paul smith's Snaps & Bytes e-home
July 2004: PAUL SMITH’S DEVIANT’S DIARY - DIY with extra screws.
Pornography has been around as long as people. They don’t often get featured in books on Archaeology, but you can be sure that next to prehistoric handprints on cave walls a cavewoman smeared her tits with a crude paint made from goats blood and wolf sputum and pressed them against the cold stone too. I can only assume that six thousand years later Victorians ran around with buckets of hot soapy water and scrubbing brushes. On a related note, what do you call a lesbian cavewoman? A troglodyke. (With apologies to any lesbian cavewomen who may have been offended by reading this.)
In the past, erotic imagery was core to many religions. The ‘Kama Sutra’ temples of Khajuraho in India are a prime example, showing that the Hindu faith didn’t think having sex was something to be shy about. I find it hard to believe the sculptures were created using live models though. No one can do the Inverted Love Monkey for two weeks straight. All the blood would run to the wrong head. In this country many remnants of the pre-Christian tradition show a fertility Goddess called a 'Sheela Na Gig' in what I believe is known as a Continental Pose. There’s one near me at Buckland in Bucks, half way up the church wall. Is the stone image of a female figure parting her vulva (a word that always makes me think of safe Swedish cars) pornographic, erotic or merely crude? What about in the context of it being in a churchyard? Questions for a broader column than mine, so to speak. Anyway, I’d say the short answer is ‘if a cucumber is involved it’s pornographic’. Indeed, pornography as such is Victorian invention, created by simply driving artistically posed nudes underground with the enthusiastic morality of the period. Before, a well-rounded woman in oil was regarded as a good thing. Now, anyone who’s walked down a Spanish street and wondered why a naked woman is needed to advertise breakfast cereal on a bus stop will know things have moved on again.
Commercial pornography is quite possibly a mainstay of your business, but this feature harks back to the early, more primal porn. It’s about the DIY stuff. I don’t mean the sort of film where a man with a moustache who’s come to do the wallpapering gets carried away with his paste. Nor is it where B&D meets B&Q, although they do stock a very comprehensive range of chains and screw-in eyelets…
There was a time, when men stood up when a woman entered the room, that Super8 was the pornographers medium of choice. Who else remembers all those so-called sex comedies (which contained no actual sex and no detectable comedy) of the early 70’s where the protagonist would hold up a reel of film to the light and exclaim in a mockney accent, “Cor blimey! It’s a blokes cock!”? Fortunately for fans of autoerotic movies times have changed. A cheap Digital Video Camera now costs less than a pair of shoes from certain shops. Jimmy Choo knows who I’m talking about, don’t you Jimmy? The bonus here is you don’t have to send the cartridge off to be processed, only to have a copy sold back to you by a mate who works for the GPO six months later with a comment like “This is a good one. The bird’s arse is a bit spotty but the bloke looks like- ‘ang on…” I see Dixons sell a Samsung DV camera for under £350 and you’ll pleased to know it can be used for weddings, births, Bar Mitzvahs and holidays as well as bedroom Am Dram productions.
I’d personally avoid MicroDV camcorders, as the tapes might be very cute but are very expensive. A newish addition to the pantheon of video formats is the MiniDVD. Hitachi brought out the first camcorder to use these adorable 8cm, 30 minute, 1.4Gb discs - which come in a choice of write-once or re-writable - a couple of years ago. Sony have recently launched their own DVD91 Handycam which retails for under £600. As you’d expect it has all the usual gizmos, including a very useful Image Stabiliser for when the action gets more frantic.
Here’s a thought for you: Sex is theatre. It’d explain performance anxiety. Ok, so maybe you only have an audience of one, but you'd still like a stand up ovation afterwards. You'd settle for a warm hand on your entrance. Sexy underwear is costume. A PVC French Maids uniform is REALLY costume. Costume leads to role-play and role-play is basically acting. And with any acting, wouldn’t you like to see the fruit of your efforts, as it were? Like any right-thinking person, of course you would!
Here are a few words of advice. Buy a book (or hell, sell a book. This is a business magazine after all)
about what to do and what not to do to make a saucy film. One I’ve seen advertised on Amazon is How to Become a
Porn Director: Making Amateur Adult Films by Nick Ryder. Or there’s always the optimistically titled Adult Video Business:
How You Can Find Attractive Women to Star in Your Own Adult Films, Make Money, and Quit Work in 7 Weeks
by Ray West. A few obvious pointers to a smooth and trouble-free shoot would be to have any props handy,
think about lighting (you can do great things with candles. Or is that just me?) and remove anything distracting
from the background of the shot. Clutter isn’t sexy. Have the scene in mind before you start.
This is called pre-visualisation and it’s great for getting the mood just right. Like all good stories,
it should have a beginning, middle and come to a sticky end. Ahem.
Editing is a pig with anything other than Digital camcorders, which is why I’ve focused on them here. Analogue Hi8 cameras might be anything up to £200 cheaper, but it’s for a good reason. Image quality after several re-records to add sleazy music and to cut out when the dog jumped on (or off) the bed will be harking back to the fuzzy video porn of the early 80’s. Not a turn on, unless you have some sort of retro flickering porno fetish. Digital means no loss of quality, even after you’ve made a copy of a copy of a copy. I use £30 worth of Roxio VideoWave 5 on my PC, but Pinnacle is another major name for editing software. Both firms also market the Firewire (also known as i-Link by Sony and IEEE-1394 by tech-heads) cards that a PC needs to get the data off the camera in the first place. That said, some fancy new cameras actually use USB 2.0, which virtually all PCs now have built into them. Once edited into a storyboard, trimmed and transitions ‘n’ text added, the resulting file can be saved to CD, DVD or compressed for Internet use- more of this later.
Long before there were naughty home movies and Ron Jeremy was a twinkle in Great Grandmother Jeremy’s eye, there was the candid photograph. Victorian ‘Gentleman’s Relish’ and ‘What the Butler saw’ machines replaced Napoleonic books of erotic lithographic prints. Then Polaroid™ launched their first instant (in the same way that fast food is fast) camera on November the 26th (my birthday!) 1948 and there was much rejoicing. I can’t help thinking that it wasn’t long before a proud owner of a Model 95 bought that day at the Jordan Marsh (ah, the irony) Department Store in Boston for a hefty $89.75 was asking his good lady wife to hold a beach ball and smile. “Now bend down for the beach ball dear…“
Kodak recently announced their future line-up of cameras will all be digital, except for single-use snappers. Clearly digital cameras are now the way to go for the budding Larry Flint. Models offering worthwhile output sizes (0.3 Mega Pixel cameras are of no use to Man nor beast) start around an affordable £40. Something with a flash and a very useful self-timer might be twice that. A zoom isn’t a huge feature for DIY porn unless you like to take your fun outdoors, but a good macro setting can bring all the juicy detail right up close. It can end up rather in your face, in fact. Something to avoid is keeping spare batteries in the same pocket as your handcuffs. If they’re short-circuited they can melt or explode and spoil your day as well as your trousers.
Printing out photos is something some folks will want to do. If they’re not backing up their data (hard drives are the one piece of a computer guaranteed to break sooner rather than later, and it’d be a shame to lose all those precious aids to memory) then it’s also a way of protecting their efforts from an untimely erasure. A good photo-quality printer with a small LCD preview screen and a choice of card slots will be about £150 from HP. A more basic model could be as little as £60. Something to consider is does it have separate colour ink cartridges? You might be getting through a lot of pink (or brown. Never let be said I’m a racist) if you’re using it to make prints for the private album. I asked around town and no High Street ‘Prints from Digital’ retailer was happy to produce anything that could be regarded as offensive. Well, that’s what most of them said. Others just asked me to leave, even after I’d assured them I was researching for a magazine article. One firm that were very helpful was Jessops. They e-mailed me their ‘GUIDELINES IN RELATION TO THE PROCESSING OF POTENTIALLY INDECENT OR OBSCENE PHOTOGRAPHS AND OTHER DUBIOUS MATERIAL’ that includes the following:
“Nudity or posing in itself will not render a photo obscene. However, the following activities depicted are likely to do
so and we will not process them:
- Sexual penetration.
- Masturbation.
- Sado-Masochism/bondage.
- Unnatural sexual practices or perversions.”
This reminds me of what Karl Marx said; “Nothing in nature can be unnatural”. So, in a nutshell, if you want to see nipples, Jessops will be happy to help you. If you want aroused genitals, penetration or Slipknot masks and chains, I’d say steer well clear. Perhaps I’ve just highlighted a gap in the digital photo printing market?
So, now you have a fine collection of well-shot photographs and artfully edited videos or DVDs. You’re very proud of your handiwork and human nature being the ego-driven thing that it is, you’re soon thinking about sharing your art with like-minded people and impressing their socks off. This can be a low-key affair or something a bit more involved:
Last weekend I was sat down watching an English CP film called ‘Just Another Day At St. Stripes’ with a friend of mine, enjoying the slightly surreal sensation of seeing her being spanked on screen. I was pleasantly impressed by the camera work and editing, given the production staff was probably the two blokes holding the video cameras.
There’s no need to turn your hobby into a business though. Through Broadband it’s quite possible to make your films available to a wider audience without the need to strike a distribution deal with Red Stripe and have ‘All actors are 18 or over. Proof on file’ stamped everywhere. You could trade with other couples (or solo artists? Tag teams?) via the ‘net or set up your own pay-per-view web site. You might want to adopt a fake name and keep a bad wig on at all times though.
I spoke to one firm called GetDotted.com who host sites -including my own- in the UK. They describe themselves as a ‘Family Host’ and take a dim view of porn on their servers. Not least because it could well be illegal under the Obscene Publications Acts of 1959 and 1963. An image is ‘deemed to be obscene if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are Iikely to see it.’ I was told they’re really only aware of porn if a specific complaint is made to them about a site, or if the pages get so many hits it becomes an obvious draw on their bandwidth. ‘Offensive material’ is featured on their Ts&Cs of service as not being welcome on the sites they host, but this is obviously one of those situations where what offends one person might not offend another. Perhaps it’d be better to track down a host (possibly beyond the UK) who’s not all that fussy, or use one of the free online services to create an Internet photo and video clip album. Yahoo and MSN Groups have a tendency to delete sites without warning though, so always keep backups. Again, have I put a spotlight on an obvious business opportunity? Professional and enthusiastic amateur e-xhibitionists both demand quality web hosting packages…
There you go. This article started out as a nice look at Home Made Porn and I’ve turned it into a capitalist manifesto again. Still, where there’s mucky pictures there’s brass, eh?
All Trademarked names are the recognised property of their respective owners and the inclusion of them in this feature in no way suggests they’re all in favour of DIY porn. They may be ambivalent. Who knows?
Paul Smith is still free to a good home. Kinky Job offers to info@snapsandbytes.co.uk please.
2225 words on the veiled world of home made porn Dale. I hope it was good for you too! :-D
Paul.