-T.C.

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-T.C.

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At least as important as how they look is how they feel about each other, which I think is well represented in the last frame I posted. It almost looks too posed, but in fact it is a spontaneous moment. I think the approach we use makes even seasoned sex-workers feel a little self conscious. Especially in the begining of a love scene our subjects touch each other very tentatively and very tenderly. The tentative tenderness (tm) makes shooting these rather stylized looking romantic poses as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

These frame grabs are from a not yet released film that will be similar in format to Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story. The subjects are Ms. Xana and Mr. Dax Star. If you google "Xana Star" you should be able to find out more about her.

-T.C.

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Now, back to the skin tone issue, having a darker man with a lighter toned woman - if only you could have filmed this Rocco scene:

His tan skin looks fine, but her pale complexion looks a bit too white (she's a redhead). Still, I liked how they looked together, I thought it was a great contrast in skin tones.

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P.S. Great news Jewel, hopefully this thread will die soon..hehe

Edited by - Coyote22 on 6/4/2004 10:49:21 PM

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Of course now video is everywhere. It's fast and cheap. But it has one huge problem. If you take the time it takes to really make it look good, you begin to loose the savings you'd have verses shooting on film. For example:

The lighting set-up for Xana and Dax used about $7,500 worth of gaff and grip gear. I own it, but if we want to assign a cost to it, we can say that's somewhere between $375/day-$750/day to rent it.

Setting up the lights took about an hour and a half, but I did that the night before the shoot and scheduled my shooting day so that I'd have two different mixed race couples come by before my shoot. I did pre-interviews and tests with them. That let me further refine my lighting set up. Here are a couple of slightly censored test images:

and

You'll notice a light in the background of the second one. Testing let me not only get an idea of how the light would look, but also how it would limit the angles we could shoot from and the way myself and my second shooter would be move around the subject. Since I wanted a look that forced us to cross lights when we moved, we needed to develop movement strategy that would let usseemlessly edit out the moments when we crossed the light and threw shadows on the subject.

The point is, this is a lot of work; nearly a full day of set up and testing. After all that work, it's a pity to drag out a couple of PD100s to do the actual shooting. It's great to have the cameras and be able to do the work (since I can't afford to go and rent a couple of Panasonic 900s everytime I want to test, or for a speculative project, let alone shoot $3000 worth of film.)

But if this was a "real" gig, with investors that were paying for all the equipment, set up time, and expertise, as a producer I would be a pretty poor manager to tell them "I've spent several thousand dollars on equipment, crew, and talent. Now I'm going to save you a few hundred on cameras." At this point mini cameras aren't as great a bargain as they first seem. Even video becomes questionable. After all the expense of setting up to make the video look look good, there's a good argument to spend a little more to shoot on film (In fact, good Super16 cameras rent for much less than the best video cameras. Depending on what you're shooting, film may actually be less expensive than video. And let's not even get into how much better film looks when you don't have the time or resourses to make sweet light. That's when shooting film is the best investment you can make in image quality!)

At any rate, maybe these images give people an idea of what is possible with this gear. As a producer, if you don't know what the gear is capable of, it's hard to go after it in your own work. As a viewer, if you don't know how good the image can look, you can't demand that it look that way.

-T.C.

Edited by - TonyC on 6/5/2004 3:40:35 PM

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I'd love to see some of Tony's stuff, as I feel like he aspires to some elements I've been strongly lobbying for here the past 20 months. At the same time, Crazy Chico's run-and-gun madness works for me, as well, because the sex is volcanic and the spontaneous wackiness creates a somewhat human ambience for the double-trucking mama-bucking.

Then again, as I said in my comments about "Perfect Porn," my concept for a porn flick would require a minimum budget of 200G, and precisely to achieve the quality TonyC talks about striving for in his productions.

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Why buy a product that is unwatchable?

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But I have never experienced the phenomenon you describe. That's with an $800 ProScan and a high-end DVD player. The only recurring complaint for me is jittery frames and bad audio synching -- mostly with RLD and Sineplex titles. (I really think if there's a studio to attack for having crappy looking DVDs, it's Sineplex; they are consistently bad: washed out, jitter-prone, choppily edited ...)

Until this thread, I had never noticed the halos ever on anything, seriously, until the guy brought up the shots from I Love It Rough #3 , and I could match it with my copy, and now I see ... but for me it's an incredibly minor issue as regards my enjoyment of the disc.

I'm sure if I were to upgrade to what I'd love to have -- a 46-inch Sony HDTV-ready projection beast, the one that sells for about $1,400 and is best bang for buck that I know of -- and got accustomed to a sweet digital signal, I'd be having a harder time with PXP's stuff. But I don't even have cable, and the four channels I get often are fuzzy-lookng, much worse than any DVD I've ever seen. (On the other hand, I enjoy a lot of mainstream DVD fare, which looks WAY better than any porn I see).

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This is my biggest problem with feature porn (and other low-budget, shot on video features) Having made the budgetary choice to shoot on video, the producers don't take into account that video isn't just cheap, crappy looking film. It's a different medium, with a different visual language. It just doesn't work to put a bunch of people in a half-empty mansion and shoot bad writing/acting/directing on video, and shot-on-video features nearly always look like under produced soap operas. (Those that don't (rare) have creative concepts that are firmly rooted in the way that video looks and the way an audience interprets that look.)

Gonzo doesn't make this mistake. It recognizes the "here and now" feel that video has. Rather than try to be something it can't, it invites the viewer to see the action (and judge it by the same standards) as an episode of COPS . But here-and-now, real-and-raw doesn't have to mean badly made. If gonzo porn were as watchable as COPS , I probably wouldn't watch anything but gonzo porn. (For all my complaining about porn, I like seeing naked girls getting stuffed with cock.)

Whatever the resources available, there still has to be basic mastery of the medium, and there still has to be enough time and talent to do the job right. No matter how much a contractor wants to do a good job buildling a house, and no matter how small and simple that house is, if he and his crew don't have the time and talent to do the job right, it's not going to happen.

-T.C.

Edited by - TonyC on 6/5/2004 4:23:38 PM

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DV should have been a new golden age for porn. With PD150s and G4/FCP edit systems, you could get in the gonzo porn game without even maxing your credit cards. For comparison, look at the camera John Stagliano used in THE ADVENTURES OF BUTTMAN . Even if that's only a Sony UVW100, that was still a ~$15K camera back in it's day, and thousands more to edit (owning an online suite was out of the question in those days.)

But for every person who said "Great! Now I can afford to start making porn the way I think it should be made," there were ten more who said "Great! Now I can start making (pick one: girls pooping, pee festivals, double whatever). People pay big money for that shit!"

So now here were are. More titles than ever, more girls than ever, a greater array of bizzare sex acts than ever, but I don't think anyone is calling this a new golden age. Noisy and ugly rule the day, while the new old guard shoots for the cable market and hopes the feds don't break up the party before they get their mortgages paid off.

Cheers, the next round is on me.

-T.C.

Edited by - TonyC on 6/5/2004 4:55:00 PM

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BUt ya know, I limit my purchases to directors and studios that I really love because of the quality and the vision and the passion I see on the screen. That's all I care about, porn-wise, so all that shit streaming out of the Valley ain't pouring into my septic tank! (That is to say, my brain!)

Seriously though, at some point porn consumers decide what matters and what doesn't, not the horn-rimmed connoissuers of tech-geekdom. For me, the mere upgrade from VHS to DVD is such a startling improvement that I'm not gonna worry about "halos" and such for a long, long time. Give me a well-designed menu, lots of bonus footage, maybe some cool commenrary or BTS, a minimum of shitty music or watermarks or www.vincevoyuer.com screen crawls (UGH! I wish someone would copmplain about THAT!), and runtimes between 2:40 and 3:30 and I am a slap-happy camper. I'll leave the bantering to you sinemaniacs from here on out. Sadly, I know I will never be able to swing more than a PD-150-type camera if I ever want to shoot my own stuff, so it is ultimately only discouraging to think about all the super HIGH end equipment. (Now, if I got a wad of cash from Ted Hope or someone like that, hey, let's go to the races!)

. Hell, I'd love to go back and shoot loop-style sex footage in actual Super-8! That would fucking rock! And then work it into a regular DVD production. OK, my Freedom Fries are burning in the oven. Carry on ...

Edited by - skronker on 6/5/2004 5:19:48 PM

Edited by - skronker on 6/5/2004 5:21:11 PM

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But oh I swear it would be worth it! Can you imagine how rich M&J's hump would look on Super16 – especially if it were projected! They only went at it for about 17 minutes total, so coverage from two cameras would be about 1300 feet, or about $1000. I've got the cameras, I've got the lights, the trouble is finding a qualified camera operator. No one will do porn these days!

-T.C.

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One of these days someone is going to figure out how to make money making smut that is both visually and emotionally engaging. I don't mean flower and butterflies, and I don't mean softcore. I mean fucking and sucking and sodomy produced at a high enough standard that you don't have to make any excuses for (it's just porn, as long as the action is hot, it's' more real that way ) when you watch it.

-T.C.

Edited by - TonyC on 6/5/2004 6:39:32 PM

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Sodomy is cheaper.

-T.C.

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Of course it's worth looking at from the other point of view: if DV is so much cheaper, why does anyone shoot film. Are the producers who do this just a bunch of spendthrift money wasters? I don't think so. In fact, people who shoot film seem to make a lot more money that people who shoot video. Maybe the two things are related....

-T.C.

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So the question needs re-asking. What is the release date of the first PXP title that will be done by the new replicator?

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Will the new replicator be pressing any "re-orders" of older titles in the upcoming future? If so, can those of us who have problems with titles from the old company get the problem discs replaced with the corrected ones?

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The author basically creates the files that go onto the DVD. The duplicator is the company that actually burns those files onto the DVD. At this point, they feel that the problem was in the duplication, not the authoring. Therefore, they just need to create new discs with the same files. If it had been the authoring, the actual files would have needed to be recreated.

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Oren
Anarchy

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Edited by - M.B. on 7/30/2004 10:54:06 AM

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Edited by - M.B. on 7/30/2004 10:55:40 AM

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