The porn shoot

You would not believe the amount of gear needed to shoot porn. In the old days, when it was still shot on celluloid, porn sets resembled your small budget film sets. With the advent of the VCR and the eventual digital media revolution the amount of gear needed to make a decent fuck flick has gone down, but there is still plenty of it…especially when it is your job to carry it from the grip truck to the set.

That was my first paying film job, lighting and camera tech for an amateur porno.

I really was not sure what to think when I took the job. All I knew was that they liked the fact that I already had studio lighting expertise and worked with nudes before. An added bonus was my interest in eventually producing my own independent film. You see, most non studio pornographers are all just really frustrated film school graduates who thought they would “get into porn and make a quick buck so they can fund what they really want to make”. Me? I was here for the paycheck and boobies. Yeah I planned on learning all I could, but let’s face it the boobies were a nice incentive.

Van now loaded down with gear, we await our intrepid director. He’s late… again. Seems the talent, that’s what you call them, Never “people we are about to watch fuck” but “talent” were having a bit of a crisis that morning finding a sitter. Perhaps I should back up a bit, our film company specialized in what they liked to call “Real Couples” by that they meant anyone willing to fuck on film who could bring their own partner(s) and provide a location. It was a good angle, in a market flooded with pretty girls willing to open their legs for the camera; porn needs a shtick in order to sell. Theirs was the “honesty” of the sex.

The “talent” lived about an hour and a half outside of the city, so we all piled into cars and set out for our destination. A rural community once fueled by timber jobs, now a strange mix of huge housing developments built for folks who don’t care about the commute and trailer parks. As luck would have it, our destination was the latter. An old single wide, the kind where they did not even bother to make it look like a house, rather there it sat an oblong silver whale along the side of the road.

Always the professionals, we set about unloading the gear in the tiny living room as the director spoke with the talent. She was pretty, in that sort of well worn pretty that you see at the end of the bar after a long night of drinking. Her bleach blonde hair revealed dark black roots. “Well at least she has a decent body,” quipped my co-worker, “you should have been here for the last shoot we did. I’d never seen a chick with back hair before”

Thank heaven for small favors I guess.

While we waited for the woman’s partner to return we got to work lighting the bedroom. The room was a thing of wonder, taking up over half the tiny dwelling it was complete with a giant wood framed waterbed. The kind your uncle had, you know that uncle who always wore the one piece leisure suits and that gold chain with the funky little horn pendant? A California, we could have a god dammed orgy on it complete with midgets, King Size Waterbed. Complete with etched glass mirrors in the headboard.

Now I will admit that I always enjoyed this part of the job. Lighting a scene for porn is a tricky task. You want to have as many angles to shoot from as possible while not having any lighting gear in the shot. Also, most humans really don’t look all that good under 1K hot lights, doubly so for folks from the damp pacific northwest. Using a portable lighting rig and some creativity, we mange to hide enough lights in the ceiling to allow us almost 360 degree view of the action. Granted to actually shot some of those angles I’ll probably need to place a knee in the middle of the talent’s ass, but we could hit it if we needed.

We filtered the lights with soft amber gels so that their pale skin would seem a bit warmer. While we did our final camera tests, the rest of the talent showed up. Or shall I say we hear the roar of what could only be… quick peak out the window to make sure… yes, yes it is. A mid seventies Pontiac Firebird, complete with rust spotted bird decal on the hood. Who should step out, but a tall, no make that scrawny man with yes a mullet. Oh my god, he is even wearing a Pabst Beer hat.

Then it finally hit me. I’m standing in a single wide trailer house in the middle of nowhere about to shove a DV camera between the sweating legs of a couple of strangers. Strangers that, quite frankly I don’t think I would want to know in real life, let alone meet them AFTER watching them exchange body fluids.

Where are the earnest, yet hot lesbians and the dominatrix?

“Ok, let’s heat those lights up and get the talent on the set! Monk I want you on the close-up cam. Get in there really tight and get me some hot shots. Here use this flashlight if you need to get more light down there.”

And so the moral of this story?

Porn is a lot like sausage. If you like to consume it, you really should never see how it is actually made.