Shine Louis Houston is using 35mm lenses on her current production!

Previous posts: Size Does Matter (The Incredible Shrinking Focal Plane),  Size Still Matters (Kirby Ferguson’s DVD)

Have you every noticed that talking/debating about porn is (mostly) more engaging than actually watching it?

Anyway, Ms. Naughty, just back from bushwalking and wine-guzzling has added her two cents to the porn/blowjob/feminism debate in a post entitled Boring Blowjobs and Feminist Facials. This is the part that jumped out at me:

“Can a facial ever be “feminist”? My answer is yes. As always, context is everything.”

I agree. Context is everything. I’d even go as far as saying context is the only thing. Porn is often criticized for being fake and/or lacking context, but this is utterly untrue.

Porn is vividly real and hypercontextual. The very essence of photographic pornography is the depiction of actual sex, and it doesn’t get more “real” than two people actually fucking.

The problem is that (overwhelmingly) the reality depicted and the context in which it’s placed is utterly unappealing if not downright offensive. But when it comes to photographic images of sex, like the words “porn” and “feminism”, “reality” and “context” are at least as slippery.

Is “reality” the degree to which the viewer becomes engrossed in the narrative conceit of the film, or does “reality” extend to how well the narrative conceit jibes with the particulars of the production?

Similarly, is context limited to the moment when the house lights go down to the final fade to back? Or does it include the director’s Q&A after, or the Behind-The-Scene on the DVD? Or how about an e-mail exchange between the film’s director and a disappointed viewer? This is a post I made back in September of 2005 entitled Real Porn (No, Really):

Two days ago I received a note from a fellow who, although he liked many things about Marie & Jack and Xana & Dax, was rather disappointed that both love scenes ended with external ejaculation. Here’s a bit from his note (used by permission):

These videos have what I have been looking for that is missing from the usual “porn” videos with one exception. You claim that these represent real sex but in both cases the man pulled out prior to cuming and we were shown proof that he came… Maybe these couples actually have sex in this way but I doubt it. If they do I suggest using some couples who do not as well. This was a particular issue in the Xana & Dax video where he spent some time masturbating himself to climax. Why miss out on the wonderful sensations of being in your woman before cuming unless you are not able to do so for some reason. That, to a large extent, ruined the movie for me.

Also, my wife does not often watch explicit videos because she misses the loving relationship aspect of sex that makes it good for her. There is much in these movies that I suspect she would enjoy but I am sure she would be put off by this as well. She has made similar comments about other explicit videos.

He was also concerned that this might also be the case in Matt & Khym, which he had on pre-order. I wrote back:

Dear XXX,Thank you for your thoughtful e-mail. It very succinctly addresses some of the vagaries of shooting sex scenes of people having unscripted and and undirected sex. With your permission I’d very much like to use your letter in an upcoming blog post. FYI, Matt and Khym’s love scene ends with Matt ejaculating inside of Khym. No particular effort is made to “prove” that he ejaculated, but afterwards Khym does reach down to catch a little on her finger and taste it.

Yours,
Tony Comstock

This seemed to (mostly) satisfy his concerns:

From your response I take it that Xana & Dax and Marie & Jack choose to handle the men’s ejaculation without any direction or suggestions. If so I wonder if that is how they normally have sex or if they did it that way because they thought that it might be expected, maybe from watching “normal porn”. You might want to make it clearer to those you film that they don’t have to do things differently, especially that.I am not complaining if that is normal for them. It just seemed faked because of the way men’s ejaculation is handled in most porn.

The “might make it clearer” comment reminds me of the conversation I had with Desiree in the weeks prior to shooting her and her husband Ben.

“Oh, so you don’t want him to cum all over my face then?” she asked in response to my saying I just wanted them do have nice normal natural sex.

“Um well,” I stuttered, ” I don’t want you to do something you don’t enjoy when it’s just the two of you just because the camera is there, or because you think we want or need you to do something like that.”

“Oh no. I love having Ben blow on my face. I think it’s great, we do it all the time!”

“Well okay then. Please don’t let our being there inhibit you!” (It didn’t. Desiree had three orgasms that were very nearly disturbing in their intensity.)

Meanwhile, a tempest in a teapot seems to be swirling over similar question about what is and isn’t real over at SuicideGirls.com. Between kids, station wagon, suburban tract house, and a BMI of 26, I’m not really an alt kind of guy, (and even when I was young and broke and played my guitar too loud, I still wasn’t wasn’t an alt kind of guy) so I don’t really know that much about SuicideGirls, besides the fact that the chicks have downtown hairstyles, tats and piercing, and the photography style tends toward the deep focus/small focal plane style that I don’t really dig.

I do know what I thought I knew about SG, which was that I thought it was some hip, alternaporn site, run by technologically empowered female scenesters who were using the internet and cheap digital cameras to deconstruct the traditional pin-up. Okay, that’s cool in concept, even if I don’t really dig it as art, let alone as stroke material. Now it turns out that maybe SG is just some site run by some guy who’s making money off a lot of 18 year old girls’ yearnings to be a little less anonymous in the celebrity-obsessed world that we inhabit. Somehow that doesn’t seem quite so hip.

So what’s it all about, Alfie?

Back during that internet thing, people would sometimes say, “Content is king,” and the inflection they used seemed to indicate they thought they were offering a pearl of wisdom. Well here’s my pearl of wisdom, at least when it comes to making sex films: Context is king. Context is king, and when you use ‘reality’ as your conceit you walk a fine line. Most audiences are sophisticated enough to know that “the truth” is not the same thing as what you would have seen if you were on the set that day. But they’re also sensitive enough to know when the “reality” you try and present is too far way from what they would have felt if they had been on the set.

I don’t know what the “truth” is about SuicideGirls. The truth about Comstock Films is that all the way along there is a conspiracy between me and the couple I’m working with to present a very idealized portrait of their sexual relationship. It’s no more (or less) real than the nightly news or a novel.

Before their scene I asked Matt and Khym how they intended to enjoy Matt’s orgasm (experience has taught me not to assume that a “real couple” doesn’t enjoy the “so fake” external pop shot). When they told me that he was going to cum inside of her, I made a couple of suggestions for how we could visually signal the audience “yes, it really did happen.” The result can be seen in that lovely Comstock Films button that Mrs.C made for us.

Does that ruin it for you? I hope not.

As a director my ideal is that everything that an audience needs to know to enjoy one of my films should be presented within the confines of the film itself. If any information from “outside the frame” enhances the enjoyment the film, that’s fine, but the film itself should be the essential experience. If a viewer is on the fence until I’ve explained my intentions at the Q&A, or they seen everyone goofing off and having a good time in the BTS, or been given my assurances that it was “real” in a private e-mail exchange, then in my mind, the film has failed that viewer.

But film is first and foremost a commercial undertaking, so as a producer and marketeer, I recognize that creating and shaping an external context for our work is an essential part of the art and business of making films. “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex”; that’s the “frame” with in which we present our “erotic documentaries.” (Of course “erotic documentaries” is yet another frame.)

But for all the effort we put into framing our work, there’s a limit to how much control we have over the context in which our films are understood. By my reckoning, at the very most even a filmmaker like Steven Speilberg only has control over 49% of how any given viewer sees and understands one of his films.

I work on the assumption that I have even less control, so a lot of my effort goes into being mindful of vast space into which viewers will pour their own understanding and life experiences, and recognizing that each viewer is going to create their own context, based on their own understanding of sex, relationships, and pleasure.

Sometimes this works.

(From our upcoming BEN AND DESIREE)

More than two years ago, in post entitled No Sadness, Anguish, Pain, or Suffering I quoted a bit from Violet Blue’s blog about her upcoming edition of Best Women’s Erotica 2006. Said Violet:

“I don’t know, but I have to say that I’ve noticed a huge difference in the way that previous generations of women have edited erotic anthologies in comparison to my generations’ attitudes about sex. We don’t think that “literary” erotica, especially women’s erotica, needs to be somehow qualified by sadness, anguish, pain or suffering… A message to the publishers and editors (and filmmakers) who imbue the hot fuck with a moral: you’re not relevant anymore… I’m running totally sexually fucking amok with BWE ‘06. I’m tossing OUT all the fucking depressing submissions I’m getting. I want erotica that totally turns my head around, and makes me want to fuck.”

Two years later, The Guardians Josh Spero has identified “the disturbing nature of sex” as a hallmark of the Independent Film Channels “50 Great Sex Scenes in Cinema.” Says Josh:

“Many of the scenes are marked out by the disturbing nature of the sex. Take No 1 - Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland having grief-stricken sex in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. It’s profoundly out of place given the rest of the film, yet it is tender, erotic and tells us about the characters, as meaningful sex scenes should.The disturbances continue through the top 10: Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello pound away at each other on the stairs in A History of Violence (2), with all the layers of deceit and mistrust involved; Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring have surreal sapphic sex in Mulholland Drive (3); while Secretary (8) and Betty Blue (6) are chock-full of odd, unhinged sex. Perhaps most disturbing is The Night Porter (12), where Nazi guard Dirk Bogarde and concentration camp survivor Charlotte Rampling reconnect.”

Let’s see; disturbing, grief-striken, deceit, mistrust, surreal, odd, unhinged, disturbing (again), and just for kicks, Nazi and concentration camp.

Notice anything?

Look, I know, drama require doubt, and as I said in Part 1, if you made a film about how great bicycling is, you’d virtually be *required* to subject one of the characters to a deadly, or at least greviously injurious wreck. That’s how story-telling (usually) works. But like Violet, I am simply sick to death of the idea that sex has to be contextualized by sadness, anguish, pain and/or suffering to be taken seriously.

Oh look! Another art-house film showing us how, even when people have wild, break the bedframe, smash the china, sing into each other’s assholes sex, they still can’t connect; not deep down inside where it counts. Did anyone besides me notice that in SHORTBUS when main characters finally got their restoritive, healing, last reel of the film sex, we didn’t get to see it!? Disturbing, grief-striken, deceitful, mistrustful, surreal, odd, unhinged sex is a reality worth of being closely observed. But sex that is merely connective, pleasurable, loving – well what sort of a pervert wants to see that?

Rant over.

I’m going to the beach!

Flash back to the Spring of 2003. MARIE AND JACK has been finished for almost a year and a half. It’s done well in the few film festivals that accepted it. But so far, no one is interested in selling it. I am sending copies to anyone I can think of who might support the film, and one of those people is the founder of Good Vibrations, Joani Blank. Joani loves MARIE AND JACK and encourages me to keep at it.

Now it’s October of 2004. I’m in the San Francisco Bay area to meet several prospective couples for shooting we hope will take place in 2005, including Bill and Desiree, who have found their way to me through Joani. It’s also my first chance to meet Joani and others in person. I take BART over to Oakland and am introduced to co-housing though a communal meal at Joani’s place (meated and meatless chili is served.)

My visit with Joani end up being one of the high-lights of the trip, but she is very anxious about Bill and Desiree’s inclusion in the schedule. I don’t want to disappoint Joani, but I’m also not interested in shooting an older couple simply for the sake of being inclusive. My primary criteria when considering a couple are: 1) would I enjoy watching this couple fuck? 2) Would I enjoy spending an hour or two chatting with this couple? I haven’t yet met Bill and Desiree, so I don’t know the answer to either question.

Joani and I visit for several more hours after dinner, talking about a million different aspects of the art and business of sex. She shows me her incredible collection of Jan Saudek prints. But the conversation frequently circles back on what great subjects Bill and Desiree would be. I am doing my best to be noncommittal while trying to seem enthusiastic. I’m quite sure she’s on to me.

A few days later I’m at the W Hotel. I am meeting couples more or less on the hour, and I have been at it for nearly two days. The W is noisier, darker, and hipper than I would have cared for, but it’s sufficient.

All of the couples I’ve met have already sent me photos, we’ve exchanged e-mails, we’ve talked on the phone a few times. But there’s nothing like meeting in person; seeing how they respond to me, seeing how I respond to them. I am also shooting some very brief screen tests. We’ll be shooting film, and I want to see how these people look on film, so I’m rolling off 40 or 50 feet (about a minute) on each couple. When you have a look at Bill and Desiree’s “screen-test” (linked below) I think you’ll see why, when after I saw it, I wanted to see them make love:

Bill and Desiree’s Screen Test (MOS)

If you’d like to be notified by e-mail when BILL AND DESIREE is available, you can sign up on our Coming Soon page!

(From “Matt and Khym: Better than Ever”)

In the book “The Conversations” master film editor Walter Murch talks about “reality closely observed” being an essential aspect of cinema. He traces this back to Proust and other ninteenth century novelists who turned their creative attention away from history and heros, and toward the drama of everyday life; taking note, for example, of how the elbows of a man’s coat might be worn shiny from wear.

In cinema, these obervations are expressed through the use of the close-up. Small, telling details, used to give the audience cues about what’s important in a scene, in a story.

The history of cinema is filled with close-ups of mouths touching mouths. In the days of movie palaces images of kissing filled screens four stories high. Those images said kissing is important, kissing is good, kissing is beautiful.

I found the below on the Freddy and Eddy forums. Kissing is not the only way that lovers can touch one another that is important, good, and beautiful.

I also like to keep the lights on to see my man’s glistening cock repeatedly plunge into me slowly to the hilt and then just as slowly withdraw. That’s such an awesome tease, and it’s slow enough for me to touch his cock and balls in between strokes. Really makes me beg for more. But the greatest thing is that the visual image stays in my mind, so when the thrusting gets more serious, I can revisit that image when the in-and-out is being intensely felt, but not seen.

The the persistant image is the technological basis of cinema. How lovely it is in love-making as well!

The story work on Ashley and Kisha’s interview is done. It’s smooth, it flows it has pace and panache. Right now I’m working the rhythm between the two shot and the close-up, using the camera choice to emphasis passages or highlight reactions. It’s one of my very favorite parts of making these films.

I am also monitoring the reshuffle of our Google site index and the the slow return of ComstockFilms.com (hopefully) back from page 15 obscurity to a relatively high ranking on the search term [real sex]. And that’s how I discovered that Sienna Miller didn’t have real sex in a recent love scene.

A week ago I didn’t know who Sienna Miller was, and mostly I still don’t. What I do know that she looks very nice bumping and grinding and humping with her co-star (I found a link to the clip on The Hater.) Warm glowing light, a roaring fire, and (what’s this now?) jump-cuts.

In a love-scene, jump-cuts are a hipper version of cross-dissolves, and they solve two editing problems that come up when cutting love-making.

Like a cross-dissolve, a well executed jump-cut can be understood as passage of time. The couple is going at it mish jump-cut now she’s on top, and we, the modern movie-going public understand that it’s not a magic act, it’s a symbolic passage of time.

The other problem they solve is you don’t need the sort of shot coverage that a match-cut would require. You can move people through time and space with jump-cuts, showing all the different ways the couple humped and bumped, without going to the time and trouble of actually moving the couple through time and space. The mismatch between shots stands in for all the missing action and time.

Comtemporary filmmakers like jump-cuts in love-making scenes because the old standby, the cross-dissolve has become associate with Hallmark movie of the week montages, and late-night cable softcore. 9 SONGS has jump cut in the love-scenes, INTAMCY has a few, Erika Lust uses them in THE GOOD GIRL too.

So far, I haven’t used jump-cuts or cross-dissolves in my love-making scenes.

I know it’s old fashioned, but I like cross-dissolves as a way to symbolize the passage of time and/or create a dreamy atmosphere. But you can’t throw them around willy nilly. Every time I try to use them in these films, they’ve ended up feeling jarring and discordant, so I’ve taken them back out.

I haven’t used jump-cuts either, but that’s more philosophical.

As accepting of jump-cuts as modern audiences are, a jump-cut is still more noticable than a match cut or other techniques used to create flow or compress time. Jump-cuts feel more mannered and remind me I’m watching a confection. To me, traditionally editing feels less obtrusive, especially in a love-scene, and that make the love-making scene feel more more “real”, and “real sex”, the kind that people whe really care about each other have, is what I want my films to feel like.

At any rate, all props to Sienna Miller’s PR people. All the buzz of real sex on film without having real sex on film. Clever! I’m taking notes!

So the last 24 have had me corresponding with a few people in the sex-blogosphere and elsewhere about HD and HDV and focal length and focal plane and zits and razor-burn and genital herpes, and what it all might mean to the collision of sex and the moving image.

Well guess what? It’s time to back up again.

I’m old enough that I can remember when seeing a shaved pussy in a girlie magazine was a still a novelty. I remember thinking, “Wow! That’s so brazen! That’s so hot!” The idea that a woman would purposely remove her pubic hair to afford me a better look at her so secret place was positively captivating. There was wonderful lewdness about a carefully depilated pussy presented for my enjoyment, and sometimes there still is.

Just not as much as there used to be.

Shaved beaver has become de rigor in porn. Women with pubic hair have been come a specialty item, what ‘the industry’ calls a fetish; so much so that that sites featuring “natural models” frequently feature women who quite obviously use a razor on a daily basis. (I guess what that means is that it’s natural to have the pubic hair off your thighs, but unnatural to shave it off your cuntlips.)

Not let’s back up again.

Once upon a time I used to be a food photographer. Not a great food photographer, but not a bad one either. I was good enough at it that my food photos in magazines and books and I got paid decently do to it. Food photography is persnickety. Cheese and chocolate take on a weird look if they’re left out too long, meat looks an unappetizing pinkish grey if it’s not styled and lit properly, and a zillion other little things that can make food photos look positively revolting.

At the same time that I was a food photographer I was also making a lot of rude pictures of my girlfriend. She liked spreading her legs for the camera and I liked turning the Hasselblad on her and making Penthouse-like images of her lovely, uncoy nakedness (Playboy was too tame, Hustler was too over-lit,) and that included taking close-ups of her very beautiful, very pink, very delicately formed pussy (which, rather daringly back then, was sometimes shaved.)

Pussy (and other sex parts for that matter,) are like food. Photographed beautifully and all you can think about is eating the picture. Photographed poorly and you lose your appetite. A beautiful food photograph will change your shopping list. A beautiful pussy photo will give you a boner. But an unflattering, uncrafted image of pinkish-grey meat won’t do either. It’s off-putting, or even revolting.

One of the easiest solutions is simply not to show things that aren’t any fun to look at. That’s why some actors are only show in close-up from one side. That’s why some pornstars forever seem to have something around–a corset, a scarf– around their waist. It covers the c-section scar, or appendectomy scar, or whatever.

Do you suppose the hideous gaze of HD(V) is going to mean we’ll see more pubic hair in porn? Will porn finally turn corner and start experimenting with eroticism of (at least sometimes) showing less?

“Omagawd! Now we’re going to see that pornstars have pimples and razor burn!”

Apparently that’s news enough for the New York Times to run yet another late to the party, misinformed and disinforming story about porn. Again I’m left wondering just what sort of porn the article’s author has been watching that the fact that you can see razor burns, pimples and celulite is news. Again I’m left with the suspicion that this in more of the mainstream media freebasing porn with precious little interest in the real story, or even the basic facts.

Let’s back up.

That HD is a bitch is not news. With the strong backing of the Japanese electronic giants, HD came roaring in the film and television industry about a half dozen years ago promising “almost as much resolution as film” but without the cost associated with shooting photo-chemical emulsion. But along with the convenience of a magnetic cassette form-factor, HD came with a host of production gremlins that started vexing people from the start.

Skin
Yes, HD video is higher resolution than SD video, but it’s still video. And guess what? Video doesn’t render skin very well. That’s why professional programs that are produced on video come in three basic varieties: a) the heavily made up, low-contrast world of the telesion studio (think nightly news, soap opera, or Cher infomercial, or b) the world as it happens of ENG (that’s electronic news gathering,) and, c) sports.

The harshness of HD doesn’t really matter in ENG and sports (except when they show the sportscasters). Sports and ENG are the world as it happens. If HD renders Quarterback’s or insurgent’s furrowed, wrinkled, sweaty, bleeding brow in ultra detail it just looks like more, not worse. And while HD cameras are on the heavy and expensive side to bring into a war zone (not that it doesn’t happen) HD is great for sports, and that’s where HD has had the biggest successes so far.

HD in the televison studio is another matter. Right off the bat, everyone from set designers to make-up artists were distressesd by the way HD rendered their world. But where set designers could do easy things like start using real wood and real metal instead of plastic veneers and tin-foil, make-up artist were stuck with the same flesh and blood upon which to practice their craft, there in lies the problem.

The problem is that video, whether it’s SD or HD, hates flesh and blood. If you want to make someone look terrible, there’s no better way to do it then to level a video camera at them. Where film is warm and lustrous, and takes pleasure in rendering the details that make each of us individuals, video hates skin, video hates people.

In fact, when you shoot people on video, you don’t actually shoot them at all, you cover them up with powders and lotions and pastes. With video, you don’t shoot people, you shoot their make up.

(It takes my make-up artist about easy 5 minutes to get our subjects ready for the parts of our films that are actually shot-on-film (the sex), while it takes her 30 laborious, very detail-oriented minutes to get the ready for the shot-on-vidio interview portion of our film. And while she leaves the set while we shoot the rough and tumble, sweaty, make-up smearing sex, she sits right on my shoulder during the interviews, dashing in and touching things up throughout. That’s why, despite the fact that 35mm film has vastly more resolution that HD video, there’s was never a zit and wrinkle crisis on the set of Fraiser and other shot-on-film productions.)

This fact that video (both HD and SD) sees the make-up, not the person has given rise to entirely new techniques. Brushes and puffs are too course for the all seeing eye of HD, so where photographs used to be airbrushed, now it’s the make-up is applied with an airbrush. The cost, both in time and money, for the ultra-high-end make-up you need just to make things look credible is one of the reasons I tell ultra-low-budget filmmakers they’re better of shooting film.

But it’s not the only problem with shooting HD, and maybe not the worst.

Back Focus
Michael Mann is one of the Hollywood directors who has been experimenting with HD. COLLATERAL was a hybrid production, shot on a mix of HD and film, and MIAMI VICE was shot entirely on HD. But if you know how to read between the lines, you can see how much cinematographer Dion Beebe struggled with shooting in HD.

When you combine the intense heat generated by CCD in HD camera with the ultra-critical back-focus tolerances that are part and parcel of shooting with a camera with a small focal plane, and the low-resolution view-finder, it’s hard to actually know if your keeping your image in focus, and critical viewers will notice that about half of MIAMI VICE is slightly out of focus.

Depth of Field
But even if you get the make-up right, and even you get critical focus on all your footage, the same short focal length lenses that have such critical back-focus, have nearly unlimited depth of field. Why does this matter? Because cinematography is (among other things) an excercise in controlled depth of field. Any DP’s kit includes a complete set of neutral density filters so that even the longer lenses used in 35mm cinematography can be set to wider f-stops to get the (usually) more pleasing effect of shallow depth of field. But the HD lenses used on normal and especially wider angle of view shots are so very short that even wide open they have nearly infinite depth of field

What this means is that instead of the background being pleasingly soft behind the subject, everything is razor sharp (if you haven’t lost back focus!) What that means for Michael Mann’s production is that incongruous elements in the background that could be ignored now half to be art-directed and designed.

(”Deep Focus” was a fast lens/fast stock fad cinematography style in Hollywood in the film-noir era, and in interviews Beebe did a good job of playing up how much he enjoyed working with Deep Focus, but scuttlebutt from the set says otherwise. It’s more time, it’s more money, it’s more hassle, and it still doesn’t look as good as shooting on film.)

So if all these HD headaches aren’t new, why is it suddenly news in the world of porn? Why is the Times writing about it now? The answer comes in the form of a camera that you can buy at any electronics store for $3,500.

HDV isn’t HD
For the last several years some very few porn higher-end productions have been shot on HD, and they’ve struggled with the same HD gremlins as the rest of the film and television industry. But the $1000/day it costs to rent an HD camera package was out of reach of 99% of porn productions. 99% of porn is shot on a $2,500 DV camera, like a Sony PD150 or similar. With no bargain basement imaging tool to ply their trade, the vast majority of pornographers were stuck in SD land while the rest of the film and television world marched steadily toward HD.

But in 2006 something happened that saved their asses.

In early 2006 Sony released the Z1, the HDV successor to the Sony VX1000, the $3,500 DV camera that launched a thousand extra shabby, shot-on-video porn productions. Like the VX1000, the Z1 is a $3,500 hobbyist camera dressed up to look a little like its professional siblings that cost five or ten or 20 times more, and it’s marketed to people who want to have the latest and in consumer electronics, and a veneer of professional features, but aren’t really in the market for a professional camera. (In the bizz the category is known as “prosumer”.)

The porn industry couldn’t wait to get their hands on the Z1. Porn directors snapped up the Z1 and overnight “shot on HD” started appearing on boxcovers. (The ‘adult industry’ has never been shy about putting misleading or false information on their boxcovers.)

The problem is that the Z1 and other HDV handicams suffer from most of the same limitations at the VX1000 and it’s decendents (PD150, DV100, etc). They have the same tiny focal plane with the attendant back-focus and depth of field problems, because it’s video, it sees make-up not skin, etc. By and larger, footage produced on the Z1 is indistinguishable from footage produced on similar SD video cameras like the PD170 or DVX100. Because the cameras used are virtually the same, and the people using the cameras are the same, these HDV-shot porn films are practically indistinguishable from their DV-shot counterparts.

Except when they’re worse.

HDV is not HD. In fact, it’s no wherenear HD. Because the HDV codec only has as much bandwidth (25 mbps) as the DV codec to try and fill the HD pixel matrix, HDV is compressed six times as much as DV. Like the DV codec, the HDV codec has massive spacial compression, but in addition it also has massive (and not very effective) temporal MPEG compression, that has to be done in real time, in the camera. The only way to achieve cheap, real time MPEG compression in handicam is to sacrifice quality.

Compounding the HDV codec’s low-quality compression, the Z1 uses a “witch’s brew” of field doubling and interlacing to achieve 24fps footage. (The same frame rate as film and real HD cinematogphy.)

What this means is that high motion footage (like people having vigorous sex) will often have more (highly visible) compression artifacting than equivalent DV footage. It’s bad when HDV acquired footage is shown in SD, and even worse when HDV acquired footage is shown in HD-DVD or BlueRay, which you can expect to start happening soon.

No one outside of porn (except apparently the NYT) regards HDV as HD. No one outside the porn industry confuses HDV with HD. And just as cheap DV handicams have overwhelmingly been the tool of the porn trade, cheap HDV handicams will weapon of choice as the porn world moves from DVD to HD-DVD and/or Blueray.

But you won’t read that in the Times article. The prospect of titillating their readers with “serious reporting” on razor burn on pornstars’ pussies and pimples on pornstars asses is too much for even the Old Grey Lady to resist. Even my buddy Andrew Sullivan couldn’t resist.

Now, thanks to the Old Grey Lady’s porn habit, 99% of the public thinks that porn is on the very cutting edge of imaging technology, while the fact is that 99% of “HD” porn is shot on a hobbyest HDV camera – a camera that is more or less the same as the one your uncle pulls out and embarrasses you with at any and all family functions. (The exact same if your uncle is one those people who has to have the latest and greatest consumer electronics gadgets.)

Who wins? Well the Times wins. Their porn articles are well-read, and that’s more ad dollars. The “adult industry” wins; thanks to the Times it’s now on the record that porn is on the cutting edge yet again. And the consumer electronics companies win. Go Get Your HDTV Now!

Who loses? Well maybe nobody, or at least nobody who matters.

There’s no saying for sure how fast player prices are going to come down, but if I had to guess, I’d say our films will be available on Blueray and/or HD-DVD by next year. Next to shot on these HDV or even HD productions, our shot-on-film/mastered in (real) HD films are going to look better than ever!

Maybe the only person who loses is the viewer who goes out and gets a 42 inch plasma screen and HD-DVD player, loads up the latest HD(V) porn production, and then wonders why porn looks worse than ever.

I’ve made more than a few posts on this blog about how technology has changed the business and art of photographic sexual imagery. I’ve made posts about the VCR, posts about the CCD chip size in digital cameras, posts about how fantastically capacious and inexpensive DVD replication is; and how all of this has contributed to how today’s porn looks, feels, and is sold.

Throughout my now two decade “career” as an artist, I’ve always felt like there’s a certain antipathy towards this view of the creative process. There’s this notion that the creative impulse is pure, that it (should) transcend technology and rise above money. The notion that art might be inhibited (or empowered!) by technological or financial considerations seems to lay at odds with our culture’s romantic notions about the artist as a pure and unfettered being, beholdent only to her vision, and willing to make any sacrifice in the pursuit of that vision.

So imagine my fanscination (and perhaps a sense of vindication) when I heard “How Painting Advanced with Paint Tubes” on NPR on my way home from dropping my daughter off at school this morning. I had long been familar with the way that the new, vibrant, synthetic pigments had helped to usher in Impressionism, but I had never considered how the portability of putting that paint in a tin tube had effect where an artist would paint, what an artist would paint, and how an artist would paint.

(In school I did get into a bit of trouble writing inflamatory essays about how the Deguerreotype had, in the space of about 10 years, rendered painting utterly irrelevent as an art form, but that’s a subject for another post on another day.)

From the soon to be released MATT AND KHYM

Those of you who are familiar with the Comstock style know that we always interview people in pairs. When we do this, we use two cameras. The first camera (a-cam for short) frames both of the interviewees, and the second (b-cam) is a close-up that stays with whomever is talking. What I like about this is that it lets me do more interesting things with the interview than if we just had one camera that panned back and forth and zoomed in and out.

For example, if we’re on the close-up of Ms. Interviewee, and she says something that makes Mr. Interviewee laugh and nod his head, we can cut to the wider camera angle (the two-shot) and the effect is sort of like cutting to the reaction shot in a film that’s shot narrative style. We see the action (close up of Ms. telling us a cute but embarrassing secret), then we see the reaction (two-shot with Mr. laughing and nodding in response to the revelation).

If it’s done right, the audience shouldn’t even be aware that we’ve switched from the close-up to the two-shot, and the fact that we don’t notice good editing is one of the things that’s utterly magically about film. The camera’s point-of-view moves fluidly through time and space in a way that our own POV never does, yet somehow, when it’s done right, if feels more natural and normal, and is easier to watch than a camera that just sits in one place and stares endlessly at the action.

I don’t make any claims to be a master at this particular part of film-craft (or any other for that matter). But when it’s working right I do enjoy it, and the last few days I’ve been enjoying deciding between the close-up and the two-shot on Matt and Khym’s interview very much. Their interview is chock-a-block with opportunities to move from one shot to the other and back again in a way that helps move the story along and helps to reveal more about Matt and Khym’s relationship.

I also noticed something about Matt and Khym’s interview. I love faces, and usually I’m always looking to find a way to the close-up. But Matt and Khym spend so much time relating to one another that this interview is mostly the two-shot, with the single person close-ups used mostly as color or grace notes. Here and their either Matt or Khym has a longer passage in close up, but time and time again I’ve found that if I stay on a close-up the way I usually would, I miss too much of the relationship. There’s just too much going on between them to stay with the longer close-ups in the way I usually favor. It’s exciting to see the way a couple relates to each other have such a strong effect on the way I cut their interview!

Figuring my way through things like this is one of the things I really like what about what I do. In it’s own way it’s as exciting as getting to see beautiful women take their close off and have sex. While there’s a certain sameness to these little movies, within that sameness there a huge opportunity to enjoy what makes each of these couples unique. They look different, they express themselves differently, they make love differently. That’s what makes this work so rewarding, and that’s what makes me feel so lucky I get to do it!