“National Geographic Color”
“I want National Geographic color.”
That’s what I tell the colorist who does our telecine transfers from Super16 to tape. It’s short-hand for “The look I want is no look; natural, normal skintones, nothing affected, artsy, or edgy.”
I also have my DP shoot a right-down-the-middle neutral Macbeth and a few more Macbeths with whatever color temp and/or exposure adjustments he thinks a scene needs. That gives the colorist a good point of reference for what I think is “natural and normal.”
By shooting and tranfering this way, we are able to get shot-for-shot color corrected 16mm transfers for $.18/foot. Add $.12/foot for processing, and .$22/foot for the stock itself, and we’re shooting on film for about $1200/running hour. That’s a hell of a lot more than shooting DV, but it’s trivial compared to the overall costs of making and marking a film.
More than once I’ve said that “Film is first and foremost the art of spending money.”
I will add that if you’re trying to get people to take your film seriously, especially if your shooting subject matter that usually isn’t, shooting film is money artfully spent!
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Spending money on film has merit.
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:52 pm
$1200 an hour sounds rather terrifying. Have you ever found yourself hoping your star couple was just in the mood for a quickie?
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:04 pm
In all the testing and shooting that Peggy and I did, we never had a couple have sex for more than 45 minutes. With two cameras running continuously, that’s $1800, which translates into the profit from less than 150 DVDs. I’m quite sure shooting on film has improved our sales on each far more than the ~150 pieces needed to break even. Long run it costs us something like $.25~$.50/DVD.
Even if we sold the exact same number shooting video, to me it’s worth the $.50/DVD to to make the films look the way that shooting on film makes them look. If this was only about money, we’d do something easier. None the less, the financial reasoning is sound, and that’s the point.
(BTW, the next time Peggy and I hoist camera I’m hoping they well be 35mm cameras. I’ll probably cost more like $.75-$1.25/DVD, and I don’t know if it will make up the additional cost/DVD in increased volume. But it will look gorgeous!)
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
That’s really interesting.
I guess the other thing is that your films only feature one couple so the cost of “talent” (which is an awful word I admit) is lower than if you were shooting a Vivid feature pic for example. Obviously very different beasts but just looking at it from an economic perspective.
I’m just thinking… you’re breaking a taboo here, talking about costs. Everyone in the porn industry likes to be elusive about profits and money in general, beyond boasting that we’re all pimpy rich.
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:37 pm
The average Vivid video is shot in one or two days. Even at 10-12 hours of footage, that’s only about $12k-$15k to shoot a Vivid-style production on film. The reason Vivid doesn’t shoot on film is because they don’t know how to turn that investment into increased returns. That same calculus accounts for a lot of what you see, or don’t see, in “adult” videos.
June 3rd, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Also, while our work is erotic, we differ from “the industry” in some pretty important ways.
Our pre-production practices are different, our production techniques are different , our health and safety standards for the people who appear in our films are vastly different, our post-production practices are different, our marketing is different, and our distribution practices are different. And the ways that our films are different from what is produced by “the porn industry” is, in large measure, a result of ways that our business practices are different.
That gets at the gyst of what I’m trying to develop for this book/seminar thingo. I’m revisiting the very deliberate business decisions we made that enabled us to achieve a particular creative result, and trying to systematize a (mostly amorphous) base of knowledge and experience that helped guide me in making those decisions, in the hopes of coming up with something that is useful for independent artist in general, regardless of their subject matter (seminar), or even their medium (book).
Part of that is going to entail dispelling a lot of myths, especially financial myths about what the potential returns are, (hint: not as much as people think) in porn, in movies, in publishing, and that is going some candor on my part. And while I’ve got no intentions of posting our tax returns online, anyone who can do math is going to be able to figure out what kind of car we’re shopping for, and that’s not a Mercedes minivan. Partly because that would be a financial decission that would not further our creative goals, but mostly because we can’t afford it!