Rogue Interview

Kerry: We're here today with Rogue.  Hi, Rogue.

Rogue: Hi, Kerry.

Kerry: So, what have you been up to since we last saw you on the interwebs?

Rogue: When did you last see me on the interwebs?

Kerry: Was it during the last century?

Rogue: [Laughs] I think my website went down in 2006.

Kerry: OK, that's not that long ago.

Rogue. No. A lot of things happened at that time. There was the emergence of social media, the MySpace and things, and my privacy was becoming a little bit more concerning to me. So I decided it wasn't worth the effort to just put things out there when I wasn't feeling I was getting a reward from doing so. 

Kerry: And for the record, we can simply say you are not a social media kind of person.

Rogue: No.

Kerry: Do you want to talk about what's been going on in your private life at all?

Rogue: I decided to focus on getting married and having a kid.

Kerry: What's it like having a baby?

Rogue: It's been wonderful.

Kerry: But you didn't do it personally though.

Rogue: [Laughs] I found it the most challenging and the most rewarding thing I have ever done. And you can quote me on that.

Kerry: Well cool. But you have still been costuming and masking?

Rogue: Absolutely. As much as I had previously, if not more.

Kerry: OK, so people can know you are still around.  You are the writer of this music video, where did the idea come from? What inspired you?

Rogue: I appreciated that you decided to explore silicone as a new medium. Latex is fun, silicone is better. And I wanted to support that. Obviously I was a big fan of the first mask that came out [the Susan] and I wanted to do an endorsement video. And when you contacted me and said you were working on a second one, I was very excited and happy to see it get released. I wanted to make sure people could appreciate the potential that it had to make some of their costuming and masking dreams come true. I thought it would fun to help market this with a video because one of things that your mask does better than some of the others is the believability when moved. It's great for still shots but also excellent for video or in person and it's hard sometimes to get that from just a still image. A lot of other competitor's masks look good in a still image but they seem reluctant to show it in a video because they realize once you get that lack of motion, that "doll look," which not everybody likes, it loses instant believability. That is one of the selling points for one of your masks and I think a video is the best way of showing that off. So I suggested a short film, something that we could both manage with our busy schedules and modest budget. My goal was to show as many different outfits or looks for this mask as we could in a short period of time to show off the potential.

Kerry: And you composed the music!

Rogue: I did compose the music. I love audio, I work in audio. And I thought that that could contribute that as well as the original story idea.

Kerry: What were some of the challenges during shooting?

Rogue: Working within our modest budget and time constraints. Deciding what we could do and figuring out the logistics of certain shots. We had greater ambitions, if we had more money...  We have had more ambitions for future projects but we decided for this experiment to keep it modest and achievable.  But, the biggest technical challenge for me happened when I broke a heel on my boot before shooting the scenes with our superheroine "Blaze."  I had to do those scenes, including running, with only one heel and make it look natural.  Not as easy as you might think!

Kerry: From your original concept, the only thing that comes to mind that we didn't do was we didn't do the shot in the train.

Rogue: Yeah.

Kerry: But other than that, everything else you put in that, we realized those shots.

Rogue: If not more. Because I think we expanded some of the superheroine stuff we didn't have in the original script.

Kerry: So let's talk about that. Where did the superheroine come from?

Rogue: I consider myself a superheroine addict. Pun intended. So many of the projects I do for my own involve a heroine in one way or another. I just think that's a fun framework in which to show off these fantasy characters. And essentially that's what they are.  So it was almost a signature of the things that I enjoy to tack it on to the end if not also a nice surprise for the audience.

Kerry: How did we come up with that character?

Rogue: You are to blame for that, thankfully. We were shooting ideas back and forth and you described the difficulty in quick changing outfits for the character to go rescue the person in trouble. How would they quickly change their outft?

Kerry: Because the original concept was to do the "This is a job for Superman" pulling the shirt open and there's the costume.

Rogue: Correct. But that posed problems of how would you hide the costume underneath her club outfit which was already fairly immodest. When you suggested burning the outfit off, that got my imagination going for a character that uses fire as their primary power. Playing around with different fabrics I came up with a costume and the character name, Blaze, which was originally a book on my wife's bookshelf, "Modesty Blaise."  I decided to check out the name Blaze in the Marvel and DC encyclopedia and was pleased to find that nobody had ever named a character Blaze. I thought that would be a fun name for our character.

Kerry: And I think originally it was going to be three goons and you were going to punch them in their turkey necks [Copyright Kevin Smith]. And I was like, "Well, I don't want to do a fight scene." If she just has fireballs then phoof and then we'll just have one goon...

Dave [our goon, interjects]: I don't want to get punched in the neck. [Laughter all round]

Rogue: Clearly the addition of the fire element to that character answered a lot of the questions that we had on how to proceed.

Kerry: What do you think of the karaoke scene?

Rogue: It came off a lot better than I expected. I thought it would be fun to have a few slowdowns in this fast-paced video: the elevator scene, the karaoke scene. It's a nice surprise, you want to keep the audience interested in what's going on, and that's just a fun little way to change the pace a little bit.

Kerry: And that's neither of us singing in that?

Rogue: That's neither of us singing in that, thankfully.

Kerry: So, what's next for you?

Rogue: I continue to make costumes that appeal to me.

Kerry: That no one ever sees!

Rogue: That I share with friends and family who I know will appreciate them. I continue to be inspired by what I see online.

Kerry: Can people contact you in any way, shape or form?

Rogue: [thinks a moment] Not really.

Kerry: OK, I'll forward anything people want to send in. Fair enough.

Rogue: I'd be too afraid of opening the door to, "Hey, let's see all the stuff you've done!" But what are you going to do for me in return? I'm sorry but that's what I come down to. I don't know you personally and I don't really want to just share everything with the world any more.

Kerry: You don't understand the entire point of the internet but that's okay.

[After I turned my recorder off, Rogue did say she would be interested in going to like-minded meet-ups in the future, like the Rubberdoll World Rendezvous or similar events if she has the time and money. She likes one-on-one social interactions, but is not interested in posting pictures to strangers she never meets.]