Something I've noticed recently is that not as many producers are now putting out a clip showing teasers for their scenes. Anybody have any thoughts on the reason for this trend? I'm wondering if it's because producers have heard from potential customers who might otherwise have bought a video but were able to get their jollies off a thirty to forty-second clip instead. On the other side of the coin, I tend to no longer buy scenes that don't include trailers. Looking for other opinions and would love to hear from producers as well!

Well, I put together these two in [checks calendar].... 2005.... so it's been a trend for a while!

[moans softly in contemplation of the advancing encroachment of time]

https://youtu.be/LJCfxq2T3bI

https://youtu.be/rT4hhgq6eHY

We still do trailers occasionally, though nowadays it'll either be a completely clean teaser that cuts out before any mess happens, or a very brief scene shot between takes in the middle of the shoot when they're still partly clean, or an equally brief clip shot right at the end. Doing a traditional "combination of shots from throughout the scene" takes serious work - a main scene can be edited in an hour, doing a full trailer takes an entire evening, and I simply don't have the time to do those any more, given the choice I'd rather use the time that is available to shoot more full scenes. Plus there are now lots of old-style trailers we did in the past so if someone's wanting a proper idea of what our scenes contain and how they are filmed, they can use those plus the preview stills as a guide.

And on top of that yes, if you do a decent trailer for a scene lots of people will just loop it and get off to that rather than actually buying the scene, and if people don't buy then we can't pay the girls to shoot any more.

I'd like to think that after the length of time we've been in business and the amount of free preview shots and trailers we've put out, plus reasonably detailed and accurate scene descriptions, people will be able to tell if they want to buy our scenes without having to have a specific trailer for each one.

I have sometimes wondered about doing what at least one of our competitors does and producing "trailers" which are just the first clean minute or so of a scene, cutting out just before the mess starts to happen, but I tend to find there's more useful info on whether I'm going to want to buy the scene in the stills from later on in the scene, so tend not to bother watching those trailers and make my purchase desisions entirely from the preview stills. A trailer of the opeing won't tell me if the model sits with her legs crossed (which is a scene killer for me, crossed legs block us from seeing legs get gunged properly), or indeed if we can see their lower half get messy at all. To me well-chosen stills, showing full details of the models and their outfits, then a few showing messing in progress, and then some showing final result so I can tell everyone gets properly messy, are more valuable than a trailer.

Man, I would KILL to be able to edit one scene in an hour! Sometimes it takes a whole hour just to accurately do the color matches across 3 angles (I HATE when angles don't match cleanly, including on my own older stuff) and adjust the brightness levels depending on how "white" certain pies get when applied to a face.

Most scenes take.... 3 days to edit? Usually each day is a 4-hour session, but if I go for 8 or 9 hours in one shot and don't get burned out, I can knock out an edit in a day or two. I think the Wonder Woman scene from SS184 was the last one that took some serious work.... like a full week. And at that point, I did spend another hour or so making a nice trailer to properly promote it. But for "normal" scenes, I agree with DungeonMasterOne... It's a much better use of my time to give people the first few (clean) minutes of a scene, with a few brief teases of mess, rather than doing the elaborate music-syncs I did in my younger days. And to echo his sentiment, by now you SHOULD know what to expect.... 16 years and 800+ scenes in!


.....I also now realize that spending 3 days on one edit is NOT the norm, but at this point I'm locked into my aesthetic, so whatcha gonna do? (I bet PieZone has a bear of a time with his stuff too!)

Wow! Fair enough, that'd dedicated professionalism and I'm certainly not going to knock it. In our case, I shoot with one video camera so don't need to worry about colour matching as long as I have a reasonably close setting to match the lighting, and I've a crew of experienced models who know what's wanted and are all familiar with each other as well as our general shoot "rules" about poses, actions, and outfits, plus we're all friends in real life. So when we shoot, I'll lay out the outfits (usually with a few options in case something doesn't fit) and leave the girls to get ready while I prep the dungeon, the girls usually end up helping to open the supplies (carefully, no getting messy at this stage! ), then I run through what they're going to do to each other, start the camera, and let them get on with it. Back in the early days I used to micro-manage every minute, but nowadays I've learned to just "let it flow", and only pause the action if something is going seriously awry. So we generally do a full scene in two or three takes, and the only editing needed is tidying up the very start and end of each take to remove things like the noise of the stop button being pressed, or me saying "pause a minute" before, instead of after, stopping the camera. The result tends to be very natural, and inherrently funny - we often fall about laughing at the end of a scene, because girls pouring custard into each other's trousers is just funny by default, as well as being sexy if you're into WAM.

So editing is tidying up start and end of each take, adding our ident, and rendering down to MP4 ready for upload to the webservers and then the UMD.

Having just upgraded the main video camera to 4K, I am pondering putting the old HD camera on a tripod shooting a semi-side view, but that would be to release as a separate file "alternative view" rather than to try and edit into the main scene, and I'm not sure if it's really worth it, given our girls all know that "whatever part of you is getting messy must be facing towards the (main) camera", is there really anything to be gained from an alternative viewpoint? Plus it would need more editing to remove the sections between takes given it wouldn't be started and stopped with the main camera. Still considering that one.

The last vid I downloaded was directly because of the trailer I watched. Had the trailer not caught my attention, I likely wouldn't have made the purchase. Just sayin'

That's really interesting - I'm scripting a custom at the moment, and I've got a 50 page document with all my notes, including the post-production stages. I'd initially assumed that colour balancing (between cameras) wouldn't be an issue, if everything is filmed indoors under consistent lighting, but apparently I was wrong! Is that due to the camera position (e.g. distance from the light source) or is it more to do with the lenses etc?

I'm not an expert so I can't tell you for sure.... I have 3 identical cameras, shooting indoors, pro lighting, all of them white balanced.... and I STILL have to drastically adjust the color of the wide angle to get it to "match up" accurately with the other two.

If I had to guess, it's the way the light bounces off the various colored backdrops. I also have to pull the exposure down more for certain colors and adjust the hue more. My striped backdrop, AKA the "restaurant," is particularly finicky.... I have to tone down the red (in RGB) on a lot of those scenes.

I'm planning to upgrade my lighting soon, not sure if that will make a real difference or not.

Based on the various side angles I've seen over the years, LOTS of other producers have this same problem too!

Ah yup. My first time on an ACTUAL film set (Homeland, actually, I'm in Season 3 if you look close!).... I was shocked at the amount of setup for each camera angle, and 95% of that is the lighting. If they turn the camera around to film the other actor in a scene, it's an entire hour just to change the lighting. THAT'S how you get professional results.... so no wonder my stuff falls so short!

My goal is to set the exposure where it's not so dark that you have to crank the brightness afterwards (at a certain point the footage look grainy)... but not so bright that the whites get "washed out." That's the tricky part here. With any other scene, you light the actress correctly and that doesn't vary. Turning her entire face white in a split second messes with EVERYTHING.... and I've seen some Hollywood scenes where one pie blows out the exposure for sure. (Especially on TV and live stuff.)

I will say.... One "trick" I use is to adjust the brightness/contrast after the fact and KEEP adjusting throughout the scene. If you're eagle-eyed, you'll notice my scenes start off pretty well-lit and get a bit "darker" just before the first pie hit. That's to avoid blowing out the whites. Certain white pies or cakes require bringing the brightness down even further, while a different substance (like chocolate) requires pushing it back up. I'm getting better at this stuff, but MAN I cringe at some of my older scenes. Too much over-exposure all around!

And if you're SUPER anal about this stuff (like me), you might even notice that the RAW footage might be too dark (or bright) in certain moments, and that's (hopefully) corrected in the edit. That's me readjusting my readjustments in the editing process. It never ends!

Aha, that solves one mystery for me! I was watching this video about shot lists:
https://youtu.be/IhXMpBk3GDA

They mentioned that it took them 3 hours of filming, when the final result (short film) was only 2m20s long. I was baffled about what could possibly have taken so long, even if they had several takes, but if it takes ages to adjust the lighting then that makes sense.