Imagine watching two people playing chess. You don’t want to do anything that breaks their concentration and involvement. Now imagine being a coach watching your team playing and shouting encouragement and suggestions—taking care never to unduly distract the players.
Being a porn director is halfway between those two, the Observer and the Coach.
Guys often underestimate how subtle the direction is in male porn. And how absolutely different it is from narrative film direction. While narrative film directing is a matter of getting one person’s vision recorded, great porn direction is much more cooperative. Directing porn involves carefully and subtlety guiding the ongoing sex, but never getting in the way.
Here are a few more guidelines on shooting/directing porn that we tend to use at TIM:
—Get really close. Most novice porn cameramen stay at arm’s distance. Big mistake.
—Never use the camera’s zoom function. (This takes some explaining. That’s for another day…)
—Use your presence and proximity to direct. When you move in close, you’re signaling that you like what you’re getting close to. Conversely, when you physically move back, away from the men, it signifies that nothing specific is drawing your interest.
—Hands and faces. Hands and faces are often neglected by novices, but they’re as important in sexual expression as cocks and asses.
With these suggestions in mind, watch these three brief clips from Scene 2 of I. Que Grande’s PORKED. This scene features top Rio 9rande and bottom Alessio Vega. When we watch an entire porn scene, there’s so much going on that it’s virtually impossible to focus adequately on the fine details. I’ve chosen these three brief clips as illustrations of specific important focal elements.
Clip One
The scene opens with an extreme close-up of Rio’s face. Imagine how close the camera is, the position of the cameraman necessary for this shot. If done poorly, the facial expressions would have been stereotypical, over-acted. But Rio clearly feels comfortable with the cameraman (director I. Que Grande). This close-up is followed by a focused, controlled simple pan down to his cock fucking Alessio’s ass. The music I. Que Grande chose for this has an almost sci-fi feeling, rather than the ordinary clichéd mechanical disco beat. The music here serves the image and strengthens it.
Clip Two
Notice that Rio very subtlety watches what the camera is doing. For example, at .02 and .07 he uses his peripheral vision to see what the cameraman is up to. When a man in porn becomes experienced, he understands the constant interplay between the camera and the men having sex: if all goes well, they subtlety direct each other. This is one of the ways in which shooting sex is akin to having sex.
From .07 to .11, the camera smoothly zooms out. Using the zoom function in the camera is nearly always a mistake for a number of reasons.
First, and most importantly, it removes the viewer from the physicality of the camera presence. When the camera zooms in or out, the viewer becomes a disembodied eye, ghostlike and unsatisfying. It also telegraphs to the viewer that the camera is more interested in controlling the shots, rather than capturing the raw realness of it. As much as possible, avoid using zoom.
The point of this particular zoom, however, is to move back from the close-up of the rimming in order to bring all of the bottom’s body into frame. In porn, the general rule is to fill the frame with the men rather than the room. Notice that for a moment, at around .20, the top of the bottom’s head is cut off by the framing. Watch as the camera beautifully pans right just a bit in order to frame all of the bottom by .22.
This section of the scene is Rio rimming Alessio’s ass, but pay attention to their hands. In your imagination feel what their hands feel as they constantly move from one place to another, now holding firmly, now sliding gently, now slapping, and so on. Each change is a subtle change in the dynamic connecting the two men. Hands are one of the defining elements of being human, and they are one of the most important and expressive elements in male sex: their movements are both a direct translation and an augmentation of the specific erotic feelings the men are experiencing.
Clip Three
Beautiful camera work. From the beginning, the focus is on the bottom’s face. At first Rio fills the left half of the frame, but our focus is really held by Alessio’s face. The, when Rio sits back to begin fucking, rather than slavishly following the top’s cock and the actual fucking(a huge mistake novices constantly make), the camera stays on Alessio’s face and at around .22 centers the frame on a held shot of the face.
Then at 9.31 we have a very purposeful pan to Rio’s tattooed chest, then a very slow pan down to his cock pounding Alessio’s ass. At first, the viewer might feel that the endpoint of the pan was an error—did he mean to move to Rio’s face? His cock? The camera shows its intention by holding on Rio’s chest for several seconds. The length of the held shot is the most certain indication of the camera’s intention—this is what he wants you to look at. You’re being shown how a man’s entire torso is the powerhouse, the engine that defines the fucking.
It all looks simple, right? It’s not. Being in a room with two men fucking—especially with energy like these two are generating—is a little like being in the middle of the movie “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” There’s so much beautiful stuff going on it’s almost impossible to figure out what to focus on. In all three of these segments from a beautiful fuck scene, I Que Grande used his camera to show you perfect points of high dynamic sexual interest.
PAUL MORRIS
