Professional porn VS Amateur

[phukhole]

My $0.02....... My pros for studio porn: usually better equipment, lighting, locations, production value.  My cons for studio  porn:  directors wanting to get artsy and use all of the transitions and tricks they've learned; story driven scenes; makeup; cookie-cutter (usually white) men.  My pros for amateur porn:  variety of men, real sex, real chemistry.  My cons for amateur porn:  bad lighting, bad camera work, bad angles, sound bleed (that dog across the street, the truck going by, the sound of the fan - all being picked up by the mic).   I've filmed both amateur and studio porn.  I have three pieces of advice for filming:  1.  If you're not hard filming it, they're not gonna be hard watching it.   2.  Know what shots you want and walk through the blocking (start here, move to doggy, ride him, then slide off and push out the load for the camera).  This is important for them doing the movements and for you getting the shot. You have to check angles and lighting for each position and determine if the lighting is adequate. and 3. Remind them that everyone watching them wants to be them. They are the hungriest bottom or the nastiest top (or whatever).  That should give them some swagger and make them a bit more confident.  There is some good amateur porn out there.  There's also a lot of BAD porn (studio and amateur) out there.  Get out there and make some content, but think about the details. That's the difference between running a camera and filming a scene.

[BootmanLA]

A few thoughts:

1. Re the Jeff Stryker scene: I remember another of his films in which an artist was sketching various men, each of whom turned out to be a character in the subsequent sex scene. In this one, Jeff Stryker was sketched as a Native American of some vaguely Southwest tribe who rescues a guy who (apparently) had been tied down and left to die in the desert sun. After being taken back to Jeff's cave abode, the guy recovers and decides to wake Jeff up with a blow job, leading to the immortal line of dialogue: "Suck this red man's cock, white boy" (or something essentially like it). Unintentionally hysterical.

2. All the points about lighting and camera angles in amateur porn are well-taken. It's expensive (and hard work) to do amateur porn well, with the lighting needed and multiple cameras (or phones) recording from different angles, not to mention someone to move one camera around so it's not just one or two fixed points of view.

3. The question was asked why studios would put two performers together who hated each other. That's actually a good argument for porn performers as actors: if they're good enough at their work, you won't know they hate each other. Hollywood history is full of love scenes between people who despised each other (if not before the film, certainly after making it), but you'd seldom know it from the actual product.

Amateur work typically doesn't have that luxury - unless someone's really good at faking it and the partner is oblivious, the result is usually mediocre.

4. Along those lines, you can often tell in group scenes when one or more performers either isn't into most of the group, or the group's not into him. Either he never focuses on the guy he's performing with at the time, or no one focuses on him.

5. Remember that when the big boom in porn came - in the 1980's and 1990's - VCR's had totally upended the porn industry. Previously produced for viewing on a big screen in a smutty theater (with limited distribution because most porn theaters preferred to show straight films), the ability to rent (another innovation) a porn film for $5 for a couple of days and watch in private at home vastly expanded the market for gay porn. That meant a lot of studios sprang up (or straight studios branched out) into gay porn. It's a business, and there were (and still are) even industry groups that track sales, rentals, and distribution of porn titles. 

So the studios could see what was selling well, and produced more of that, just like hit TV shows spawn similar content. A legal procedural is a hit, and suddenly every network has a legal procedural in the works. Ditto shows about: police precincts, hospital ERs, dysfunctional families headed by a mockable father, whatever. If a porn video with a 6'2" blond beefcake with shaved chest and pubes outsells everything else for three or four weeks, every studio out there was going to find another tall blond guy of the same type.

Amateur porn can be subject to that, but a lot of it - including some of the most poorly executed examples - are actually more innovative. It's people having the kind of sex they want to have, and hoping to find a market for it, rather than reinventing yourself to slot into a market that already exists.