Woah. A lot of (maybe too much) ranting on here about porn philosophy and film theory. How about some ranting about something measurable and quantifiable. How about a little on why todays porn looks the way it looks?

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING FOCAL PLANE

Even 70mm film, used in Hollywood epics (the cinematic standard is 35mm) is a pretty small negative compared to what is used to produce a lot of the high-end imagery we see. Despite claims to the contary, 4″x5″ film is still the industry standard for most commercial photography. 120/220 twenty is used where speed of loading is important, but even there the RZ and GX680 are more popular that Hassleblad because (in a rectangular crop) the negative is nearly twice the size. When you see the same subject shot with both 35mm and 4″x5″ there’s just no comparing the sharpness and and detail of the smaller negative to the larger negative. In other words, in photography, size matters.

To create the “illusion of sharpness and detail” in the cinematic image, one of the easiest tricks is to show some difference between what’s in focus and what’s out of focus. What’s in focus (the subject) will look sharp and detailed by comparison to what’s out of focus (the background). (There are other reasons to employ this technique, and it’s common in still photography as well.)

If you look at modern porn, especially modern video porn, you seldom see this pleasing contrast of focus between figure and field. As porn (both moving and still) has become more and more dependent on consumer gear, it has in turn become more and more dependent on gear with small focal planes. Focal planes on cameras like the Sony VX1000 and it’s decendent are about 1/3″ inch measure diagonally. “Palmcorders” have even smaller chips, a tiny as 1/5″ diagonally. Compare that to the 1/2″ or more commonly 2/3 inch on broadcast video equipment, or the approximate 1″ diagonal measurement of non-anamorphic 35mm wide screen. That means that when you see smut shot on a Sony PDX-10, the total area of the film plane is less than a tenth the area of a broadcast video camera, and about 4% the size of the cameras that are used to shoot your favorite T.V. shows or movies. As I said before, in photography, size matters.

This focal plane size difference is part of why movie, TV shows, classic 70s porn and and even early shot-on-pro-gear video porn has a look to it that can’t be replicated by today’s consumer gear. Sure, the CCDs in today’s consumer cameras outperform yesterday’s professional chips in, but the chip size and lenses on these consumer cameras severely restricts the kinds of images that can be made. Because of the immutable physics of optics, particularly the relationship of angle of view, focal plane size and depth of field, this effect difficult, sometimes impossible to achieve shallow depth of field with small focal plane consumer video cameras.

The distinctive look of small focal plane photography has uttlerly changed the face of porn. I suppose whether or or not you like that change is largely a matter of personal taste. I don’t. Resolution issues aside, deep focus shows all the clutter in the background. When pornographers are savvy enough to attend to this, they clear out everything, so the sets in “high-end” porn always has a stark, sterile look. You’ll never see the pleasingly art-directed cluttered background of a “real movie” because all that clutter (that helps create a sense of place and mood) looks terrible when it’s just as in focus as everthing else. (For the same reason that large diamonds cost much more than small diamonds, there will never be large CCDs (these perform the same function as film in a film camera) in consumer gear, nor will consumer gear have higher quality lenses.)

And with out the soft/sharp relationship, everything looks soft, which further compounds the fact that images from this kind of gear are soft. The lenses aren’t very good, the lens flaws are spread over a proportionately larger part of the focal plane, and the tiny CCD’s gather up the image aren’t all that good. The final image has soft, plasticy sameness to it. This is a big part of what makes porn look different from everything else. It’s part of what makes people say “ewww, that’s porn.”

That’s not to say that high-end consumer gear (sometimes called “prosumer”) has no place in making pretty pictures. Both Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story and Xana and Dax: When Opposites Attract were shot on the Sony DSR PD100A, a camera with a very small chip. But we had to work hard to compensate for the limitations of the gear. These days we’re using a combination of video (for the interviews, where we have absolute control over every aspect of the light) and film (for the lovemaking, which is a little more “catch it as you can.”)

Using film for the “catch it as you can” part runs contrary to a lot of conventional wisdom about where to use film and where to use video. Our reason are both technical and aestetic. More on that in another instalment.

-T.C.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 9:40 am and is filed under Filmcraft, love-making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.