Tell us about the "light bulb over the head" moment where you decided "Hey! I can do this too!". And also all the hurdles you had to overcome to make your vision a reality!

Feb - 1995 - Discover I am not alone. Rob Blaine of Messyfun is a god. Or at least a minor deity. Join MPV BBS. Literally stay awake for next three days searching entire internet for more. The universe tilted.

June 1998 - Dave Lodoski shoots his first video. While expressing great enthusiasm for the video, the accompanying photos aren't very good. I jokingly message him via usenet that he should call me if he needs a photographer.

June 1998 - Damned if he doesn't do it.

(Light Bulb Moment)

July 1998 - Arrive in SoCal to meet Dave and photograph the next shoot. Using borrowed gear since I sold all my stuff the first two years I was married. Shoot a bunch of Kodak print film. Return home - Mind completely blown and sure I'll never do this again.

Sept 1998 - Doing it again. Write, direct, first scene. Mind blown to the point of brain damage. Life is irrevocably changed forever.

June - 1999 - Working with National Geographic "Danger Quicksand" Documentary crew. Shoot video for them. Narrate opening. Meet Chuck Lang.

(Freaking Kleig Light Moment)

Summer - 1999 - Shoot my first solo stuff with Alyson - Spend days with Chuck Lang, Kaol and later Kristine.

Could and should flesh this out but for now -

June 2000 - July 2019 - "The fetish is strong with this one" - Spend 20 years running all over Hell and half of Texas with Dave. Work with many other people as well. We shoot in California, Alabama, North Carolina, Illinois, British Columbia, Philippines, Tennessee, Nevada, Arkansas...other places. Many adventures. Many new friends. Blood spilled, money spent, cops outrun, bikinis lost, tens of thousands of photos taken. MPV moves permanently to Tennessee in 2011 with the creation of Camp MPV. I become carpenter, hole digger, MPVBleck mixer, girl wrangler, exterminator, electrician, photographer, director, writer, driver, deck hand, travel arranger, minor bitch, social media mouthpiece and defender of the faith for MPV. I am now Vice Luckiest Man in the World.

July 2019 - to date - MPV halts production. Dog dies, mother dies, COVID screws up the world. Can't be unhappy over such a tremendous, successful, and undeserved good time but feeling kind of lost ever since. Everything has become too threatening and complicated now. Sure was great while it lasted. Wild Wild West of the internet is gone.

Over all this time I spent a fortune and profited none, financially. That was never my goal anyway. The biggest effort was keeping all of this completely from my family. Wife, kids, all, never knew what I was up to all this time. If you've ever seen the movie "True Lies" with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis you have seen something not unlike the way I lived. Being Dave's wing man, the Festus to his Matt Dillon, the McCartney to his Lennon, was more than I could have hoped for. Got something to treasure for the rest of my life.

Snap! Though a bit later in the year, May I think. That "I am not alone" moment really was quite something, and (also thanks to Rob) finding out that other people were into getting messy fully clothed. Back in 92 I'd once asked a video seller in Amsterdam, who had lots of nude oil-wrestling videos, if he had any where the girls wore jeans or overalls. He looked at me like I'd asked for a deep-fried jellied badger on a stick.

1996 - tentatively advertised for models to do some fully clothed messy shoots. Got responses, but for various reasons, it never happened.

2004 - met Lady Jasmine in a nightclub. And the rest is history.

Though for the first seven years it was very much a hobby, and cost much more than it brought in. Worth it though for the friends and the experiences. And nowadays, it pays taxes and breaks even.

The biggest advantage was having the dungeon, with water, power, and drainage all already built in. That makes it orders of magnitude easier to shoot, and clean up, than if we were trying to do it anywhere else.

The biggest hurdle for me was having the nerve to ask people if they wanted to do fetish modelling. I've always been an active supporter of equality and women's rights, which means I've lots of female friends, and so have heard lots of horror stories about pushy photographers who won't take no for an answer or assume that just because someone models they are also going to sleep with any guy with a pulse. But in the end, I had people clamouring to get involved, and discovered that lots of people really, really jump at the chance to get messy for fun when they know clean-up and wash-off will be simple and easy. One of our people once described the hosedown facilities as "the best shower in Yorkshire!"

The history of Rob Blaine is long and started with a magazine called "SPLOSH" the 1st copy was printed in the late 1980's and continued until the early 2000's still produced after his passing which I posted in other forum some time ago (sorry I forget which forum). Rob with Wavey Dave and others are the reason some of us landed on UMD.

I am not a producer but a customer and have helped make some video/DVD content over the years as a customer adding content to some videos with the help of producers (re costings). The 1st videos could not be custom made and were purchased with mail orders. It wasn't until the mid 1990's that some producers allowed customers to order custom made videos. By this stage UMD was set up by MM and this platform allowed both producers and customers to make "splsoh/wam" content using the UMD "inbox" mailing system.

The main hurdle every body needs to think about are the costs, not the content itself as this has changed heaps over the years. The early videos were far more expensive when 1st released only on VHS later to DVD's now file transfer.