CARNAL NATION

Shooting porn is not as exciting as you might think. It's like all TV production, mostly a lot of hurry up and wait.

CarnalNation spent Tuesday evening on the set of an all-girl / genderqueer alt-porn movie. The movie, Courtney Trouble's Seven Minutes in Heaven Part One: Coming Out, is described by Courtney (the director) as “the first ‘gonzo’ Queer Porn ever made.” Porn often gets criticized for lack of script or plot; this film takes that critique and turns it on its head. Everything after the opening was unscripted and improvised. The cast got to pick their own partners, toys and scenes in a reality TV style shoot, including a self-directed "video confessional."

So what does go on behind the scenes? People started arriving at about 1PM and the first order of business was lighting. Working in an old Victorian in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district presents a few lighting challenges, particularly with placing the lights so they and their power cords don't show in the shots. It took a while, but with some creative use of gaffer tape, a lot of clamps and a borrowed length of bondage rope, the main rooms were finally lit without constraining all the camera angles. While all this was happening, the cast trickled in and the front of the house became a green room / makeup studio with bags, clothes, and gear everywhere. There are a lot of people on a porn set; for this shoot there were seven models, a makeup person, two video camera people (one was also the director), a still camera person, the man with the toys, two of us from CarnalNation, and french porn actress judy minx who wasn't in the movie due to lack of paperwork.  It was crowded.

Next on the agenda was paperwork. Lots of paperwork. Porn is highly regulated. Anybody in a US-made porn movie has to provide two forms of ID, one of which must be government issued to prove they are over 18.  The ID is recorded and kept by a custodian of records so that if (when) the FBI comes calling it can be produced. Failure to get and keep the right ID is a criminal offense so it's taken seriously.

Paperwork squared away, on to the stills and intros. Each performer shot a few seconds of "Hi, my name is..." intro and a few stills while doing a quick strip.  

Finally about three hours, filming of the movie itself starts. Performers wandered in and out of the green room in various states of undress and bliss; loud sex sounds could be heard from multiple rooms in the flat. (We wonder what the neighbors thought.) The orgasms in this movie are real, and the sound from one scene bleeding into the scene in the next room will just add to the gonzo effect the movie is aiming for.

Pizza break. Jokes about the clichéd pizza guy scene in pornos. (In this case, he never knew what he was missing). Pizza as a sex toy. Pizza deep throat. Interesting.  

Throughout the movie, there were a lot of cool buzzing toys provided by LELO. Shaye from LELO was on set to provide some of their high-quality vibrators like the GiGi our toy testers loved so much last week.

We lost count of the number of scenes that were shot (seven? eight?), but the shoot finally came to an end at about 10PM. By the time everybody left, it was 11:30 and the flat looked like a bomb had hit it.     

Unfortunately we’re a visually work-safe site, so you’ll have to wait until the movie comes out on October 19th to see just how hot the cast is in action. Until then, here are some PG stills.