First, let’s talk about my favorite subject… me. I have been shooting still content since 1998; I have a background in legitimate theatre and film production, and recently I decided to enlarge the Big Lou Empire by shooting video. That being said, this was the perfect seminar for yours truly.The parties involved, chiefly Colin Rowntree and Greg Gregory, started off by mentioning that all of the footage shot would be viewable in an online editing tutorial on AVN. Those of us who went to the seminar will be able to log on and see if these guys know anything about making dirty movies or not. The point was also made that original content sells well, and that surfers want video. It might even be argued that an amateur filmmaker with minimal skills can pull in more bling-bling than the best Internet still photographer (I have a video shooting friend who reminds me of this all the time). Enough conference attendees seemed to agree; this final seminar of InterNext drew a nice crowd.
The first step to producing adult video, says Colin, is the story. He believes that you can’t just shoot two people having sex; there needs to be some plot involved. That might be the only thing he said in the hour that I disagree with; I always fast-forward through the plots during my, ahem, private time. With that, he and Greg turned the stage into a movie set and shot a video based on the familiar “pizza boy” theme. Greg took the camera, and I am dying to see how his footage looks, because it seems to me that he was moving more than his actors were. The characters, played by two adult actresses, claimed to be hungry and ordered some pizza. The scene was shot straight through, with one camera and no pick-up footage. Colin yelled “cut” and they moved onto Scene Two… the arrival of the pizza boy.
When pizza boy arrives, the models realize that they have no money and more-or-less seduce him. Greg is still shooting one establishing shot, moving the camera constantly, with no close-ups. I have not been shooting close-ups either; as with a lot of amateur videographers, time is money and sometimes you only have time for one good shot. The same goes for stunt cocks, I believe.
The final scene (they yadda-yadda’d through the actual sex parts) features a husband (played by convention regular and resident porn little person Mini Holio) coming home shocked that his wife and her friend are seducing the pizza boy. He kicks the pizza boy out and demands oral satisfaction.
After the shoot, Colin mentioned that the lighting was poor in the convention room; a large space eats up the light, whereas in a small space it reflects back. He offered budget solutions for those who cannot afford a professional kit, such as halogen lights from Home Depot. He also made camera recommendations; to my relief my $700 Sony MINI-DV Handycam from Fry’s is exactly what he recommended for beginners. He also gave some good advice for dealing with models, mainly that they have all of the info before the shoot (type of sex acts, time, pay, ids, etc.).
An interesting recommendation, semi-exclusive to the adult world, is that one should shoot in sequence, especially for fetish shoots, since it’s quite easy to make a white bum turn red, but the opposite takes more time.
There was a one-hour time constraint, and even the Robert Rodriguez film school takes 24 hours. Given this limitation, the lesson might have been better titled “How to Shoot Adequate Video on a Shoestring.” It definitely made up for this shortcoming in entertainment value. For this reason alone, the seminar was timely, as most of us had just been to the legal seminar that took place immediately beforehand, which offered little levity. I attended a similar seminar at InterNext two years ago, and rather than a demonstration, it consisted of three content providers saying, “Don’t shoot your own content; buy it from me!” This was definitely a more constructive way to spend an hour.
