How to make a Porn Movie

There are various reasons why some of you may want to shoot your own porno video scenes. For one thing, it's fun. Shooting (a) sex video is a voyeuristic sex act for the camera operator. when they are strongly connected to the action in front of them. This is not necessarily or even often the case in commercial video production, where the camera operator has a lot on his or her mind besides their own enjoyment. Plus, the scene they're shooting may not be very erotic due to the detached performances of the actors or because the scene is often broken up into short segments (at least in the more professional productions) to make it easier to control all the filmic elements. But in the more intimate and emotionally charged setting of your bedroom or kitchen table, a playful video shoot may be a special sexual treat.

Other people interested in making their own porn may want to watch it later, to be turned on by their own sexual escapades, reliving a moment with or without the company of the original participants. Nothing could better represent their own experience on screen.

Some people like to shoot videos of themselves and swap with "swingers" across the country, accumulating hot, personal documents and knowing it's all real. This is actually how the amateur business got started.

Still others may want to enter the amateur or professional porno business (a whole new level of competition and avariciousness), with a fresh vision, an artful skill, energetic new faces, or just an unusual-looking piece of garbage for the media sewer. A whole book could be written for the hopeful video entrepreneur, but we can't cover all that here. If you want to get into the business, you will need to do your own research appropriate to the particular path you want to take. How you work depends on who you are personally. You could start a lesbian video art collective-making production decisions by consensus, or you could pay starving art students fifty bucks for a blowjob while you point the camera downwards. You could put ads for your mail order business in radical sex 'zines, or get paid bottom dollar to hand your footage over to Joe Blow's amateur porn company. The possibilities are too vast to detail in this chapter, so I will limit myself to imparting tips on how to shoot good material.

I recently reported on a "professional" shoot where some of the hints I will give below would have been useful. Sometimes I've seen beautiful people having hot sex, and the technical ineptitude reduces the experience to murky glop on the video screen. (And of course I've also seen the opposite, where boring sexual fakery was lensed by consummate professionals.) I hope that the readers will strive to preserve the magic of the sex they shoot, so it heats the viewer as much as it does the participants.

I also assume that everyone involved in these little videos will treat each other's public image with consideration, and not get into situations that some public figures have regretted when their bedroom documentaries are broadcast on television, or sold everywhere on the Internet. If you intend to sell or exhibit the video, get signed releases. Examples of these are in books on filmmaking, but they basically just say "I give you permission to use my image however you want."

The camera

Lighting

Shooting the scene

Editing