know that pussy good...puss will have me busting a fat nut so fast...hell nah, girl…” Erik’s voice lowered over the phone to a whisper that ran down London’s spine and straight to her clit, “I just want you to know how good that pussy tastes and feels baby...pussy so fucking good...I love when you say don’t stop daddy, you know daddy ain’t stopping for nothing. Daddy got something long and thick for your ass…and I want that fat pussy in my mouth…”
The voicemail had ended two minutes ago but London was so frozen with shock that she couldn’t move enough to close her mouth. She finally removed the phone from her ear before checking to see that no one was watching. They couldn’t anyway because of the frosted glass doors but London wanted to be absolutely certain. Scooting back in her black Sterling Leather Executive Chair, London gathers the bottom of her skirt, bringing it up and around her waist. London brings her left hand down between her legs to pull the crotch of her panties to the side. She scoots to the edge of the chair so her pussy is sitting nice a plump for a perfect picture. Grabbing her cell phone, London activates her camera from her lock screen, turning it to selfie mode before aiming it as best as she could to achieve a good angle so he can see everything. London takes a few pictures, one with her lips sitting nice and fat and the other with her lips spread so that he can see how hard and poked out her clit is and how much of her creamy wetness spilled from her pussy. 
“There you go daddy,” London says before sending it off to Erik. She wasn’t happy at all that she had to leave for her meeting. London brings all the necessary material for the meeting before exiting her office for the conference room. When she entered the conference room, everyone was already in their usual spots so London quickly found hers near the front right across from the manager of CSOC, Linda Yeager. 
“Goodmorning, London, do you have the contingency plans packet for the meeting today?” 
London’s eyes swept over Linda’s appearance. Linda has her long strawberry blonde hair pulled back into a low ponytail and a navy blue women’s suit on with a white blouse underneath. Her veneer smile is wide and similar to that of a horse and her thin lips are painted red to bring out the heavy makeup look she went for today. 
“Yes,” London opens her portfolio, handing Linda the packet that she created yesterday, “I made sure that everyone received a new one before today.” 
“Excellent,” Linda stands from her seat before making her way to a podium situated in front of the conference room, “Okay...Good Morning everyone! I know today is going to be yet another stress-filled one but we all know this is a necessity,” Linda pulls out a laser pointer, aiming it at the presentation behind her, “Today we will be discussing contingency plans that the company will implement in case of a successful attack. Since cyber attackers are constantly using new tools and strategies, cyber security analysts, such as yourself, need to stay informed about the weapons out there to mount a strong defense.”
Linda went on and on for about an hour before everyone was dismissed to assist with clients to keep intruders, attackers or hackers out of networks in order to protect digital files and information systems against unauthorized access. London made it back to her office with a bottle of Fiji water, taking her seat again. Before she started any type of work, London grabs her phone from her desk drawer because she knew Erik had a response for what she sent him. Sure enough, he left her yet another voicemail. London prepared herself for a lustful ear full. 
“Baby...fuck...I just wanna eat that pussy up...I might have to come see you for lunch today...Goddamn...mmmhhh...you know eating pussy is my shit, right? Ima tear that creamy pussy up, girl...make love to that pussy with my fucking tongue...put that whole pussy in my mouth...mmmh…damn, I wish I could eat that...Look at the lips on this pretty motherfucker.. gawd dayum! I’d slurp the hell out of them lips...call me back...call me the fuck back, London.” 
London calls Erik back with no hesitation. She could feel her heartbeat in her throat almost with the amount of anticipation running through her veins. 
“London...can daddy come eat that suckable pussy for lunch?” That was his greeting as soon as he picked up. 
“In my car? baby, you know it’s an open lot...people will see,” London says with a sultry voice. 
“London... I’m tryna eat that pussy… you gon’ make me wait?” 
“I can try to get home sooner...that way, you can eat my pussy all day if you want to.” London’s tongue dragged across her upper lip, “it’s been a while, I know you miss this pretty pussy.” 
“Yeah?” Erik says, “All day baby?”
“Uh-huh, all day...any way you like…”
“That’s a mouth full of pussy ima need a lot of time to eat that shit up,” Erik chuckles, “I guess that will be dinner then, swallow all that pussy juice and slurp up that clit, yeah?” 
London ran her pink and white ombré acrylics through her copper hair. She could feel her clit poking against the crotch of her panties and her pierced nipples stiffen behind her silk top. She wanted Erik to suck on her nipples so damn bad that she thrust her chest forward like his wet mouth was wide open and waiting. London is a B cup so she could easily go without a bra. She wished she would have now because her nipples are rubbing against the silk of her shirt. They are so damn hard. 
“Ima be face first in that ass as soon as you walk through the door, London.” 
“I know, baby,” London spoke softly while using a single finger to circle her taut left pierced nipple. 
“Yes, sit that fat pussy on my face.” 
“Daddy, I gotta go,” London’s voice didn’t match her words. 
“Aight...just Gon’ leave me drooling all over myself until you get home, huh?” 
“I’m sorry, daddy.”
London knew Erik had to be fiending since they haven’t had sex in over two weeks. He would have another job lined up soon and from his words and the harsh, uneven sound of his voice, that told London everything she needed to know. Erik needed her. Part of it made London feel guilty because there were times when he would simply watch her masturbate in the tub. He would sit on the toilet after coming home from a job, his body just as tired. London would be in the jacuzzi whirlpool tub, her waterproof rabbit vibe going to town on her clit beneath the water. She didn’t mind him watching her, he didn’t even complain about her pleasuring herself instead of letting him do it. No, Erik would simply sit there with this sexy, devilish grin on his face, his eyes all low and seductive while they peered through the soapy water to take a look at how she worked that vibrator over her clit. 
That’s it baby..make that pussy cum
Mhm, good girl...you making that fat kitty cum, baby?
Then, there were the times he walked in on her riding her dildo in the shower with it mounted to the wall. These times she hadn’t expected him to be home so soon. His sudden appearance would make her feel timid to finish but Erik would insist that she continue because he really wanted to watch her. He would stand outside of the shower, his eyes focused on the way the dildo that’s an exact mold of his dick would slide in and out of her creamy pussy. The look on her face is so beautiful while she fucked herself. She just looks so helpless and useless with each stroke. Water mixed with her creamy mess would drizzle down her inner thighs with each stroke and it made his dick chub up real fast but he didn’t intervene. He knew he wasn’t around often to take care of his baby girl, she deserved to play in her pussy. 
You’re opening that pussy up beautifully, baby
Definitely A Greedy Pussy Indeed. I Love It. 
His words made her cum in an instant. 
________________________
[ Greetings Killmonger…..]
Erik heard the alert from his personal work computer all the way from the bathroom. He walked into his master bedroom with water still trickling from his body and a towel wrapped around his hips. His office was just in the other room where his laptop was located. He walked up to the laptop, tapped a series of keys and his Oracle message popped up in green letters with a black background that reminded him of the Matrix. 
“Oracle,” Erik spoke lazily before taking a seat at his desk, “another mission?”
 [Yes...do you accept the mission? ]
“...yes,” He says while stroking his goatee, “Lay out the details.” 
[ Russia’s ambassador to Turkey named Andrey G. Karlov is supposed to be attending an art exhibit two weeks from now on Monday in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Your assignment is to get to him and kill him before he reaches the art exhibit. We can’t have any witnesses. This job will require special gear and technology. We will provide a black Ducati sports bike and you have a suite booked at the JW Marriott Hotel Ankara. If the mission is successful, 3.5 million will be wired to your offshore bank account in Belize. ]
“Sounds legit...send me all the information I need on Karlov along with my hotel and I’ll be ready.” 
[ Excellent. Happy killing Mr. Killmonger….]
His laptop screen blacked out which meant that whatever information that was previously mentioned would be deleted without a trace. Erik has two weeks to prepare for his next job. He trained all day to keep up with his skills. It’s never a good look to take too much relaxation time. Standing from his desk chair, Erik makes his way into his master bedroom to rub his body down with cocoa butter body oil and slip on a pair of lounge pants. The body oil softened and conditioned his body perfectly. He slipped on a pair of black joggers and walked to the bathroom to finish his facial routine. Erik believes in taking care of himself, in a balanced diet, and in a rigorous exercise routine. Erik applies an herb mint facial masque which he leaves on for ten minutes while he prepares the rest of his facial routine. After rinsing the mask, Erik applies a moisturizer, some under-eye balm to help alleviate the dark circles forming, then finally, he sets it with a protective lotion. 
Back within his bedroom, staring out at Midtown through one of his wide, ceiling to floor windows, Erik realizes that London couldn’t make it home earlier like she promised. After their call ended, Erik decided to train so he could clear his head. He did his usual routine that involves jackknife crunches, crucifix push-ups, single leg burpees, jumping lunges, and other workouts. Then, Erik trained a little in combat; your fighting skills can always be improved. To end it, Erik let off a few rounds from his new Smith & Wesson pistol with a crimson trace sight. Erik walks down the modern stairs that ended within a corridor. He made his way towards the kitchen, turning on the lights and opening the fridge. Grabbing a box of leftover egg foo young, he places it within the microwave for 2 minutes. The front entrance to the penthouse opened and from the surveillance cameras in the kitchen Erik can see London removing her pumps before walking barefoot further into the penthouse. 
“Hey, baby,” her silvery voice soothed his ears, “I’m sorry I didn’t make it home earlier, today was yet another busy day...what are you heating in the microwave?” 
“It’s okay, I figured you were tied up,” Erik opens the microwave, grabbing the hot takeout container filled with shrimp egg foo young smothered in extra gravy, “Some Chinese I never ate yesterday, you wanna share?” 
“Yes,” London places her black Louis Vuitton tote bag on the galaxy storm granite countertop of their kitchen island before taking a seat on one of the stools. She finger combed her blunt cut bouncy copper hair away from her face while Erik grabbed two forks for them and after that two water bottles. He sat across from her before passing her a fork. London hissed from how hot the food was against her tongue before blowing it rapidly.
“Mmm...I haven’t had egg foo young in so long,” she licked her fork before going for more. 
“How was work?” Erik asks between chewing his food.
“It was alright, I’m exhausted,” London rubs her neck with her free hand, “How was your day?”
“Productive, did some training most of the time. I got an alert from my Oracle for a new job.” 
“...oh, yeah?” London swallows her food, hoping that her eyes didn’t read disappointment, “I figured it would be happening soon. When is it?”
“Within the next two weeks. It’s a big job so I gotta do some research over the next few days…” Erik reaches across the counter to rub London’s chin, “Hey...it’s two weeks from now. You got me for two weeks before I go away.”
London played with a piece of egg with her fork, “I know...I just get really lonely when you’re not with me, daddy.” 
“You sure about that? Still using the dildo I bought you?” Erik gave London a lopsided grin. 
“I am...but there’s nothing like daddy’s dick,” London laughs, before yawning, “I didn’t get any sleep last night.” 
“If you weren’t watching me take a shower and rub down with my body oil you would have,” Erik teased. 
“It’s your damn fault, you’re so sexy,” London strokes a single vein on Erik’s left hand with her pink and white ombré acrylic nail. 
“You know what I want, right?” Erik drags his tongue across the corner of the inside of his mouth to catch some food, causing a single dimple to form in his other cheek.
“Yes, let me shower first and I’m all yours,” London takes one final piece of egg foo young before grabbing her tote bag, walking around the kitchen counter to kiss Erik’s lips before walking away. Erik finished off the food before trashing it. He drank his water before tossing the bottle in recycling. Upstairs now, London is already out of the shower, her naked body seen walking into her walk-in closet to find something to sleep in. Erik brushes his teeth before joining her in the walk-in closet. London is wearing a sheer babydoll with berry-red trimming. 
“I got you something,” Erik says while walking up behind her. He picked it up in Miami for her. Reaching inside one of London’s many drawers, he pulls out a Cartier box. Erik presses his crotch against London’s curvy backside while leaning over her shoulder. London watches him open the box to reveal a stunning 18k white gold necklace with 264 brilliant cut diamonds. London’s topaz eyes locked with Erik’s onyx ones. They twinkled and it made him smile. He grabs the necklace, opening the clasp before placing it around her neck. London touches it with her delicate fingers. Erik’s thick lips lightly kiss the baby-soft skin of her cheek. 
“You look good in diamonds, girl,” He whispers to her before kissing along her neck, “icy just like your daddy.” 
“Thank you, daddy,” London fought for oxygen when Erik’s hands began to lift the bottom of her baby doll up. 
“Come sit on daddy’s face,” His nose was in her hair smelling the strands. Erik strolled back to the bedroom, laying back on the bed. London follows him, crawling onto the bed between his wide legs before climbing onto his lap to straddle him reverse cowgirl. Erik lifts the bottom of the baby doll completely up and around her waist to reveal her dangling fat pussy from behind. He takes his thumb to rub her protruding clit and labia that sat stunningly between her fat pussy lips. Lifting his thumb away, a slimy string of her fluids connected with it. Erik sucks it off before grabbing London by her thighs, roughly scooting her back towards him so that her pussy hovered over his lips. 
“Mmm, I miss this fat pussy,” Erik brings his lips to her pussy. He starts off by placing soft, lingering kisses that caused her to let out little gasps. Erik continues kissing her outer lips until her hips start oscillating back and forth. 
“Calm down, girl, daddy got you,” Erik spreads her pussy lips to reveal her cotton candy pink center, “had me wishing I could eat this pussy all day and I finally got it in my face,” Erik’s tongue poked out and he delivered stiff licks around her protruding clit. Erik could see her pussy contract with each lick and a single stream of slippery lubrication drip down to her labia. Erik dragged his thick bottom lip up to catch the fluid before sucking her labia into his mouth. His eyes closed one at a time after he got a taste of what he hadn’t tasted in two weeks. That sweet puss. 
“Yes, daddy,” London’s toes curled, “Fuck, baybeee.” 
Her drippy pussy was evidence that it missed his tongue among other things. 
“Sweet, tasty, pussy...sit on my face, London...THAT'S it…yeah, baby,” he groans, “Yummy pussy,” He sounded out longingly with a deep, alluring voice.
Erik loved spreading London’s lips with his tongue and tasting the warm sweet juices from her pussy. He loves when she puts her pussy on his face and rides his tongue. The loud smacking sounds from his slurping and licking mixed with London’s quickening breaths were sounds unheard of in two weeks. The way she was dripping in his mouth she was ready for his big black dick but all Erik wanted to do was eat. Both holes honestly. Erik wets a finger with his spit before sticking it in London’s tight, virgin booty hole. He was gonna get in that tight ass one day but for now he simply pushed his thick finger inside. It was so tight that it sucked his finger in. 
“Oooh, shit,” Erik says while watching his finger stroke London’s booty hole, “That ass is tighter than a motherfucker...you gon’ let me get in that ass?”
“I don’t know, daddy...fuck,” London looks back at Erik while he finger fucked her booty hole, “Damn, daddy, oh, my God…”
“I said, you gon’ let me get in that ass with this fat fucking dick?”
“Daddy it’s too big-
“If you’re used to this you’ll be used to my dick in no time, baby...taking that shit beautifully,” He wraps his lips around her clit and starts sucking. 
“Oh my God, daddy, that’s my spot,” London started speaking in tongues, “Yes, baby, suck on my pussy…”
Erik brings a finger from his other hand to slip inside of London’s pussy. The soft, fleshy ridges of her walls massaged his finger. He found her G spot and started massaging it with the pad of his finger. Erik started loudly sucking on London’s pussy and licking it sloppy with a lot of spit in between. Each time he licked London could feel his tongue print still lingering. 
“I’m gonna cum,” London says when she could feel her entire body spasm, “Daddy I’m cumming.” 
Erik continued sucking her clit, fingering her creamy pussy, and fingering her tight ass. He was working the hell out of her pussy that London almost collapsed. 
“You’re making my pussy cum,” Her voice grew louder, “Oh my God!!!!!” London started throwing her ass back, fucking Erik’s fingers before she started leaking all over his face. Her milky white orgasm covered his facial hair and lips. 
“Yes, daddy,” London became overstimulated and lifted her body from Erik’s. She fell back on the bed beside him, stroking her hair from her sweaty face. 
“I’m not finished...you said I could have it all I want, right?” Erik spreads London’s thighs before leaning over her body with a hankering desire. His tongue wiggles all over her pussy with exhilarating speed that strokes her clit in the right spot. London’s hips began to lift off of the bed but Erik held her in place. After licking it a few more times he went right back to slurping her up but this time he did it with fervor. Each suck came with a deep grunt. He was enjoying the hell out of her pussy on his mouth. He had London screaming his name. Erik was telling her through every suck and lick that this was his pussy and that she better cum in his fucking mouth. 
“Unnffttt!!!!!” London moaned out repeatedly. She yanked Erik’s tapered dreads, “eat this fucking pussy,” London rolled her hips, driving her pussy in Erik’s mouth, “yesssss ima cum in your mouth so fucking hard keep doing that.” 
Erik started sucking on London’s clit while swiveling his head back and forth. He was loving that pussy. 
“Suck on my pussy...suck on my pussy...sucking on my pussy…” London’s mouth unhinges, “Oh, yes, right there, ooooohh, DON'T stop...Yep...right there, daddy, uh-huh...uh-huh...uh-huh...FUCK YES...you’re making your pussy cum...FUCK!”
London fisted Erik’s hair as she climaxed in his mouth. 
___________________
The next day, London awoke to the sound of her alarm at 7:00 AM. She turned it off, sitting up in bed. Blinking her tired eyes, London rubbed her inner thighs together, feeling her pussy juices gathering in a puddle. She’s still wet from the repeated head she received from Erik last night. He ate her pussy three times before she fell asleep next to him then he woke her up at 2:00 AM with her clit in his mouth again. Spreading her thighs, London could see that her clit is still stiff and her inner folds are still engorged with arousal. The bed shifted behind her and London turned to find Erik stretching his built arms above his head. He blinked at her with low eyes before giving her a lazy smile.
“Good morning, baby,” Erik spoke before yawning, “You’re leaving me again, Princess?” 
“Duty calls,” London stood from the bed giving Erik a tantalizing view of her slim-thick frame. She leaned over the bed to kiss Erik nice and gentle, “I’ll miss you.” 
“Stay home,” Erik looked up at her through his long lashes, “We got some making up to do, girl...I ain’t have that puss in two weeks...we got some making up to do.” 
“I know, I know,” London was pulled down into the bed with Erik, “Daddy-
“Hush, Princess,” Erik’s hand made its way between her thighs, “That fat puss is still wet.” 
“Umph,” London shielded her face in Erik’s neck. 
“Nah, look at what I’m doing...London,” Erik yanked her hair, forcing her to focus on him, “LOOK.” 
Her eyes widened at his barbaric tone. The rough edge made her shiver. London’s eyes watched as Erik used two fingers to rub her clit side to side. 
“Mhm, I got that puss,” He bites her jaw, causing her to squeal, “Damn, that clit stiff...you going to work and leaving daddy home to take care of this fat ass dick by himself? Hmm?”
“Erik,” She could feel herself leaking all over his hand, “Daddy stop...I gotta go to work...fuck,” Erik pushed three fingers inside of her, “Fuckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.” 
“Princess, I plan on hitting this pussy from every angle imaginable,” Erik whispered to her before giving her sloppy kisses on her neck, “cum on my fingers, girl, you know you want to.” 
“Umph, Yes-
“I see you girl…FUCK,” Erik aggressively bites his bottom lip while he watched London cream his fingers, “Thats a good pussy, baby...such a good girl,” Erik’s fingers slip out to smack her pussy. London jumps from his lap while squeezing her thighs tight. 
“I’m gonna go take a sh-shower,” London lets out an unsteady breath while watching Erik suck her juices from his fingers. 
“Go ahead, Princess, I’ll see you in there.” 
London grabs her silk bonnet and shower cap before walking into the master bathroom. With her out of the room now, Erik grabs his cell to call London’s job. On the third ring, the receptionist picks up. 
“Thanks for calling, CSOC, this is Taylor Bianchi, how can I direct you?” 
“Hi, can I speak to Linda Yeager, please? This is Erik Stevens, a long time client of CSOC.” His eyes fall on London lathering up her soap sponge with her body wash. 
“Okay, I’ll transfer your call.”
The line clicks over and there is a brief pause before Erik could hear the phone being picked up and Linda clearing her throat. 
“Erik! How are you? Is everything alright?” 
“Yeah, everything is fine...I’m calling about London...listen, I’m requesting that she has a few days off. She’s exhausted and London needs to rest her mind and her body. With her being Lead Analyst now it’s taken a heavy load on her.”
“I understand,” Linda sighs, “I wish she would have told me she needs time off, it’s never a problem. Of course, London can take however long she needs.” 
“Thank you, Linda, I’ll let her know her vacation starts today.” Erik hangs up his cell before tossing the silk duvet back. He takes off his black joggers before walking naked to the bathroom. London has just finished washing herself a second time and now she is rinsing off. Erik opens the glass shower door, stepping inside the steamy shower, “Finished without me?” 
“Sorry, baby, I have to go to work, I’m already gonna be late.”
“Nah,” Erik closes the shower door, “I called your job, you won’t be going to work for the rest of the week.” 
“Huh?” London says with a perplexed expression.
“I requested for you to be off. Linda said it was okay.” 
“Babe…” London blushes, “You did that for me?”
“You know I got you, Princess. We can use all this time to fuck as much as we want...and I’m gonna fuck you good,” Erik approaches her with a gait that had her week in the knees.
“Okay...it’s been a minute…” London was backed into a corner, “All I’ve known is my vibe and dildo…”
“Aww, I know,” Erik takes his thumbs to twirl her pierced nipples, “That’s why I gotta remind you how daddy does it...dig that pussy out.” 
Erik snatches London’s bonnet and shower cap from her head before picking her up, walking with her until their bodies are beneath the squared shower head. Erik’s long dick began to thicken up beneath her pussy. He stuck his tongue down her throat, kissing her roughly while gripping her ass. London braced herself by wrapping her arms around Erik’s shoulders. From her lips, Erik’s kisses were on her neck now right along with his teeth leaving marks. He was so hungry for her, not even a grizzly bear could stop him from getting all of London. 
“You want daddy to fuck you in this shower?” Erik sucked on her bottom lip. 
“Please, daddy, can you fuck me in the shower?”
“You know how to ask daddy for what you want...good girl,” Erik used a little force to push London’s back against the shower wall. She sucked in a sharp breath, before raising a single brow at him. He was being rough with her. 
“Being rough with me, daddy?” She questioned sweetly because she knew that drove him crazy, “It’s okay…I know you need this pussy.” 
“You’re fucking right,” Erik growled before his mouth made its way to her erect pierced nipples, “This pussy hasn’t stained my dick in two fucking weeks...that’s way too long for me, girl...you know daddy gotta have this pussy any fucking chance I get,” With one hand, Erik places it around London’s neck, “those eyes are so sexy, baby...you better look at me just like that when I fuck this pussy,” Erik grinds his dick up against London’s pussy, “and when I cum on that pretty face.” 
“Anything, daddy, just fuck me,” London tried grabbing his dick but Erik’s hand around her neck grew tighter.
“Is that how you ask for this fucking dick? Try again,” Erik spoke through clenched teeth. 
“Can daddy fuck my little pussy, please?” London asked with a pout of her lips. 
Erik smiles devilishly, “Yeah...daddy can fuck that little Princess pussy.” 
With short, heated gasps, London watched Erik grab hold of his dick with the hand that was around her neck, rubbing it back and forth over her clit. It didn’t matter how much water covered their bodies from head to toe, London’s pussy is still drenched with her slickness. Erik strokes his dick against London’s entrance before pushing in just the tip, purposely stopping so he could watch the helpless expression on her face. 
“Yeah,” he spoke smugly, “And that’s just the tip, baby,” Erik pushes in some more with just his hips, “Damn...clenching up already? You know how this dick can be,” Erik continues without stopping this time before licking away a single tear from her face, “you know daddy gets in there, ma...this shit ain’t new.” 
“Damn,” London hisses, “You got my pussy opened up, daddy.”
“And you got my dick tickling your cervix,” Erik pulls all the way to his wide tip before pushing back inside deeply, “Like how I pull it all the way out? Huh?”
London could only nod her head.
“I asked you a fucking question, Princess,” Erik does it again. His thick, long, curved dick pushed back inside. London’s pussy is so warm and wet that it made his ass cheeks clench. 
“What the fuck did I say?” He barked out.
“If I like the way you pull it all the way out,” London’s lower lip trembled between moans. 
“Pull what out?” He asked her with narrow eyes.
“This big ass dick,” London’s head extended back, “This shit is hitting the bottom of my pussy.”
“Mhm,” Erik angles London’s hips with both of his strong hands, “That’s what the fuck I’m talking about,” He picks up speed, London’s hips loudly smacking against his, “This what you kept from me?” 
“Yes!!” London’s eyes never left his, “God...you’re stretching me.”
Their tongues flicked wildly before Erik pressed his forehead against hers. He was still watching her, his hands moving her hips in a circle while he stroked her pussy long dick style. 
“Unfff, if you keep doing that- daddy, shit,” London pouts, “Daddy it’s deep.” 
Erik wasn’t listening, he was too busy moving her hips in a multitude of angels just so his dick could reach every single part of her pussy from her walls, to her cervix, to her G spot, and then her A spot. Warm, liquid leaked from her pussy and it made Erik smile handsomely at her. 
“I got this fat pussy squirting,” Erik starts banging London’s pussy out harder, “Ima make you do that shit again...UH-HUH…nut on this fucking dick.” 
With a silent scream and her feet nudging against Erik’s back from his forceful thrusts, London gave him exactly what he wanted. Erik’s dick left her pussy and he put her down. London has to brace the wall because her knees are wobbling.
“Get down on your knees and clean this daddy dick off.” 
London was on her knees, grabbing Erik’s balls with one hand while wrapping her plump lips around the tip of his dick with just the power of her jaw muscles. 
“You better suck it good too or I’ma tear that throat up,” Erik bites his bottom lip down at London. He runs his fingers through her loose curly strands, “feeding my pretty baby some dick...see? You needed that, right?”
“Mhm,” London hums whole slurping on Erik’s dick. She had to work extra hard since his dick hadn’t been in her mouth for two weeks. She worked her jaws overtime and her head moved in a circular motion. 
“You’re such a good girl,” Erik licks his lips before leaning over, spitting on his dick. He watched London lick and suck his saliva into her mouth. 
“You sucking this dick, girl, mm,” Erik shakes his head, “You want me to unload down your throat?”
London responded with puppy dog eyes and a harder suck. Erik thrusts his hips forward suddenly, causing London to gag. She removed her mouth from his dick to take a breath but Erik grabs a fist full of her wet hair, making her look at him, “Did I tell you to stop?! You know this dick is long, girl,” Erik slapped his dick against her cheek, “Open your fucking mouth, Princess.”
London opens wide and Erik didn’t waste anytime getting back inside. His head went back while he uses London’s mouth like a pussy and started fucking her throat. London’s nails clawed his thighs. 
“Told you I had something for little ass girls like you who keep running from dick...don’t stop eating that dick up, Princess.” 
“Mmm...mmmhmm,” London blinked away her growing tears, striving to finish until his cum was down her throat. 
“I need it nice and sloppy like this. Make a mess like the good girl you are. You look so sexy when you get nasty,” Erik says between London’s sucking, “Yes baby...mmmh...fuuuckkk...make it nasty, baby, that’s it,” Erik’s face fixed into a mug, “Ughhhhhh fuuuckkkkkk, don’t ever stop sucking baby girl, make daddy bust a nut...ughhhhhhh…yes, empty me...mmmm...here it comes baby... getting the job done just drain your daddy and you never have to worry about anything...FUCK YES,” Erik’s entire body spasmed out of control. He gripped the back of London’s head before erupting deep down her throat. London welcomes her gift graciously with a flickering tongue. It was a lot of cum, definitely overdue. 
“Good girl,” Erik says between ragged gasps. 
___________________
After their shower, London and Erik had a nice breakfast that Erik prepared. Veggie omelette, turkey sausage, and a side of shrimp with cheesy grits. London did a bit of yoga, something she hadn’t done in a long while. Erik cleaned up before joining London in their personal gym for a morning workout. Erik couldn’t keep his eyes off of London stretching her body. After taking yet another long shower, London and Erik lounged around well into the early afternoon in complete nudity. Erik was supposed to start his research for his new mission but that wasn’t going to happen with the way London’s nude body was calling him. They were sitting in the living room, laid back on their luxury leather sectional sofa, music playing from the installed surround sound system. 
London couldn’t keep her eyes off of Erik’s dick sitting heavy between his toned thighs. Unable to control the urge to slurp his thick pipe into her mouth, London leans over Erik’s lap, grabbing his dick in her hand, slapping it against her tongue, and then all in one motion, his dick was back in her mouth. London arched her back, her ass sitting high in the air now for Erik to reach over and slap whenever he felt like it. She massaged his nut sack while swallowing her man’s fat dick. He loved to see her with a mouth full of his meat. All he could do was simply shake his head at her. Before he needed to remind her, London’s topaz eyes connected with his and that’s when his dick swelled to cum inspiring proportions in her throat and unloaded a fat nut that she worked for. 
“There you go,” Erik studied the way his balls tightened, “Got my nuts tight, girl, get up here.” 
London climbed into Erik’s lap, squatting over him while bracing herself on the back of the couch. 
“Nah, fuck that, grab daddy’s dick and put it in that sweet little pussy so I can fuck the shit out of you.” 
London reaches between her legs, grabs Erik’s dick, and lines it up with her snug entrance. She gyrated her hips over him before lowering herself onto his third leg. 
“Mmmm,” She locked eyes with him, “Big-ass-dick.” She tells him, even though he already knew that. 
“Tight-ass-pussy,” Erik’s thick lips practically swallowed London's, the more he devoured her with his kisses. His saliva laden tongue battled for dominance in her mouth the more he kissed. London was like putty in his arms. London didn’t see it coming when Erik’s hips elevated from the couch to fuck her. His balls slapped her on the ass with each heavy, gut-filling stroke. Her thighs shook and her toes were beginning to sweat from the hot leather. 
“Oh, shit,” Her lower abdomen clenched, “It’s deep…”
“Move your hands,” Erik ordered when London’s hands came down to press against his thighs to try and slow him up, “Move your fucking hands, London.”
“Daddy, nooooo,” She whimpered.
“Shut that shit up,” He wrenched her hands away from his thighs, “grip my shoulders...that’s it, girl,” Erik went back to fucking the shit out of her wet pussy, “I got this pussy gushing all over me and you want me to stop? You better take this big black dick...all I wanna hear is you moaning and saying how much you love daddy’s big dick, nothing else,” Erik tore his eyes away for a second so he could watch her cream his dick, “I’m beating this pussy up...shut that crying up, London.” 
“Yessssss,” London chokes up, “Daddy, pleaseeee-
“Please? Please what?” Erik wrapped his arms around London’s body, holding her in place so he could work her pussy some more, “Please what? Huh?!”
“YES!!” London buried her face in the crook of Erik’s neck. She could feel a warm sensation overpower her body and then she froze. Erik’s dick was covered in her cream all the way down to his balls. 
“Just making a mess on me, huh?” Erik sucks on London’s neck, “Daddy likes that shit...come here,” Erik lifts her from his lap. He stood up with his dick dripping cum, turning London over and arching her back. 
“Mm-mm, keep that arch,” Erik strokes his messy pipe, “Push them shoulders down...good girl,” Erik slaps London’s clit a few times before he enters her with a long exhale, “Good fucking pussy...pass me my phone.” Erik barked out. London grabs Erik’s phone from her left before passing it to Erik, “You remember how we used to do it?” Erik opens up his camera, aiming it at London’s ass, “Bring that ass up, London, I’m not gonna tell you again.”
London was holding off on purpose because she knew how deep he can get in this position. 
“How is daddy supposed to beat this pussy the fuck up if you don’t listen?” Erik pumped London’s pussy full of his fat dick with just his hips while holding the phone steady so he can capture it perfectly, “Wait until you see this shit, ummmmm, baby...widen your legs London,” Erik pushes himself in all the way, causing London to cry out, “It’s okay, Princess, here,” He did it again, “beat this pussy up…look at me.”
London looks back at Erik through her messy hair. She wished she hadn’t. Just one look at him had her squirting on his dick.
“You make that shit look so damn good...I’m spreading that pussy, baby?” 
“Uh-huh-
“What else is daddy doing?” Erik smiles.
“Making my pussy feel good,” London smiles back before her face frowned with ecstasy. 
“That’s the face I like to see...you got my dick pulsating in this pussy...got this good dick up in you all you can do is cum...I like that...too big, baby?” 
She couldn’t respond but HELL YEAH. His dick damn near pushed her stomach out of her mouth in this position. 
“Daddy…” London said so low. 
“What?!” Erik asked while hammering London’s pussy. He angled the phone so that the length of his defined body could be in view while he stroked her. London’s cheeks clapped loudly and her moans damn near blew out the speakers of his phone, “this is mine and ima remind you any and everywhere,” London gripped his dick with her walls, “yeahhhhh, make daddy bust a nut!!!”
“Fuck me!!” London grabbed the back of the couch, “beat it up, daddy!!”
“Fuck,” Erik had to drop the phone. He was about to cream all in London’s sweet, tight pussy, “Look at this arch, girl, damn...you want me to really get in this puss.” 
Erik’s mouth unhinges and his eyelids flutter. He gave London two deep, long, and filling thrusts before cumming deep inside of her. Erik slapped her ass hard a few times before pulling his dick from her pussy. 
“Come suck this big dick up,” Erik said between heavy breathing. London was on her knees in a flash, grabbing Erik’s dick up in her hand before licking their mess off. Erik twirled London’s pierced nipple with one hand. He was thickening up again and all he wanted to do was bury himself back inside her tight, creamy pussy some more. 
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sucaritra · 6 years
Text
Bāṛi - Chapter 15
Word Count: 1832
Warnings: language, anxiety, Negan
Summary: Negan teams up with some familiar faces
A/N: quick reminder - Lucas is the baby from chapter 11. also, is anyone reading this anymore? i dont get as many readers on here so im not too sure if i should continue posting here
Masterlist
The tension was thick in the cab of the truck as they drove along the road, not even Simon’s shitty country CD was playing to cut through the heavy atmosphere. Taking in a deep breath, Negan watched as the lightening cloud of smoke grew ever closer.
He wasn't worried per se, of course not. Though, he couldn't say he was entirely happy with the situation at hand. The not knowing of what they were walking into was beginning to set his teeth on edge. Not hearing back from the first team that was sent out to investigate wasn't helping matters any either.
The changing seasons could well and truly be felt now, the temperature having dropped low enough to turn the end of his nose red, his Saviors not faring any better. Negan would have much preferred to be lazing around with the wives, engaging in certain activities to bring his body temperature way up. Or better yet, a fidgety little Brit warming up his side, just as she did earlier today.
“No fucking way.”
Removing his gaze from where it was stuck on Lucille in his grip, Negan raised his head to see what had caused his right hand man to sound so incredulous.
“You've gotta be shitting me.”
Keeping his eyes on the man who wasted no time in staring daggers at him, Negan stepped out of the truck and sauntered over towards the group, his men following close behind.
“Well, well, fucking well. Prick! Fancy seeing you here! What the fuck are you doing here?”
Negan’s eyes narrowed dangerously at the man, putting his energy into focusing on Rick, as he couldn't be a hundred percent sure that he would be able to school his features if he let his sight drift to the burning wreckage directly behind Rick. Afterall, he did have an image to uphold.
“Probably the same reason you're here. Haven't found any signs of who did this, but we ain't been here long.”
Negan took great pride in the obvious distaste Rick had in having to answer to him, the control that slips from his grasp oh so quickly, all because Negan had arrived on the scene. Deciding to throw the prick a bone by saving the teasing for another time, Negan does a quick count of everyone that arrived with Rick. Most of the faces he recognises to be from Alexandria: the hot samurai lady; Rick’s redneck guard dog - Darren? Darrell?; the pregnant widow was also, surprisingly, there, along with a few more. The rest of the group was made up of Hilltoppers, with the long-haired pretty boy up front and center.
Where not too long ago Negan was slightly uneasy with bringing as many men as he did from the Sanctuary, now he was somewhat grateful that his men outnumber his employees.
Not wasting any time due to the slowly increasing numbers of walkers in the area, Negan divided the ragtag group in front of him into smaller units, consciously splitting up as many of the Alexandrians and Hilltoppers as possible, or at least the ones that looked like the biggest threats. Not willing to blindly trust Rick’s word, Negan pairs himself with him. If Rick was lying, and he had anything to do with this or his missing men, then he wanted to be close enough to let Lucille work her magic.
Once the teams started to spread out and look for any signs of the perpetrators, the Saviors consciously keeping an eye out for any signs of their missing men, Negan gave in and took a good look at the burning wreckage before him. The damage was so severe that the man had no idea what the building was before it went up, the fire having charred the rubble left behind and the explosion leaving a significant crevice surrounding it, making any attempts to get closer highly risky.
Dragging his eyes towards Rick and Fat Joey, he motioned them to follow as he lead the way towards a convenience store that, like all the buildings in the area, had its windows shattered, no doubt from the explosion.
After taking down a couple of the dead and doing a quick sweep, the trio took their time picking apart the store, searching for any signs of life or of anything valuable.
“Rick,” Negan sing songed, “I couldn't help but notice all yer little friends with you today. I fucking hope you didn't leave my little goldmine you call home with no one to protect it. And that little one-eyed psycho kid of yours doesn't count as protection.”
Clenching his jaw, Rick tried to keep the contempt out of his voice as he replied, “We’ve had an influx of survivors lately, plenty of people to help protect Alexandria while we're away.”
“Is that right? New residents. Huh.”
Letting Rick’s words register in his mind, Negan felt a cold tendril of dread wrap around his heart, something that he hadn't felt in a long fucking time.
“Ya know, Rick, it’s funny you should say that. We've had a whole fucking mob of survivors showing up on our doorstep over the course of a few months.”
Negan watched Rick narrow his eyes in suspicion, before replying, “The Hilltop’s had some new citizens too. That's quite the coincidence.”
Before he could reply, Negan’s walkie went off, informing him that one of the teams had found something. Making sure Rick and Fat Joey were following, Negan made his way towards what appeared to be an indoor carpark with the open spaces in the walls boarded up. Before he could step inside, he was once again interrupted by wis walkie.
“Negan?”
The signal was pretty shitty considering how far away they were from the Sanctuary, but Negan would’ve recognised that accent anywhere, even through all of that static.
“Maria?”
Even Rick managed to pick up on his surprise but it was too unexpected for Negan to try and hide it. Where the fuck did she get a walkie from?!
“You ……back ……-ling them……”
Negan strained to hear her through the crackling of the reception but he had no luck.
“Sweetheart, need you to try that again, you're breakin’ up on me.”
It seemed as though all three men held their breath as they waited for a response, hearing nothing in return.
“Babygirl, can you hear me? You still there?”
Nothing.
Negan didn't leave her with a walkie, meaning she must have gone out of her way to get one just to reach him. That did not bode well for the Sanctuary.
Putting on his mask of confidence to hide his growing worry, Negan resumed making his way into the carpark.
“The fuck are you two waiting for? Let's go, pussies.”
Rick knew all of that swagger was just for show, but he wasn't stupid enough to challenge Negan on it and instead followed behind him after sharing a look with Joey.
The carpark consisted of the ground floor, plus four levels above that. The ground floor was littered with freshly killed walkers, no doubt the work of one of the other teams, and as soon as they made their way up to the first level all three men were on high alert as they saw the first signs of someone making this place home.
Tin cans on wires that must have once been intricately set up as a survivalist alarm system were now laying uselessly on the ground, as well as other knick knacks and homemade devices that would have alerted anyone residing up here of any intruders or stray walkers.
Continuing on their way, the men reached the second floor, taking in the scene before them in shock.
Negan was eerily reminded of the communal living area back at the Sanctuary as he took in the rows upon rows of bedspreads and sleeping bags laid out across the floor. Making his way through, he took note of the things that were left behind, shit no one actually needed anymore. Stepping over books and empty food packets, the trio continued on to the third floor where they met up with Simon and a few Saviors and Alexandrians.
Again, the floor was covered in bedding and personal artifacts.
The group started picking its way through the clutter for anything useful as Simon gestured for Negan to follow him.
“You're gonna wanna see this.”
Simon lead Negan to a small box that was set up near a sleeping bag. Peering into the box, Negan used his gloved hand to grab the only two things in there. The first was a babygrow that was covered in dried blood. Negan breathed a quiet sigh of relief to find that there was no blood on the inside. The second item was a soft, blue, baby blanket. Simon lifted one of the corners and presented it to Negan, looking somewhat disturbed.
The embroidery was not the best work, considering this person stitched it with the dead roaming around just a stone's throw away, however the white was easy enough to read on the blue background - Lucas.
Negan, for once, was speechless as he tried to make sense of all of the random bits of information he received in the span of less than half an hour.
“You guys! You need to see this!”
“Oh what the fuck is it now?!”
Negan didn't know how much more fucked up info, that didn't actually make a lot of sense, he could take, but made his way up to the fourth and final floor anyway, hearing a slight crackle come from his walkie as he does so.
Negan didn't have time to take in the supplies located on this floor, instead, the sight of Rick’s face as he looked over a piece of paper he was just handed made him head directly towards him.
He hadn't seen that look on his face since the night of the lineup when he officially introduced himself and Lucille to Rick and his group.
“Negan?! You there?”
Hearing that sweet voice come through much clearer, Negan reached for his walkie with one hand whilst simultaneously snatching the paper from Rick with the other, almost catching him with Lucille in the process. He brought the walkie to his lips, though words seemed to fail him as he looked at what happened to be a map in his hand.
“Negan? If you can hear thi……to get back right now……I don't know what to do……We need you.”
Negan stared down at the little crosses strategically placed on the map. The little crosses that marked the Sanctuary, Hilltop, Alexandria and even the Kingdom. There were detailed routes on the most efficient ways to get to each community, details on the size of each one and even what types of supplies they had.
“Negan? Please…“
Maria’s broken voice was enough to break Negan away from that troubling map, quickly shoving it into Simon’s hands before replying.
“I'm right here babygirl, don't you worry. We’re coming back darling.”
tagging: @neganisking @backseat-negan
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simonhawketts · 6 years
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Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been evaluating a copy of ON1 Photo Raw with the thought of switching to it from Lightroom and I’ve written this post so I could share my thoughts.
First some background.
I didn’t actually decide to look around for a Lightroom replacement because I’m dissatisfied with Lightroom. I received a promotional email from ON1 about a discount being applied at the moment because a new version has just been released, and I thought I’d download the 30 day trial to see if it looked interesting. It was only after I’d played about with it for a while that I started to seriously think that it may be a good move, and to be honest this was driven by cost more than any other factor.
I’ve been subscribed to the Adobe Photographers plan for about 5 years now and over that time I’ve paid over £500 to have access to the latest version of Lightroom and Photoshop. Now that is actually quite a good deal if you use it all the time, but for the most part I only use Lightroom. On my rather elderly iMac (2011 i5 version with 12G ram) I can hardly run Photoshop because of the resources it needs, and anyway I only occasionally want to do pixel level editing. In contrast, the ON1 Photo Raw 2018.1 version is about £60 to purchase the software and own a perpetual licence to use it. Even if I purchase an upgrade version every year that is still about half the price.
My ON1 Photo Raw evaluation
So with my reasons discussed, here is my evaluation of ON1 Photo Raw. First thing to note is this is just my personal assessment after a few days trial – it may be that I have things setup incorrectly and some of the negatives are simply that I haven’t found the correct way to do things but for what it’s worth these are my findings.
Some ON1 Photo Raw screenshots
Full Screen preset Browse
Simple Photo compare mode
Browsing Photos
Develop module
Creating a Panorama
Lens Correction panel
Develop options
ON1 Photo Raw Negative Points
First I’m going to mention the few negative points I’ve found in my short evaluation of ON1 Photo Raw. I’ll add some detail for some of these points in the text that follows, but I’ll just say that for me none of them are real no-go, deal breakers. They are simply annoyances which I’ve listed in order of most annoying to least annoying
No history view to allow rollback to any point
No Hierarchical collections
Can’t select a lens correction if it isn’t detected
Doesn’t work with two monitors
Mouse wheel doesn’t scroll filmstrip although it works in thumbnail view
The History view is one of those things in Lightroom which I don’t use often, but when I do it is pretty important. Every time you make a change in Lightroom a restore point is added to the history view and you can step back to that point at anytime. When I tried to find the same view on ON1, I found it doesn’t exist. It is possible to remove all the edits and even to remove all the changes applied in any of the individual modules, but I would rather be able to step back to any point in the process.
I find hierarchical collections to be a good way of organising my photos, although I can live without them. For example, all my pictures of vintage cameras which I’ve taken for the vintage camera reviews on this site are arranged in collections underneath a top level collection called Vintage Camera Pictures. This makes it easer to find any particular set, and also removes clutter from the collection list.
The lens correction pane in ON1 is both better and worse in my opinion. One of the things I didn’t like with Lightroom was that I always had to apply the lens correction manually; Lightroom would detect the lens manufacturer from the metadata, but I then had to select the lens. Now that may have been me not using Lightroom correctly, but I could never find a way of making it automatic. ON1 Photo Raw does exactly what I want in that situation and automatically applies the correction if the option to do that is turned on. Unfortunately however, if I’m shooting with a manual, vintage lens so the metadata isn’t embedded in the photo, I can’t select it even if it is in the database of lenses. Instead I have to create a manual lens correction profile and then apply that.
The other two points about multiple monitors and the film strip scrolling are really just minor irritants.
ON1 Photo Raw Positive Points
These are features of ON1 Photo Raw which I find easy, useful or convenient to use and I’ve listed as Positive points. Again I’ll give some more details after the list, but unlike the negatives, this list is not in order of importance to me.
One application for both cataloguing and pixel editing
Full screen preview of Presets
Don’t need to move photos – import just seems to register the photo
Works with cloud based storage
Has proper layer editing
Lens corrections applied automatically
Built in HDR and Panorama support
Includes many training videos and documents in the introductory offer
Quick and simple Photo Compare (but Lightroom can also compare of course)
Price
I said above that I don’t do much pixel level editing and that I find Photoshop difficult to run on my Mac. Well, I suspect that the difficulty in running Photoshop is one of the reasons why I don’t do those type of edits; since it takes so long to get a Photoshop session running and it’s so slow when it is running, I just don’t bother doing it. This is one of the advantages of ON1 Photo Raw – all the editing features are built into the one program and you simply switch modules to use them.
Full Screen preset Browse
I believe that ON1 started out writing plugins for Lightroom and Photoshop which apply filters and presets to images. If that is true, they certainly supply a lot of preset effects and film simulations in their own ON1 Photo Raw package which is good, but one of the best things I find is that I can see all the possible pre-sets applied to the image I’m working on as a full screen, browse window without actually applying them to the photo.
This is shown here and also in the gallery above, where you can see a whole series of film simulations applied to an image I took in York a few years ago. With examples this size (and the size can be adjusted with the browse image size slider) it’s easy to see if you want to apply any of the filters.
Probably the most important thing for me is a the next two items on the list. There is no need to import photos and it’s possible to use cloud storage systems. At the moment, my Mac has about 200G of its 1000G free, but I’m having to constantly move images to external disks in order to recover disk space.
With ON1 Photo Raw, I can move all of the raw images off the Mac and on to a separate USB drive and then just open the images directly from the drive when I want to. The images don’t need to be imported into the editor – it just opens the files from their current location and writes the changes it makes to a database so it keeps track of them. It is also possible for that location to be cloud based storage, although I haven’t worked out if that is actually pulling the files in from the cloud, or just using the local copy – I may try that later to find out.
The other points in the list above have either been discussed, like the Lens Correction, or are fairly obvious, but one other fairly important item included with ON1 Photo Raw is a whole raft of training videos which are included in the package. The few I’ve watched are pretty well put together and show a lot of how to get the most out of the software.
At the moment I’m still in the process of evaluating the software, but for an amateur photographer like me it seems a more cost effective solution than using the Lightroom / Photoshop option.
Evaluation of ON1 Photo Raw as a Lightroom user Over the last couple of weeks I've been evaluating a copy of ON1 Photo Raw with the thought of switching to it from Lightroom and I've written this post so I could share my thoughts.
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lorrainecparker · 7 years
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ART OF THE CUT: BLADE RUNNER 2049 with Joe Walker, ACE
I have interviewed Joe Walker, ACE, three times previous to this (in addition to hanging out once with him for a trendy lunch in LA this summer while he was finishing up Bladerunner 2049. I hope you have time to dig into his previous wisdom from his work on the films 12 Years a Slave (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), Sicario (for which he should have been nominated for an Oscar), and Arrival (for which he received another Oscar nomination). He has a lengthy filmography going back to his days editing documentaries and dramas at the BBC.
This interview was nearly two hours long and we recorded it on a Sunday morning while Joe sat near a lovely canal in Amsterdam, where he is busy cutting Steve McQueen’s next film, Widows. We are waiting for the studio to approve some personal photos, screenshots and artwork. Please check back on this interview in a few days to see even more visuals from the movie.
(This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber. The entire interview was transcribed within 20 minutes of completing the Skype call. Thanks to Martin Baker at Digital Heaven)
HULLFISH: Joe, as usual with your work, I loved Bladerunner 2049. I originally saw it in Mumbai, India where I was doing some training at Digital Film School and then I went to go see it again yesterday. There was some international editing in the Mumbai version that I’m pretty sure that you and Denis would not have approved of, so I needed to see a proper cut. The Mumbai version even had a makeshift intermission that was cut smack into the middle of one of the most crucial scenes in the movie. But there was no intermission in the version I saw in a Chicago multi-plex.
WALKER: The first assembly of the film was nearly four hours and for convenience sake and – to be honest – my bladder’s sake, we broke it into two for viewings.  That break revealed something about the story – it’s in two halves. There’s K discovering his true past as he sees it and at the halfway mark he kind of loses his virginity. (laughs) The next morning, it’s a different story, about meeting your maker and ultimately sacrifice – “dying is the most human thing we do”.  Oddly enough both halves start with eyes opening. There’s the giant eye opening at the beginning of the film and the second when Mariette wakes up and sneaks around K’s apartment, the beginning of the 1st assembly part 2. We toyed with giving titles to each half but quickly dropped that.  But what does remain is that there’s something of a waking dream about the film.  That’s a very deliberate choice in terms of visuals but also the kind of pace they were striving for on set and the hallucinatory feel in the cut – it’s the kind of dream where you tread inexorably closer to the truth.
HULLFISH: I don’t remember a lot of recent films having an intermission. The only one I can think of in the last couple of years was Hateful Eight.
WALKER: David Lean had them, of course. Ryan’s Daughter has one and a grand musical suite opening the film to boot, which plays over an image of rippling curtains. I also seem to remember Gandhi had an intermission. Very civilized.
HULLFISH: I really loved the tension of the opening scene, that there’s no music. It doesn’t give away anything.
WALKER: That’s the scene with Sapper Morton where K goes out to ‘retire’ an outdated Replicant played by Dave Bautista, a scene dropped from the original Blade Runner. If you put music on it, it somehow becomes less tense. It just felt that all the tension we needed was in the dialogue, the different sizes of the men, and that pan of soup boiling on the stove. Without music, you sense the quietness of the place and that helps sell the kind of barren landscape of the film, a world without natural life. Everything is designed by Wallace, even the maggots. Late in the process, I was sitting next to the producer, Andrew Kosove, and he made a comment which I thought was brilliant about the opening line of the film, K saying “I hope you don’t mind me taking the liberty. I tried not to drag in any dirt”.  Andrew said it’s a kind of mission statement for the production – revisiting a much-loved 35 year old film and hoping not to contaminate it.
HULLFISH: One of the other things that I noticed is that you preface that scene with Sapper actually seeing that someone has arrived. So the tension isn’t in whether K is going to jump him unexpectedly. While he’s farming he looks up to see K’s spinner arriving. So when he comes into the house the audience knows along with him that someone is there which I think it adds to the tension. So just one little shot plays into the whole rest of the scene.
WALKER: Yes. And then deliberately keeping K hidden from view, this skinny vampire. I loved holding on Dave Bautista’s back, at the sink – that colossal head, those ears.  When Sapper finally turns to face K and puts his tiny glasses on, I think you start to feel, like K, tremendous sympathy for Sapper.  It helps inform the idea of what a foul job K has, and that he doesn’t take pleasure in ‘retiring’ anybody.
We trimmed out a chunk of the previous spinner scene – a deliberately anachronistic conversation between K and Joi designed to make them seem like newlyweds. Cutting this helped simplify the purpose of the scene to simply being K on a mission, heading across a barren landscape.
HULLFISH: Part of that scene with Joi still exists in the movie where you see him waking up in the car…
WALKER: Yes.  Another allusion to dreams.
HULLFISH: I’m always interested in movies that are so heavily VFX, if that’s challenging?
WALKER: There were over 1150 VFX shots in the movie – so for Editorial a big challenge for my temp team (led by Javier Marcheselli and Russell Sadeghpour) was creating sophisticated templates of at least a thousand of them.  Denis, Roger Deakins and VFX Supervisor John Nelson’s approach to the VFX shots was to ground them in real footage. For example, the aerials over the abandoned solar farms are shot at a real location, a thermosolar power station near Seville.
VFX had to remove reflections of sunlight and clone the reflectors out to the horizon. The approach to Sapper’s farm was Iceland. An insanely cluttered aerial of Mexico City became Los Angeles. There were a few CGI sequences conceived in the cutting room, such as that vertiginous shot tumbling down to the Atari sign, or the sequence where K returns to the abandoned LA Cathedral, but for the most part things were tethered to reality and the majority of the sets were real builds, with cityscapes visible through the windows. Very little green screen, maybe to extend something into the horizon or capture some supplementary element. I’m sure it makes a huge impact on the actors in how they inhabit that world, but also in editing terms there’s far less delay before you can properly decide how long to hold a shot.
HULLFISH: It changes the way you feel about the scene as you’re cutting when it’s “real.”
WALKER: Yes, indeed. Shooting took place in Budapest and most of these sets were a two minute walk from one another. For example, the ‘Trash mesa’ set was a stone’s throw from Sapper Morton’s. There was a shot where originally K leaves Sapper’s farm and picks up a little maggot as he walks towards his spinner before the reverse shot shows us the farmhouse ablaze. There was a giant green screen marking off the horizon. Over the top edge of the screen you’d see Hungarian stuntmen being yanked 40 feet in the air by crane, while on the Sapper side, the American Humane Association were on hand to make sure that the maggot was properly rested.  We could see all this from my cutting room, one of the more surreal moments of the shoot.
So much was shot for real.  For example, the three-some scene, there were no green screens, no elements. The actors would run the same shot twice with the same choreography. One complication from that was that you had two Ryan Goslings in the shot and two backgrounds of the apartment and you had to pick which to use. There was a lot of craft involved in finessing that. But the fundamental thing was that they could get instant gratification on set by seeing blended images and go “yeah, we got it”.  During the shoot, my cut used 50/50 blends and I did a few motion effects and picture-in-pictures position shifts to improve the actors’ sync with each other. Then my temp team would roto everything in order to finesse it in Nuke.
Because of the difference in the actors’ faces, if you matched the right eye up, the left eye would be out of register, making three eyes in all, a spidery quality. Denis chose to enable accidents. For two seconds Joi and Mariette’s choreography will be identical and the next they’ll be adrift, which creates a kind of ghost in the machine that we cherished.  A fantastic accident I really loved – I don’t know whether Denis sees it as a failure or not but I certainly see it as an unexpected treasure – was a moment where the two women walk behind K’s back to take his coat off and he no longer has eye contact with them. That was one section where their body positions never sync’d well and despite every trick in the Effects palette I couldn’t get a match.  In the end, the VFX House D-Neg used an animated CGI Joi for that shot. It’s subtle, but it feels like the program conserves energy when she’s not being watched – she defaults to something more robotic.  A beautiful happy accident.
HULLFISH: Did you pick performances that were completely realistic for this “holographic person” or did you attempt to interject some sense of artificiality?
WALKER: This is meant to be the most sophisticated hologram technology available and at one point K says both “she’s very realistic” and “you are real to me.” So we always went with realistic performances from Joi, who in any event was played by an actress who looks so perfect you begin to doubt she’s real. In my first cuts, I tried freezing her image for like nine frames when she was interpreting a remark from K that might have drained her processor.  The visuals shut down just for a nanosecond and then skip forward and resume. But it felt corny. There was enough to suggest that she’s artificial, like her rapid costume changes and the rain effect on her hand. For example, I exploited those beats on the rooftop with Roger Deakins’ fabulous strafing lighting where she’s momentarily see-through.
HULLFISH: I just felt a bit of artificiality in the timing of Joi’s first lines, when you haven’t even seen who K is talking to and you get the impression it might be a real person and it might be some kind of “Siri-like” program.
WALKER: This is a long established game between them. He’s coming home and settling into a rhythm with his Digital Companion. And that sort of informed the choice of timing which is just a little off. There were two or three interventions in the cutting room – for example, once we settled on having Frank Sinatra singing ‘Summer Winds’ in the background we wrote a very Siri-esque comment for her: “Did you know, this song was released in 1966 on Reprise Records? It was number one in the charts.” It’s the idea of barely concealed traffic reports or weather predictions. We liked the fact that it said something charming about K’s character that he’s customized Joi to a place where I suspect 99 percent of the customers will not have taken her. He’s gone for the most exotic available options, including presumably her Cuban accent. He wouldn’t have gone for the kind of Jessica Rabbit version of Joi which is the technology’s default setting. Another change we made, just before the seawall sequence, was to replace her voice in the giant pink Joi incarnation of her character. It was a much more ‘sex kitten’ voice. That’s Mary’s voice, my very versatile 1st Assistant Editor, who recorded a temp voiceover which stuck.  There to drive home that K has permanently lost that personal history with his customized Joi.
HULLFISH: I’ve talked to some editors who’ve said that their shows, as a rule, do not ever use pre-laps in dialogue between scenes. There’s a great pre-lap of dialogue going into K’s first baseline test. You hear him going through the baseline test for quite a while before we actually see him in the room where he’s finally in sync. Was that as scripted? Or did you create that pre-lap?
WALKER: One of the very first things I did was lay guide tracks on the pre-viz, so from the start I made this a pre-lap. The first voice you hear is the interrogator saying “Officer KD6-3.7” and I felt it was important to put that on K’s face to hammer home that he is a numbered replicant and what that means to him. I love pre-lapped sound. One of the editors I learned a lot from was Tariq Anwar who worked at the BBC for a long time. I was lucky enough to be his dubbing editor on ‘March on Europe’.  He often created beautiful pre-laps with either a sound effect or a voice ahead of the picture cut.  The new scene would come to fruition at exactly the right time. It felt beautifully cinematic, the soundtrack is in sync for most of the film but sometimes it diverges and you entertain two separate thoughts, like patting your head and rubbing your tummy. In Blade Runner, the pre-lap helped make the actual interrogation when we cut to it, a very violent assault. I was able to spread out the first part which is a kind of slower paced introductory section where K repeats the ‘Pale Fire’ mantra: ‘Cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.” So when we cut into the interrogation room we join it in the middle of a quickfire assault.
By the way, this quickfire section was not scripted that way, it’s something Ryan Gosling brought to the party. Apparently, there’s an acting technique to help learn complex dialogue, where you answer hundreds of questions about each word. That’s a way of grappling with complex memory tasks like Shakespeare, I imagine, it just penetrates the deeper tissue of memory. It was great to edit.  Although it didn’t end up in the film there was an extended version of this scene which is ten minutes long.  There were some other really interesting baseline experiments, to me anyway. I did a version of the second baseline test, the one where he’s really under pressure and his identity is collapsing, but I tried to use this as the place where we finally reveal visuals of his memory, far later than planned.  That stayed up until the 7th or 8th version of the fine cut. All these harsh questions from the interrogator: “When you’re not performing your duties, do they keep you in a little box?” or “What’s it like to be filled with dread?” These were used to provoke little synaptic memories which we glimpse piecemeal rather than as a continuous sequence. Those scenes were always fantastic material to play with, a great spin on the Voigt-Kampff test. It became a rhythmic motif like a percussion solo that we really tried to exploit more.
HULLFISH: You mentioned that scene on the rooftop. It had a great deliberate pace as Joi is discovering her new freedom. Talk to me about trying to maintain that beautiful pace as you’re under pressure to cut down a four-hour movie.
WALKER: Denis doesn’t like deleted scenes on BluRays and I tend to agree. There’s a reason why you chop scenes out and although I respect the fact that there’s some fan interest out there, we wanted to make one definitive cut of Blade Runner 2049. In reality, there weren’t so many whole scenes to cut because it’s a story that develops piece by piece – remove any substantial piece and the edifice collapses. So we had the challenge of bringing down the length but if you merely cut things faster so that they’re just “fast” then the whole film motors on without the audience. The right version is the one that allows you time to peer into the souls of the character, interspersed with some very dynamic moments of destructiveness. We were also trying to create a dreamlike quality. There are takes where Ryan walked through the desert faster but the shots that sang this song more clearly were the ones where K slowed his pace.
So what could we cut?  Firstly, a lot of connective tissue and bridges.  For example, there was a really magnificent aerial sequence when K and Joi fly to Las Vegas. It was one of those rare occasions when it was raining on the hills outside Las Vegas, God’s contribution to Blade Runner 2049. But it just felt more impactful to go straight to the pilot fish’s view of this strange landscape and hear K’s distorted commands, to skip ahead of the audience for a while. For the vast bulk of the tightenings, we pared the dialogue down to the minimum amount you could get away with, allowing us to play the beats that remained very intensely.
I had a great experience watching the IMAX version of the film in a screening very late in the process – we were more used to the 2.39 aspect which we worked with for over a year.  The IMAX was a revelation because while the big vistas and cityscapes were even more dizzy, the dance between the actor’s eyes is also way more intense. Because of the sheer size of the screen you just push away the peripheral information a little bit when you watch and zero in on the actor’s expressions. That was a very enjoyable screening.
HULLFISH: This is our fourth conversation. In our first conversation, I quoted something to you about the fact that if you trim a film down too much, it just turns into information and is no longer entertainment. The next time you talked, you remembered that quote and quoted it back to me. Now we’re back to the same idea. If you trim too much, the film loses its heart.
WALKER: You wouldn’t believe the vast amount of effort and tricks we perform to speed up the flow whilst trying to preserve what’s so special about the pace of the dailies. Roger’s lighting effects often require a certain amount of time to play such an enjoyable role in the experience. The Wallace building, for example, had this slowly moving artificial sunlight. It just felt such a groovy idea, artificial sunlight following the characters around the most sophisticated office on earth, owned by a blind man. That means that a shot like Luv walking down a corridor, which in a normal drama you’d probably hold for three or four seconds, but here with slowly shifting caustics you’d be decimating a world-class cinematic moment if you didn’t give that the necessary slot. I guess the choices are about picking which moments to sell and which to buy. And that made it a really interesting edit.
HULLFISH: You’ve said in the past that time is your superpower.
WALKER: Certainly not the amount of it in the schedules. (laughs).
HULLFISH: There’s a great cut of K seeing the date on the tree to the furnace scene. Was it scripted that way? And how do you determine that perfect moment to make the cut in time?
WALKER: It’s kind of a little informed by working on Arrival and exploiting the freedom to flash to something to reveal an inner thought. It wasn’t planned or scripted. It was something I chipped in as a way of underlining the power of the memory prompted by the clue when none of us at that stage can tell its significance. If K had a big reaction to the clue alone, it would perhaps have looked too big. There are a few flashes elsewhere – the same thing happens when he’s describing the memory to Joshi, and Deckard also has a brief memory, of Rachel.  That one we talked about a lot.  We needed to remind the audience or inform a new one what Rachel looked like, how she moved, which we ultimately fixed by pinning a shot of Rachel walking towards Deckard from the first movie to a moment of intense concentration on Harrison’s face in the second. I hope we got away with this perilous choice by peppering the film earlier with moments where we see what people are thinking. Arrival really taught me the power of the Kuleshov Effect . It’s a powerful tool not to be abused. But it’s there in your armory, so if it tells your story better, you have to go there.
HULLFISH: And if you’re going to do it throughout a film, you have to use it relatively early in the movie, because otherwise the first time you do it is too much of a shock to the audience.
WALKER: Exactly, the inscription on the tree and the cut to the furnace was the perfect chance to set that in motion, early in the story.
HULLFISH: There’s a jump cut in a scene in Bladerunner 2049 with Robin Wright’s character in K’s apartment and she’s having a drink and says, “This breaks the world.” and then there’s a jump cut to a later moment in the same apartment. This is back to you saying time is your superpower. It’s a break in time.
WALKER: What makes it work, I suppose, is the big change in shot size, and the contrast between some qualities in the performance. We go from a tense charged performance of Joshi taking a drink in a close-up and then you cut to a wide shot with a different body language that suggests K’s been stuck there for a while out of politeness to his boss who’s in no hurry to leave. A nice time compression.
It’s worth talking about the beginning of that scene in K’s apartment, an even bigger compression.  It originally started with a few beats of K using a device that zooms into pictures of the tree and the photo of Freysa holding the baby.  Then there’s a knock on the door and a kind of paranoid beat because K isn’t expecting anybody.  He goes to the door and Joshi barges in saying “Coco’s dead”. In tightening up the film we noticed a kind of repetitive pattern to scenes, each had a beginning, middle, and end which made for an unhappy global pace to a film. By overlapping her dialogue over the last shot of Coco’s death – Luv dropping Rachel’s bones into her bag, like a deranged Audrey Hepburn shopping in Beverly Hills – we’re meeting the new scene in the middle. It’s odd how many scenes in films, not just Blade Runner, but all films, start with a door and end with a door. I don’t know whether that points to the theatrical origins of film, or whether it’s just a common way to shape a scene. In many cases, of course, doors can be phenomenally loaded symbols – of hidden secrets or paths disguised. I’m no door-ist, but if there are too many scenes bookended by them, the editor’s duty is to kick them down.
HULLFISH: That was one example of choosing to create a pre-lap.
WALKER: Yes.  As an audience member hopefully you just feel as though the tectonic plates are moving faster and the thread is tugging hard.
HULLFISH: You had this same comment about doors in our interview Sicario and Kirk Baxter also talked about the difficulty of doors in editing Gone Girl. Sounds like it should be somebody’s Master’s thesis.
WALKER: Yes, or perhaps it’s time to make a version of Christian Marclay’s ‘Clock’ entirely made of doors.  Having said this, there’s a lot of really great doors in Blade Runner and I think we preserved the very best of them.  K entering the door into the forest in Ana’s lab; the giant door to the archive which Luv wrenches off its hinges. One of my favorites is after K’s boss tells him he’s doing fine without a soul. That’s a beautiful moment where K gently closes the door behind him and walks away – K’s melancholy was so palpable in that boxed off framing of the glass panel.  It was a beat we could have easily shed, but we pinned our masts to it. I’m no door fascist.  But you have to sell some to buy others.
HULLFISH: That’s a great expression and very true. I loved that “don’t need a soul” moment. There’s a sadness in him. You need to rest on that moment, right?
WALKER: We had to be very careful about which moments really worked and which didn’t. Some sequences just needed a little time to work, and as soon as you cut them down they don’t work anymore. For example, when he’s in the orphanage there’s a moment when he and the story come to a dead end. The book identifying adoptive parents has been destroyed. Then K looks down and spots an ashtray in the shape of a horse (Blade Runner aficionados will know the importance of animal imagery). K walks back to an area in an abandoned ship where he’s already sensed something puzzling and he’s drawn deeper towards it, into the dark, into the subconscious. The music starts to kind of tip downwards as he treads towards a clue that’s going to change everything. We tried tighter versions of the beginning of it and it just looked like he was lost. You have to have that ‘Aah! Bisto’ moment, as the Brits say. (There used to be an advert of kids who smell gravy being cooked for Sunday lunch and follow the wavy scent home). You had to have that moment.  Take it out and it just becomes an accident.  If you take your time, you know there’s something going on, even if you don’t know what it is yet.
HULLFISH: RIght. And the movie actually seems LONGER by cutting it because you don’t have the meaning, but you still have the rest of the scene taking up space.
WALKER: That’s it. Put very well and quite a lot shorter than me.
HULLFISH: The DNA scene — what I call the DNA scene — is where K is looking through this thing that looks like a Moviola. And Joi appears to be with him and they’re interacting and overlapping similarly to the threesome scene at his apartment. Let’s talk about the complexities and decisions of working on that scene.
WALKER: Again it was shot the same way as the threesome with seven or eight takes of the two actors together and then K on his own, in situ, no green screens, and then again with Joi on her own. So I’d end up with maybe 7 takes of each version to pick from and I could just do a 50/50 merge with a little bit of picture-in-picture adjustment for positioning. In the days where roto is not prohibitively expensive, this way is relatively easy.
Actually, the big ticket item for me in that sequence is the machine itself. That was a very early example of saying the sound needs to participate in the scene. Denis briefed Ryan Gosling that it should be like switching on a snow plow – or was it a jalopy? – they are both Canadians so they understand each other no matter what.  Turning on this machine with all its levers should make it whir and click and grind into action. A great friend of mine Bernie Leinfelder – she’s a voice artist in LA and sometime assistant to Werner Herzog – provided us with a depressed Japanese voice for the machine.  Denis asked for this, he wanted to fill the soundtrack with hypnotic voices trying to lull the population into dreamlike states. On the rooftop scene, you hear them very clearly.
For the Denabase screen, there was a really great company Territory who provided the on-set graphics. But in this case, we just wanted to push it further in post and I think Denis let me kind of get my fingers stuck into that one because I suppose a viewing machine is such an obvious thing for an editor to get over-excited about. I remember being in your ‘hood, Chicago for a day, for a secret test screening and I was scribbling little diagrams and sending them back to Russell Sadeghpour, the Editorial VFX designer to develop. The general brief is that we’re in a post-digital world where the analog world has sort of taken over again in some hyper-developed way.  In the case of the Denabase machine, we were harking back to the weird machines languishing in libraries, or in editing warehouses, like the twin-headed PicSyncs which were a strange monster indeed. In every BBC cutting room, the typical workhorse was a motorized viewing machine called an ‘Acmade Compeditor.’ It had one ground glass viewing screen where you watched the picture and three audio tracks, and a fourth audio track you could disengage to spin the mag track down to find the sound effect you needed. Something like that mixed with library microfilm machines informed our Denabase graphic design. Russell did this beautiful job of making these celluloid records click a little bit as they settled into position.
We went to all this effort because fundamentally it’s a scene of somebody looking at a screen and we all struggle to make those exciting. The curse of modern day storytelling is that too often the characters are gawping at screens and blabbing on cell phones, something we all head to the cinema to escape. So one has a duty to make them as interesting as possible. Mr. Robot, for example, so much of that show includes computer screens, but what a great job they do with them. They convey enough information for a lay audience to understand what’s going on but with enough deeply researched information to keep the real hackers on board. They’re very free pieces of editing. They break continuity and time. And they condense things beautifully, it dances in some way.  I’m always marvelling at how well they do that.
HULLFISH: I did an interview with the editor on that.
WALKER: On a tangent, but one of the things I love about that show is the use of contrary framing. It’s like the camera’s panned to the extreme and pushed the eye-line off the edge of frame. You end up getting that bizarre editing consequence that heads are often cutting from one side to the other which jerks your audience’s eyes each time you cut. I edited a film shot like that a long time ago, called Tabloid where we really got so much more impact from the sets and the décor, especially in widescreen.  But I remember the pressure on every cut. There’s a huge distance the eye has to travel on a forty foot screen so it’s kind of a big ask. The editor has to make double sure every single cut is perfectly timed for it to work.
HULLFISH: That’s exactly what I talked to him about. With that off-set framing, it seemed like it would have a big effect on the cutting.
WALKER: I’d really love to read that. I think Mr Robot is exquisitely cut.
HULLFISH: There’s a wonderful moment, where K asks Joi, “Do you want to go for a ride?” it was a wonderful moment where he says “you want to go for a ride?” And then it cuts to the water pouring over the seawall.
WALKER: As storyboarded it was a very simple sequence but gradually it got more elaborate and it was one of those things where I was pushing Denis to set up the seawall more which had a great benefit when you re-encounter that location in the finale. I felt kind of guilty because we really overfilled this sequence then had to reign it all back again. You’re setting up Joi and K out on the road, you’re setting up the seawall, you’re setting up off-world transporters, at one stage we were even setting up the idea of him being followed by Luv’s drone. At the heart of it were the little beats between Joi and K.  One of them we cut was Joi reacting to a Joi advert. As they passed it there was a very beautiful non-verbal moment where Joi’s a little embarrassed by her shop window version and he sort of reassures her. There were a great many things that we tried to shoehorn into that sequence which had to go.
As for the opening shot, John Nelson the VFX supervisor had filmed some amazing element shots of salt being poured over a black surface and it was just one of those things where you see an element shot and say, “Holy F*ck, that’s got to be in the film’. So that’s where it came from, it was an element plate.
The other big thing that kind of took control of that sequence was that when we started working with Hans Zimmer, the very first thing he did after we watched the film together was say “Well, I can tell you what’s missing.” And he figured out this tune at the keyboard while talking about trying to get that Mahler 5/Death in Venice kind of longing.  To us this was mindblowing. Denis and I thought “At last! That’s what it needs!” Something that’s oddly optimistic, not confirming what a dystopian world it is. That’s something that Vangelis’s original score has in spades, a kind of cracked optimism. Vangelis wrote a very heroic major key theme which could almost have worked in a cowboy picture, but for it being played on a Yamaha CS80. On the seawall sequence, that combination between images and Hans’s music worked so well, at that point when you need to go outdoors and feel some sense of majesty and scale.  So that music became a kind of traveling theme in a way, a journey theme.
HULLFISH: There’s a scene where K goes to Stelline to find out if his memory is made up or real and that was amazing. The performances between the two were really pitch perfect, I thought and the breath and the moments to soak in the information K’s receiving…
WALKER: There was something that just moved me deeply when I first saw the dailies. Something about Carla Juri’s demeanor and this anemic place filled with digital playthings. The set is symbolic, it’s an egg in a box. In a previous cut, you could see the architecture of the space a little bit more clearly. Ron Bartlett, the re-recording mixer in charge of dialogue, played a lot with the sound, creating different perspectives in the chamber against the sound of her voice projected into K’s glass booth. Again it was a fully built set and actually, Mac Ruth’s location sound was really interesting with some very odd reflections. The performances were just outstanding but we had to make sure the scene sustains a second viewing so that when you’ve seen the whole film you come back to that enigmatic moment in your mind where Ana reacts to K’s memory.  The first time round it seems to be an empathetic reaction to K but of course, it’s Ana’s own complex feelings of sadness about her past and the need to conceal the illegal act of disseminating it. I like the idea that somehow unconsciously she planted that memory to call Deckard to her.
There was quite a decision at the end of that scene which was how does K react to hearing that the memory is real? And for that, I had lots of choices. There was one particular take where the pressure blew and K kicks off and screams, hurling a chair against the wall.  It was a violent reaction which felt right for such a huge turning point. Elsewhere, Ryan’s performance is buttoned down and stoic almost like the Clint Eastwood role in a spaghetti western. One of the reasons why trying to find the right music for the film was really hard because it needed thematic music to really draw out the passions lurking inside. But here, the pressure blows from under the surface, which I thought was a great beat.
HULLFISH: I think it shows tremendous discipline between you and Denis to maintain these important moments. Like the threesome scene. There are these amazing emotions going through all three of the characters that make it so much more poignant, yet if you rush those, all you’re left with is just a sex scene.
WALKER: Like Joshi says: “We’re all just looking for something real.” The mystery of sex is revealed to him and his virginity is lost and maybe it’s because I was brought up in the Catholic faith that my view of this initiation rite is that in parts, it’s fascinating and exciting and in parts frightening and disturbing.
HULLFISH: There’s tremendous sadness in that scene. Joi has the sadness of the other girl taking over and a kind of fascination and he seems sad as well. You mentioned that part of the scene where they go behind him to take off his coat and he seems, not thrilled, but resigned.
WALKER: I think it’s also set up rather well by the previous scene between Joi and K.  She keeps persisting that “you’re too good to be a K. Your mother would have named you.” When she starts planting the name Joe, he gets short with her. He says, “Stop!” In a way, it’s on the trajectory from self-controlled robot to self-interested human, this rather blunt response to her. And it puts a small chasm between them. If he is really human, is he going to need her? Joi and K’s relationship is a strangely touching ingredient in the movie. There probably could have been a version without it but that would have been very different, a lone wolf Philip Marlowe kind of thing. You would have lost a lot of heart.
HULLFISH: One of the things that I love is that she is completely inhuman. She’s a computer program, like Siri, and there’s no reason for K to treat her like a human — with respect, dignity, and love — but that’s just what K does. A lot of the optimism of the movie is in that relationship that he treats his computer program.
WALKER: Yes. I couldn’t have put it better myself. She’s a glimpse of hope in his life, a tiny green shoot in the vast empty tundra of his life, a life of being shunned and hated.  A big moment was when Mariette and Joi’s combined hand touches K’s. That shot is so strong – after all, the only way he has been touched in the past is when a giant Replicant slams a fist in his face or shoves his head through a wall.
HULLFISH: He is treated inhumanly throughout the movie, yet the one thing that’s even less human than him, he treats as humanly as possible.
WALKER: So much is kind of a beautiful spin on the original film. It took a Replicant to tell Deckard how to be human. Here, it takes a hologram to show a Replicant how to be human.
HULLFISH: Did you convince Denis to have K be called Joe?
WALKER: No! It does mean that I’ve got some good ringtones on my phone, though. I think it’s a reference to Kafka, don’t you? ‘Josef K’ – protagonist of The Trial and The Castle.  Or maybe it was just to set up that sour moment where the giant pink Joi says to K “you look like a good Joe.” You’ll have to ask the writer.
HULLFISH: She really hopes for him to be “a real boy” and there’s a moment where, faced with her own mortality, she says, “just like a real girl.”.
WALKER: All the characters are just looking for something real.
HULLFISH: So would you say that idea is the subtext? And how do you build that subtext into the film?
WALKER: Well, in so many of the characters there’s certainly a lot of broken dreams. Building subtext is I think about exerting the right choices. If you’re condensing a longer film to a shorter film it’s that sculpture analogy: you just don’t want to lop off an arm. Isn’t that the difficulty about editing and appreciating what we all do? We’ll never know what has been discarded and how wise that path has been. When you look at a Bernini, you don’t see the pile of rubble on the floor and get to contemplate what’s been excised or what other possibilities there might have been. We’re hopefully reducing and simmering, sometimes flambéing in musical alcohol, but always hoping not to damage the vital tissues. Here, honoring that subtext was about discarding other ideas to make space for it.
HULLFISH: Want to talk about transitions — either between storylines or otherwise?
WALKER: There’s a scene where K’s been rescued by a nascent Replicant army and he’s out in the desert, badly beaten up.  There’s a hallucinatory feeling as he looks across to these strange figures around a fire. The plan was to cut from the floating embers to the city – originally the meeting with Freysa was set in the abandoned Tyrell pyramid. But we felt we had to explain better that they have brought him back to LA in his spinner so that it’s available for the seawall fight. There was a fantastic test animation of the spinner landing which had no particular place in the film, and that became the basis of a shot of the spinners passing the giant Pink Joi and landing in front of a church. That choice of building was a late idea, hatched in the cutting room. I was always gripped by that cathedral St. Patrick’s in New York, this little sliver of religion dwarfed by the vast towers of commerce.  Something similar felt right as the setting of a rebel army. And we got to create a mesmerizing transition from the embers of the fire into the lights of the city.
HULLFISH: Let’s talk sound.
WALKER: When choosing who would be our sound editorial team, we knew it would be a perfect marriage between Mark Mangini – who won an Oscar for his work on Mad Max Fury Road – and Theo Green who I’d known for years since working together on ‘The Escapist.’ We’d picked up on Mark’s fanatical devotion to recording original sounds – all the amazing vehicles on Mad Max for example – but we wanted to merge that with the kind of leftfield approach I knew we’d get from Theo. The blaster sound effects exemplify this: Mark recorded a whopping great big sniper rifle and Theo chipped in a 909 kick drum as a sweetener. That gives the gun a great signature. In a microcosm that’s the kind of creative match we wanted, to create sounds that we’ve never heard before.
In my edit, I set out to make contrasts as sharp and intense as possible.  One I love is during Luv’s violent attack on Joshi where there are some very sharp cuts… literally and editorially.  At the height of the attack, we shift outside to an exterior looking in and the soundtrack plummets down to the soft sound of snow falling. I am very happy that the soundtrack preserves an idea prevalent in all the assemblies which was that it would be extremely dynamic. You could have big grand overpowering pieces of music and sound, such as the seawall sequence and yet you could also zero in on the sound of the bee beating its wings on K’s hand and an odd moment of desert silence. That’s the kind of range.
The sequence where K walks into the Las Vegas hotel is a really outstanding piece of sound.  Silence isn’t enough. You have to feel a little bit of dust or plaster falling on the floor to give you a sense of space. Mark Mangini puts it very well. He says, to make a perfect white a painter has to add a tiny dash of blue. It actually takes that one contamination to kind of make it real and make you appreciate the silence.  We chose not to have the sound of the dog panting when you first see it lurking in the shadows. You just have this mysterious creature you study and then the silence is broken by the most famous voice in all of cinema saying “You don’t happen to have a piece of cheese, do you boy?”
We pared down the music here, too. In the sequence where K walks through the erotic playground we had a full score at one point. Then we were going through all the stems with Clint Bennett, our fantastic music editor. There were always about 20 elements sent over by Ben Wallfisch and often we would investigate them to see what we could live without. One of the stems from this fuller piece of music was just a single stroke on a drum and that felt closer to the kind of Vangelis bombast which we wanted. So we came all the way down from the full band to one heavy drum stroke.
Also, there’s the sound of the piano luring K inside, the Brahms lullaby being played on two fingers. Sorry to boast, but by the way, that’s me!
HULLFISH: Really? Some readers may not know that you have been a sound editor, but also that you have multiple credits as a composer. So, a two finger Brahms Lullaby, huh? Uncredited I guess?
WALKER: Well, I definitely like to see myself as the rhythm section of the band, finding a way of fitting together rhythmic objects whether they’re dialogue, sound effects, music or in many cases on this film little visual elements we dropped into shots like the hologram adverts or the graphics or the dancers in Las Vegas.
Denis had chosen the piano piece, for him it represents something maternal, but we didn’t want some virtuosic performance of it.  It’s Deckard playing that piano and he’s not filling concert hall seats, he’s luring K into a trap.  I asked Mark Mangini, our sound supervisor if he had a real piano available and he suggested the one that lives in Formosa’s ADR suite. I took the piano apart and prepared the strings, John Cage style – we wanted to age it, so I stuck credit cards between the strings and all manner of paper clips and screws.  Mark recorded it on seven or eight microphones and I kept the loud pedal down so that each note had a long sustain to it, that felt like it could curl around the corners of that grand architecture. At the end of the session, Mark told me it was “the Raiders of the Lost Ark piano”. I couldn’t remember any piano in Raiders of the Lost Ark. So he rammed his foot down on the loud pedal and screamed into the strings. It scared the living daylights out of me. If you remove the sound of the scream and just keep the sustain, that is exactly how they created that angelic effect you hear in the Nepal bar scene in Raiders, this is when Marion reveals the headpiece she has been wearing round her neck. In Hollywood, you’re never too far away from some iconic movie prop.
HULLFISH: The flip side of the silence, is the dynamic change of a scene like where the three prostitutes are told to go and talk to K. That was a really loud scene. From my recollection, the previous scene had been very quiet.
WALKER: Yes, the previous scenes are the killing of the newborn Replicant, and Gaff in the nursing home which were relatively quiet. They’re accompanied by those types of sounds that either be a sound effect or music, it’s hard to tell – a blur very true to the original film. When I obtained the bootleg album back in 2003 it was one of the few (if unofficial) soundtrack albums that pay homage to the sound design. You can’t tell whether they’re provided by the sound team or Vangelis. We really took that idea for a ride on this film.
Before I go, one sequence we didn’t talk about is the Hologram Funhouse. That was a big deal in the cutting room, and probably the hardest and longest sequence to work on. This is the scene where Deckard traps K in the nightclub and flips a switch that summons a broken hologram show to life. To gauge the scale of the operation, on that scene alone there were 21 fine cuts, just of the pre-viz. That gave us a solid idea of music for playback and a template for Roger to design his lighting.  Denis and the main unit then filmed the scene for real with Deckard and K, with Ben Thompson in the background as Elvis. They shot old-school without a motion control rig. Then we had a weekend to frantically fine cut this material and then break everything down again so that we could go back to set with the 2nd unit and shoot all the holograms: the Folies Bergere, Elvis’s band, Cowgirls, Gogo dancers, Liberace, Marilyn Monroe, you name it. We had to get it right because when you cut from one angle to the other, the dancers had to do their high kicks on exactly the same beat whilst staying in sync with lighting effects already shot by Roger. That’s a really complicated thing to achieve, technically. I ended up with dozens of video tracks running for each shot and my temp team set about creating more polished versions.
So when we got back to Los Angeles, soon after Thanksgiving 2016, we sat and watched the First Assembly.  Denis said, everything is fantastic, it’s going to work, except one scene: the Hologram Funhouse. We’d been toiling on that on and off for six months so it was disappointing, but I knew he was right. Tonally it didn’t fit, it didn’t feel like Blade Runner.  Denis’ point was that the last time Deckard met a Replicant, it was Roy Batty, who nearly killed him. So this should be full of fear and tension. A manhunt, not a variety act. Deckard turns on those holograms because it gives him an advantage, he knows where and when the light will fall. So Denis and I recut the scene to maximize this and we dumped a lot of the layers of holograms. Really great footage of pole dancers spinning down from the ceiling, all had to go.
I wanted to emphasize the spookiness of this broken machine and I dug around and found some golden moments before “action” where the dancers were waiting for the playback music to start –just breathing, standing by, lit heavily from above.  These ended up in the cut.  We tried to put in as many dead and broken holograms as living ones.
The big transformation was dumping the music almost entirely. We just had this idea it would be creepier if just one little speaker somewhere in this vast room would suddenly spit out some audio. Theo Green our sound designer worked with me the entire length of the project. He came up with this amazing track of all the lighting units shifting and the crackling of bulbs firing up. That absolutely nailed it. Denis loved the new sequence and it was back in, but at one stage it was so far from the ‘Bladiverse’, its head was on the guillotine and we were reading it last rites.
HULLFISH: Watching it I was thinking what a nightmare to edit this scene.
WALKER: I’ll send you a screengrab that shows all the video layers. There’s one wide shot facing the stage where the plate is Deckard throwing a punch at K and the light changes very dramatically to a different routine halfway through that punch. And in that, you’ve got dozens of elements: the Folie-Bergeres dancers, the go-go dancers, Elvis and different shots of his band behind him. Then a line of cowgirls doing a kind of Cotton-Eye Joe routine. We timed it so that a cowgirl did a fantastic forward somersault which crashes through Elvis, it’s barely visible but added some chaos.
HULLFISH: Joe as usual. I loved talking to you and it’s been a great conversation. Thank you so much.
WALKER: Great talking to you about Bladerunner 2049, my friend. It’s always lovely to talk to you. I mean that.
HULLFISH: Same with you. Thanks so much for your time. I’m sure we’ll be talking about Widows at some point.
WALKER: Better get on and cut it.
To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish
The first 50 interviews in the series provided the material for the book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors.” This is a unique book that breaks down interviews with many of the world’s best editors and organizes it into a virtual roundtable discussion centering on the topics editors care about. It is a powerful tool for experienced and aspiring editors alike. Cinemontage and CinemaEditor magazine both gave it rave reviews. No other book provides the breadth of opinion and experience. Combined, the editors featured in the book have edited for over 1,000 years on many of the most iconic, critically acclaimed and biggest box office hits in the history of cinema.
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