-T.C.

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We've also just sold a bunch of copies to a rent by mail website that is an advertiser here on ADT. When they've got them up and running I'll put an announcement in the Press Release section.

But back to full body shots:

I think one of the big problem is coverage/editing. If you're in a full body shot, how do you get to the close up? (Porn needs close ups!) Once you're on the close-up, how do you get back to the long shot. Sure you can do it all in one long take, but hand-held "dollies" and zooms don't usually work well, and without good coverage, even a good editor doesn't have much to work with.

I'd love to see more porn scenes that cut through a variety of shots, close-ups, longs, face reactions, etc. But it takes a lot of thought to shoot a scene in a way that these shots will all fit together smoothly when it comes time to edit. If the choice is between one long take and choppy editing, I'll take the long take (but I won't like that very much either.)

-T.C.

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It's just easier to find directors who shoot mainly long and medium shots. Most of Rocco's movies are like this; his cameraman/cousin Gabriel is good about capturing nearly all the action that's going on, and he keeps a good 4-8 feet away from performers, too. It's really the only way to shoot Rocco, I think, since he's on the move so much, and he's unpredictable, so if the cameraman didn't stand back, he'd be in the wrong place too much of the time.

I just watched a Jake Malone film, and that one was a good mix of long, medium and close-ups, and he kept the camera moving most of the time. I didn't have many of those "Pull back, already" moments during the movie.

Some directors purposely show only close-ups and lower torsos, because they don't want to film any of the male performer's faces, since they feel that there are enough (male) porn fans out there that dislike this. But the trade-off is stilted camera work, that can get boring pretty quick.

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This is one of the creative cul de sacs of the gonzo genre. The whole format is too locked into the "camera as observer" which fixes the camera in time and space to a degree that is so limitting it creates problems. In traditional cinematic forms, the camera can often change angle, location or time frame "just because". In gonzo, these changes have to fit into the framework of a "character-driven" camera.

I'm not saying this is impossible, but it's hard enough that I'd *never* format an entire show around a first-person camera, (let alone an entire career!) Like many other aspects of the gonzo conceit, it's easy to do, but very hard to do well.

-T.C.

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What you're describing isn't so much a jump cut so much as it's a bad edit. The audience isn't being asked to fill in the blanks between the long shot and the close-up, so much as they're being asked to forgive the lack of rhythm (and likely changes in exposure, color, and film grain) between the two shots.

This kind of editing is extremely laborious. Editors must have an innate sense of flow and then must have both the time and temprament to worry about each cut down to the 1/24th of a second (one frame of film). Even if the editor has all the need coverage, the amount of scene time that is completed for each day of editing is measured in minutes. (10 weeks is a pretty normal edit schedule for a feature. Docs are usually longer. Sometimes much longer.) Even if porn valley had a surfet of editing talent, there's simply not enough time in the porn business model for this kind of editing.

-T.C.

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Here is what we get:

1.)-No general scene views. To do so requires cutting and pasting and some editing.

2.)-Men don't do anything to women at all except for a disembodied dick going into a hole. No interaction. No attempt to touch her tits, kiss a female body part, turn her on or talk to her. We even rarely see the male actor.
These things also require editing and perhaps a second camera.

3.)-Who knows where the popularity of below the waist perspective came from? Buttman? It gives viewers a stiff neck to constantly look up to try and correct the view to what the brain is accustomed to. --I had a comment on this forum asking if Jules Jordan was a midget that couldn't help photographing from the dogs eye view of things. No other movie, TV production or still photographer puts the lens at knee level for very long for good reason. It looks unnatural and bad, the viewer gets a headache. Ok, look at a nice ass for 15 seconds, but get the camera off of the floor for Pete's sake. Why is it that this type of shot goes on so long in Porn?

4.)-Close ups by shoving a wide angle vidcam into a girls face, which distorts her head and gives the "fun house mirror " look to people. No one else in photography does close-ups this way except for these porn people. Long lenses fill the frame and flatten and flatter the facial perspective. Basic photography 101, but these dudes don't get it, or once again are too cheap to do some cut and paste editing mixed from a second cam.

Look, I am into gonzo. I don't want to see "Gone with the Wind", and high production values are not what I am talking about.
Just basic film technique which can enhance hardcore not distract from it.

Perhaps one day they will listen. But as long as they are making bucks doing this they probably could care less. Somebody someday will pay for the video guys that shoot for "Private" (they know what they are doing) and have Jules or Brandon direct the sex.

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Multicameras are a good idea (never shot a sex scene with fewer than 2 cameras). On another thread I've been teasing Brandon Iron about the camera he uses. In fact, I'd rather edit a scene that's been competently shot with two or three cheap cameras than with one expensive camera.

But multicameras introduces production problems of their own; not insoluable problems, but problems that must be addressed to get the most out of multicamera coverage. For example, pornographers seem to have a lot trouble keeping the cameraman op's shadow out of the scene with one camera, just think how much trouble it is with two or three cameras! Exposures and color balances must be well matched, or cutting between cameras is distracting.

Still, the technical and creative challenges of multicam shooting far outweight the difficulty of getting good coverage using a tradition single camera production style. Like comedy, sex is very much about "the moment";top flight talent may give you a good chance of creating a few of those moments, but you can't recreated those moments on demand!

-T.C.

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When porn "loops" were shot on 8mm or 16mm flim, you were forced to think in terms of cuts and do editing. There was not that much film on a roll. You ran out of film, loaded another and went from there. May as well, move the camera position. There was a kind of standard pop shot where you saw the girl, cut to the dude wincing in ecstasy and back to the girl. It was so routine that it was almost a joke, and I am not suggesting we return to it. But every 5 min loop had lots and lots of edits just as film or TV has today that is good, to give a realistic sense to the flick and allow the viewers brain to merge the various angles to get a sense of the whole.

Vidotape unlike film just keeps on rolling. All they need to do is shorten it once they finish and they dont even bother to plan a shot. At they end they just cut down the single tape pretty much and put a box on it. Hand held POV, cheap cheap cheap cheap.

Being good at Gonzo, like the sex part, is an entirely different set of skills than being a good director it seems.

It is apparent to me that the distribution channels in porn is were the money is and they must be locked up to prevent competition.

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Let's assume that a top-shelf gonzo company can reasonably expect to sell 4,500 copies of a title, and can get $10/copy. That's a gross of $45K per title.

Now let's also assume that each title requires an average of 10 women and 10 men at an average of $1,000/scene and $250/scene respectively. That's $12,500 for talent.

Now let's pay the director $500/day for two days. Let's pay a make-up artist $250/day for two days. Let's pay a couple of PA $75/day for two days. Let's figure $250/day for a location fee. That's $2,300. Add another 10% for misc nonsense; no we're at $2,530.

Just for moment let's skip to the otherside of the process and figure out our DVD pressing and packaging costs. A studio doing a lot of business could probably have this down to about $1/disc, including case and 4 color printed insert. But because it's better to have a few extra than to have to go back and do another run, if they expect to sell 4.5K on average, their probably going to do 5K-6K . Let's take the middle and call it $5,500 for replication and packaging.

So what have we got:

Talent: $12,500
Production $2,530
Rep/Packaging $5,500

TOTAL $20,530

That leave $25,000 for everything else : production equipment rental or purchase, editing, compression, authoring, warehousing, package design, promotion, office overhead, advertising, paying production cost for titles that flop, and a million other things. Ask anyone in manufactoring – if it costs a buck to make, and you can only sell it for two you, you are in a low margin business for sure! It just doesn't leave much room for pushing the production envelope.

-T.C.

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Accepting that your numbers are as true, TC, my point is that decent videography is not that much of an added expense to the whole process. I mean Private does it and they sell worldwide. The 8mm loops in the past certainly had much much less of a market or distribution outlet but there were plenty of them. Check out the "Collection Series"(that guy was a genius) that released 4 loops a month, or even John Holmes "Pretty Girl" series to see the visual difference between those products and what is filmed
today.

Even without dual cameras and a lots of edits, what is the excuse for showing flick after flick with disembodied dicks, no interaction, no general scene shots and upward pointing camera positions and grossly distorted faces from the wide angle close-ups? Why do most porn movie with lets say 5 scenes, clone each of them almost exactly, in setups, in sex, in timing and pop shot? Only the hole changes. It is as bad as watching a single episode of Jerry Seinfeld over and over except there are different actors in each.

Those things require less money than attention and some pride in the look of the outcome and a small amount of creativity. I think.

Perphaps if the videos were more engaging visually and at least as interesting as a short TV commercial, they would bore less and sell more. TV commercials can be erotic in a minute, why not produce erotic and hardcore in a package?

As far a the money calculus goes, it has been reported the the video porn industry does a billion dollars a year, not only sales but rentals. I don't know ,and I am sure the average catalog flick hardly justifies its cost. But there is money out there for sure.

Edited by - mango on 5/27/2004 1:16:19 PM

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You mention commercials, but commercials are produced at a cost per second of screen time that makes Hollywood feature films look like a bargain. I was on a Kudos candybar shoot (simple one and two shot on the street of the Lower East Side) and the producer told me it was going off at about $60K/day. That didn't count the cost of the talent or the agency people, and that was 20 years ago. Today the same thing must cost $100K/day.

I don't know what Private does or doesn't do. I don't know their numbers. I do know that when something looks all fucked it, it's often more informative to ask "why is it this way?" then to ask "why can't it be different?"

-T.C.

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Lori

PS: show MORE, hide LESS!

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In any event, there are manifold ways that the classical editing style can be bent, stretched and broken, all while serving to make the film more enjoyable/interest/worthwhile for the audience. One need not be employing any of these techniques to have a "bad edit" ie an edit that work against the creators hopes and/or intentions and disrupts the audiences enjoyment of the presentation. In pornography, the badly inserted insert shot of insertion is a classic example of a "bad edit". But since porn's primary purpose is to show insertion, I suppose it could be argued that it's the rest of the production that is at cross purposes to the goals of the filmmaker and/or the audience.

-T.C.

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The two problem are:

1) Hardcore doesn't have access to mainstream money. No theatrical money, no cable, no mainstream video rental. Without the potential of mainstream revenue, there's no reason to invest mainstream amounts in production.

2) The audience's willingness to support the EXPLOSION of titles means we're in a quantity over quality world. When sales are measured in the thousands, it just doesn't make sense to invest much money in each title. The only think that's going to change this is if someone starts a run of break-out hits; videos that sell in the 50K-100K range, and gross about $500K-$1M per title. The chance to make more money will attract money, and that will attract talent.

Don't hold you breathe.

-T.C.

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As far as older porn is concerned, there was a lot of bad editing in it. But the interesting thing about "bad" editing is that, when used in a consistent way, it quickly becomes a stylistic effect the viewer accepts without much bother. There were a lot of "bad" edits in those old Playmate and Collection loops that Mango mentions; but what made many of them so successful is that the shooters were working in a very structured format: they had 10 minutes to show background, set-up, tease, sex-scene with all the key shots and events, and pop-shot. And often, the edits they used worked just like the "temporal ellipse" that Walter describes. They weren't trying to show you ALL the sex, just the highlights. So jumps from people kissing to mutual oral to fucking to whatever were common and accepted by the audience. Why was this so good? Because you never saw enough; you always left the loop wanting to see more of the action, to watch that scene again, to see that girl again, etc (and your mind of allowed to fill in all the blanks). Another way in which current porn tries to be "real" is to shoot the action in "real" time, with natural transitions from moment to moment during the action. Thus, we have lots of 45 minute sex scenes that almost seem to be made to fast forward through. Old porn shooters did the fast forwards for you, and if you looked down to unzip your fly, you probably missed the best part. Less is more . Piss the raincoaters off? You bet. But you can watch those old loops over again; after I've seen one of these one hour gonzo spunkfest scenes (or the new girl going through all the tricks with X guys in it), I probably will never re-visit the scene, or the girl, again.

The other thing the old-timers had going for them was the medium of film. Tony could speak to this better than I, but I am guessing that many of the effects of the video age have come about because the old filmic style (including long and tight shooting, certain angles, etc.) simply look shitty on video stock, even with optimal lighting. Video today looks vastly better than video circa 1985, but you still have limited lighting options, you still lose depth perception, close up detail, and edge hardness, and you still lose a lot of the color range in this medium. I sometimes think that one of the reasons for this insatiable demand for more and more extreme circus action in today's porn is to compensate for the fact that porn itself is shot in a medium so bland, so washed out, so soft focused, and so limited in physical detail. Porn fans want "hard" to offset the "soft" medium. Put them in a movie theater in front of a big screen, show them some simple close-up vaginal penetration footage on 16mm stock, and I'm betting commercial video camera double-anals would never again impress quite the same.

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OK, so it isn't up to Skronker's standards for a single sentence, but it's the best I could do.

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The gonzo business model has decended to the point that it can no longer attract and keep a cadre of professional craftsmen to create it. To attract professionals, you need to offer them the chance to make enough money to pay their mortgages, pay their health insurance (if they're freelancers), and put a little away for a rainy day and/or retirement. The way the numbers add up today, this simply isn't possible.

Moreover, porn has gotten so uncraftsmenly that the only thing you can really learn on a porn set is how to make more bad porn. When (10 years ago in NYC) I used to pay my assistant $125/day none of those youngsters expected to live well at that rate, but they did expect they'd learn a few things on my set that they could take with them to the next job (porn or otherwise). The could take tear sheets to another (non-porn) photographer, tell him they set up the lighting scenario, and get hired. Working on my set was a chance to acquire skills and experiences that would serve you in the larger world of commercial photography.

Can you imagine a modern gonzo porn PA (or director for that matter!) taking his reel to a local television station to try and get a staff position? Of course not, and that's not because of the hardcore content. It's because the quality of the work is shit that wouldn't pass muster for a small market used car dealership advertisement.

-T.C.

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