Task 22: Snappy Erotic Video

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“Make a one-minute snappy erotic film where the focus is on your emotion and the aesthetic. I remember a friend who used to work on gay porn say to me ‘ the story is told through people’s bodies in porn…well good porn anyway.’ And that’s true, how you channel that is up to you.”

Another Video…

I haven’t been enjoying the tasks of making videos in that I’m feeling the pressure to make something good and I get too anxious about it. I don’t feel confident in my ability to film. I feel confident in my ability to edit but in order to be able to edit, I need material. Moreover, creating a one-minute snappy video is difficult. When I start a video project I get sucked into it and I want to do it right, which isn’t great when you only have so many hours in a day and too many other things to attend to.

I tend to edit my videos on music. I did a degree in media design (commercial videos) but originally I’m an AMV editor, by which I mean I started making fan videos when I was 14 and have around 140 videos uploaded on those accounts (which don’t include all the Multi editor projects I took part in). In AMV editing you take a song and edit material on the lyrics and the beats, add fancy effects, colour correction, animate things and whatever. Over the years I moved from effects to subtle emotional editing. An editor has done the best job when the audience can’t see the editing that she has done. Here’s a tiny little example of a project I started and never finished, ha.

That aside, I first sought a song to edit this 1-minute snappy video on, because that’s how I work best. I found a copyright free one on Youtube and it honestly has a perfect atmosphere and I can fully picture how I would animate a manga video on it. But it would also do for this erotic video, as long as I could capture the footage.

The Idea

The first idea I had (which I knew wouldn’t be possible for me to accomplish) was having some mood shots of a room with an empty bed where the sheets are all messed up from the night before. It would be bright and peaceful, a warm atmosphere. The shots would be slow pans using objects in the foreground (and mostly total shots). So for example, there’d be a pile of books and the camera would pan from behind it until the unmade bed comes into focus. These shots would tun throughout the entire minute and be slow but would be interspersed with quick snappy shots of two people having sex the night before. These shorts would be close-ups of body parts, dark and portray an animalistic passionate side. There could be an arching back, movement of a mouth, fingers clasping on to the sheets etc.

Anyhow, I did not have two people, nor a suitable room for this. So instead, I thought I could do it with an empty chair in the living room. The idea would be that this person is imagining things happening to her as she is tied to the chair. I wrote about this in another blog post the other day. In her fantasies, the girl would be tied to a chair with her arms behind her back and with her legs cuffed to the legs of the chair. The girl would be left in the dark with a remote control vibrator inserted. She’d wear a hood and perhaps a ball gag and/or nipple clamps and lose track of time.

So I wanted to film these different objects (the ball gag, clamps, hood, handcuffs) individually laid out on the chair, one by one. These shots would be slow pans / slow zoom-ins and would be laid out over the full 1-minute video. Then the quick snappy shots would be close-ups of this girl on the chair, struggling against the handcuffs, for example. I thought I would be able to do it because of the close-ups, so I prepared the chair and everything. However, I also wanted to shoot it in low-key, with a black background and that made it a whole lot more complicated. The biggest issue was being unable to properly film myself though, as well as being unable to get a full total shot due to the lack of a black background. After trying all day I felt like I had to give up.

Failing

I messaged Roxy and explained the ideas I had and that it wasn’t working out. I felt like I had to as I had started beating myself up over it, felt anxious and really didn’t have to time to beat myself up over something like this. I thought it would be best to let it go so I told her I wasn’t able to do it. We don’t message all the time though, and so a few hours after sending her the message I thought I should try something else. As turns out, I’m not very good at letting go.

At 9 PM I decided to try another idea. The idea was to do some sort of striptease but film/edit it into slow motion. So a shirt, skirt, underwear, heels would be slowly drifting to the floor. These clips would be played over the full minute and be interspersed by quick snappy shots of the sensual movement of my body as if I were having sexual pleasure. I didn’t manage to get the slow-motion right so after messing with it for 2/3 hours that idea went out of the window too.

I then messaged her about my mental health as I didn’t think I would have been this stressed about the project if I didn’t have a million other things to do, weren’t feeling worse generally because of the pandemic (isolation and uncertainty?) and it felt important to mention. Then finally, I went to sleep at 1 AM.

One Last Try

Last week, I posted a picture of me wearing rope handcuffs as if I were tied on the chair. That was inspired by the original idea I had for this video. When I managed to take the picture I felt like I might be able to do the video after all. While I took the pictures at around 10.30/11 AM, I kept trying to shoot/edit some of the video until 1 PM. It wasn’t working because I couldn’t get a total shot, which I needed to get this effect that I can’t explain to you, lol. Additionally, I couldn’t get the shot of my hands right either. I have the idea of what it would all look like in my head so clearly and I know I could edit it and have a lot of fun with it but I’m missing the shots.

Still, I made this tiny little part of it, which I had just rendered when Roxy messaged me and told me it was okay and that we would make something together in the future instead. When I shared the picture and this little snippet she said she was quite inspired actually and would try some things, so it wasn’t all terrible. And once she told me it was okay I was able to let go.

Xx Mila

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