☯️ Dry Brushing & Body Oil ☯️ [Virtual Spa] (Patreon)

Version without music here. 

Hi guys, I'm happy to finally publish this beast of a video. I may not be able to cure my own insomnia, but I can cure yours. This ultra long Virtual Spa video features so many soothing brushing sounds in a softly whispered roleplay, sprinkled with various appropriate triggers and gentle personal attention throughout. I hope this will get you to sleep in a calm and cozy setting with how slow and relaxed everything is. 

You'd think I'd be running out of ideas for Spa soundscapes, but you'd be wrong. This is simply the first one that manifested in my head as I already had all the necessary tools and it was easy enough to figure out how to put together even while I was sick. It worked out just fine for you, didn't it? People have been requesting a fully whispered video ever since I started my channel pretty much. I usually shy away from it because I find soft speaking more realistic and immersive, but I had no voice for a while so this was my best option. Now that I'm proofreading the finished video, it doesn't really bother me that much. It feels very calm and cozy and serene, maybe because I'm so focused on what I'm doing with the brushes that it makes you just go along with it. 

Speaking of brushes, one of the hardest things in this project was making the candle background. Because, frankly, the brushes are not very aesthetically pleasing and I had to work around them by adding detail and color coordinating so that the setting would allude to what is happening in the video while still being beautiful and peaceful. My camera overheated twice because everything there is lit by candles. I hope my video makes you sleepy enough that you don't notice the fade between the two clips, lol. 

I covered my altar mirror with rose print tissue paper but made sure it's out of focus enough that you can't tell. It's actually the mirror that came with the apartment and used to be in the bathroom but I put it on my altar instead because I didn't wanna pay big bucks for a new one. It's covered in paint splatter which I can't get off and I couldn't focus out of it enough to make it just blurry and make the detail disappear, so I did the best I could here. 

The yellow and red of the tissue paper invited for similar colored candles and crystals which had to be matched with the generic beige of the brushes. Having everything dimly lit and knowing about how to fuck around with color settings and filters helps with getting everything to match. 

The "smooth and gentle body oil with almond oil and peony" is a real thing. 

I use it on myself, but by far the best thing about it is the sounds it makes, which is why I chose this over all the other oils. I believe some thought went into the sensory experience of this product and the nice sounds are by no means coincidental. I placed it in the background of this video, but it's defocused enough that you can't read what's on it. I just wanted it to be in there because it's a main feature of the video, and then it led me to incorporating some white accents in the image to make it not stick out like a sore thumb. After fucking around with arrangements for close to two hours, I decided this is as good as it's gonna get. 

The next day I recorded the soundscape which took me about three hours just to sit there and record. Because I had a terrible cough, I kept having to drink water and swallow spoonfuls of honey to suppress it. Turns out, swallowing spoonfuls of honey somehow works wonders in minimizing mouth sounds! I found the holy grail, folks. Except for the fact that it makes my tummy make noises so I had to record extra long to make sure I had enough usable sounds in the end. The recording, in three parts, was two and a half hours long. I spent two full days chopping it down to one hour 17 minutes. I would rate the experience as average. Editing is my least favorite part of video creation and if I could manifest my ideas out of thin air, I would. I detest it so it was frustrating, but not unusually so. You probably can't hear it but I used two different brushes for the mic brushing portion just to give it some variety and for that same reason I used different brushing techniques in the body brushing portion. It was like brushing a horse - and I was the horse. Very relaxed and exfoliated horse.

Then it was time to find some music. Nothing I had on my computer really fit the vibe I was going for and I spent 8 total hours browsing free relaxing music. There was one track I liked with nice relaxing harps, but it was four minutes long and I knew I couldn't get away with looping one piece 25 times for such a long video. Could I have made it shorter? Yes. Did I want to? No. I really like the brushing sounds and I didn't find them annoying so I thought I'd make a super long video again for those of you who can't fall asleep in 20 minutes. After running myself ragged listening to ambient music all day, I settled for relaxing Celtic music by mah boi Adrian von Ziegler (whom I proudly support.) It really fits the experience best out of everything I heard, especially compared to long drawn out synths, and if you hate it you still have the no music version. 

And then guess what? Yep, it rendered for 2 days straight. XD Plus one night because I started out with a slight glow filter but it made it take four times as long to render so I had to cancel it after one night when I realized it was going as fast as one percent per hour and it wouldn't finish by the time I had the Ultra tier livestream scheduled. I mimicked the effect of the glow filter by adding back some gain and amping up the bleach bypass filter, which does a similar thing but doesn't eat up quite as much CPU and GPU as glow. Without it I was able to render one version within 24 hours which is important because I can't do much on the computer while that is going on. One day I'm gonna invest in a PC, but probably not until Uncle Sam lets me get married and be with the love of my life. Then again, I want to be making videos for a long long time so I guess in the grand scheme of things, another year or two won't matter that much. By that time, who knows?! Will 8K be the standard resolution?! I really like the crispness of 4K, even if I have to scale it down to 1080p - somehow it still looks crisper than a video rendered in 1080p. 

Now that I'm done proofreading and haven't noticed any mistakes or annoying sounds (thank fucking Christ, it took forever to remove everything), I'm finally free to relax and prepare for the next project. I hope you all like this Spa session and there will be many more to come in the future. 

Sleep tight and take care of yourself. ☯️