What goes into making a video?

[tragmich]

Originally Posted by dendrin

Yeah, but just about every wrestling video from them includes several lifts as well. Their first focus was wrestling, but always had very strong ties with l&c.

Yes, and we kept on begging Dave to make a compilation tape of the lifts from the wrestling tapes. Finally he did.

[rflcblue]

Hello filmguy,

Thank you for trying to begin this thread. I could write a long posting with details of my thoughts, also with information about my work ?another time. Here are 2 notions:

1. One thing is to explain the lift and carry fans about the background and the difficulties to offer lift and carry videos online as a viable business in order to make them more sensitive against abuse and more open to support producers.

2. Another thing is not to discourage those enthusiasts, who are only 1-2 steps away from offering their stuff online by telling them how complicated and senseless it is (no viable business possible). This would be a shame.

I agree with CMCWmod concerning the wildly divided community and their fondness for different l&c-details and also with Dendrin concerning the combination of fetishes for making a project viable. Maybe you consider that too much professionalism (one girl for all fetishes) does not guarantee the best l&c-result (see Homoancients posting about his balloonfetish-video). Probably there are people who are curious to offer their own content, though they know they cannot become rich of it. Is it possible to find a balance between hobby and business?

I finally do not regret at all, what I did with shecarries. This was a damned thrilling time, a spice in my live, a counterpart of my straining job and I was also glad when a couple of customers told me they like the videos, I only just earned nothing.

Thank you and best regards,

Jo.
(www.shecarries.com)

[intolnc]

Originally Posted by rflcblue

I finally do not regret at all, what I did with shecarries. This was a damned thrilling time, a spice in my live, a counterpart of my straining job and I was also glad when a couple of customers told me they like the videos, I only just earned nothing.

I'd certainly be one of the first buyers of any new material you'd put online on your page. If that will ever happen...

[filmguy]

Originally Posted by rflcblue

Hello filmguy,

Thank you for trying to begin this thread. I could write a long posting with details of my thoughts, also with information about my work ?another time. Here are 2 notions:

1. One thing is to explain the lift and carry fans about the background and the difficulties to offer lift and carry videos online as a viable business in order to make them more sensitive against abuse and more open to support producers.

2. Another thing is not to discourage those enthusiasts, who are only 1-2 steps away from offering their stuff online by telling them how complicated and senseless it is (no viable business possible). This would be a shame.

Yeah I wasn't trying to go with 2.... don't want to discourage anyone. In fact, I hoped that maybe it would inspire more people to try it out. Even if they only produce 1 video, that's new content

But I really do think, and I think boards like this do help, as we're able to communicate with you, Davemeister, Taylor, Homoancient and others who are involved in the production of videos, we have at least a name to go with the company.... putting a human spin on the dicussion makes producers less of a "faceless corporation," and in my opinion, harder to steal from.

[homoancient]

I just can;t tell you how much it urls me when I see so many freebie seekers going bonkers over a 10 second snippit clip when if they had supported the people who were producing full length videos there would have been a plethora of videos out there.

I just had to advise someone whi was on hiatus thinking of coming back to hang it up. That is pretty much the advice I gave myself after being screwed by Nercy from Builtmore.

[rflcblue]

What goes into producing and selling lift and carry videos?
(some special information based on our work with www.shecarries.com)

1. Formal requirements (5% of work)
In many countries (I produced in Germany) you first have to register a trade. You get a tax number. You have to pay sales tax for your subscriptions. You have to pay income tax, when you have profits. You must do a tax computation at least one time a year. Maybe you need a tax accountant, we needed one. You have to pay him.

2. Equipment (5% of work)
Everything around a computer, a backup solution (at least an external hard drive), a video-cut-program, a web design-program (when you want to design your own website), a good video-camera, a professional reporter-headlight with a battery belt (when you shoot outside in the evening), a tripod, a wide-angle lens is useful, a car, a contractor for the payment, a web host and a domain (for your own website).

3. Finding models (25% of work)
(?please don?t ask me, how exactly we find our models). But here are some notes: you can contact professional models by different ways, but it is not so cheap (compare also homoancients comment: ?a good $ 300.00 per hour fee?). If you work with amateurs or hobby-models it may be cheaper, but consider: one thing is to find girls for a (private) lift and carry video-session; another thing is to get the permission of them, that you may use the video for the internet. We found that amateur girls didn?t mind to do a private video-shooting but did not want to be online or even on youtube. Anyway you should respect the personality-rights and of course get the permission of the girls in writing. Furthermore you should be patient. We found, that maybe 2 of 10 girls that we contacted were finally willing to do a lift and carry video shooting for the internet. On the other hand this is a very thrilling affair. We also found that a girl, that first said ?No?, finally was curious to do it, because she heard from her girl friends that everything was OK. Sometimes we made a try-out date with girls in order to check what they can do, sometimes we did this in order to provide confidence for a video-shooting with us. Anyway you have to pay for this.

4. The place for the shooting (5% of work)
Maybe you have an appropriate room or even a studio. If not you can rent a room for your session. Another possibility is to do the shooting outside like we mostly did. It is diversified and offers a large free moving space. We often selected the location for the shooting near to the contact address of the models to minimize pay-time or travel expenses. Here are some notes concerning an appropriate place outside:
- not too much public and not too much noise (not near to a highway or a railroad line)
- be careful with private areas (avoid the writing of a company label on your video)
- it is useful, when you can reach the place by car
- if you pick up the girls you can tell them further details for the shooting while driving
- tell them more about this very rare fetish and encourage them for your shooting
- don?t forget to check the weather report before the shooting-day

5. The shooting (5% of work)
- check the girls and their clothing (amateurs: no cigarettes, no chewing gum). I have some sessions with bubblegum and those tough girls look so silly and I was angry afterwards because I did not notice it until I saw the movie on the monitor at home.
- tell the girls how to start, what to do and where to go.
- the more you have explained before, the less disturbing comments during the shot.
- do the shooting.
- pay the girls.

6. Prepare the video for the internet (35% of work)
- copy the video-material from your camera to your computer.
- check it and consider which parts of the movie you will take and what you will cut off.
- first do the video-cut of the pictures.
- then care for the sound. Cut off improper parts of the sound:
We had about 5 times as much work with the sound-cut as with the video-cut. If you shoot outside there are often sounds like airplanes, barking dogs, rescue vans or you give instructions during the action (?throw him up, go faster,?). A good video should have an authentic sound but no extern disturbing noise or permanent directives, what the girls shall do. If you for instance cut off the noise of an helicopter you have to replace it by another sound (you cannot leave it blank, because everybody will think the video is defect). But if the girl walks on high heels, you should hear the clicking of her shoes. If you want to produce a good quality, you can take the sound of the walking heels from another part of the video and copy it to the place, where the helicopter was. But this will only succeed, when you stretch the sound the right way so that the snap of the shoes is congruent to the pictures. If you have done all this, you have an authentic sound without annoying noise or too much nerving comments. You can also completely delete the authentic sound and put music into the video. This is very simple but if you take music do not use copyrighted songs from the charts. For a commercial video you must search or buy non copyrighted music. I personally do not like only-music-videos. I rather want to hear the breath of the girls, just the original sound. We put in music for special parts such as slow motion scenes, also mixing music and original sound can be very nice.
- when you have finished the cut, add a lead text and your symbol.
- check the video, then encode it for the internet.
- check the encoded video.
- maybe you still adjust contrast, brightness and coloring, then encode it once again.
We finally needed about 1,5 hours of preparations-work for 1 minute encoded video-material, that means about 90 hours of work for 60 minutes of online-video material.

7. Web design (10% of work)
If you have your own website, you have to complete the design of the site for your new video (?photos, text, price, length and weight of the actors, sample-video?, ?).

8. Payment (5% of work)
If you sell different separate videos like we did you have to install the payment via credit-card for your new video on your website. It is useful when you can handle at least a little bit of html-speech. I don?t have a good command of html speech and my english is not good enough to discuss technical problems. So we needed the support of our not very known german contractor Netdebit (and not the well known CCBill for instance). Without their help (technical telephone-support in german language) we wouldn?t have been able to run our site.

9. Upload to web server (5% of work)
Usually the payment-contractor has a system with a password-protection, that must be installed on your web server, before you upload the new video. Then you can upload it via FTP-program. You also have to upload your new html-sites in order to complete your website before anyone can subscribe your new video.

10. Business
We were quite naive when we started, believing that maybe 1 of 10 persons of the lift and carry community would subscribe for content. We sold our video-pools medial maybe 70-75 times. If you assume, that there are at least 3500 lift and carry fans around the world you see, that finally 2 of 100 were interested/willing/able to pay for the kind of content we produced. We would need about 8 of 100 (at least ca. 250 subscriptions) to get a business-model like ours to the point, where we begin to make profits and don?t have to work for free or have minus. Of course we could try to change or improve our business model (maybe offering 20 minutes-videos with 2 models for $ 20.00 as a kind of clips4sale instead of 60 minutes of mixed videos with more than 15 models for $ 30.00 like we did or minimizing our cutting time by completely deleting the original sound and putting music behind the pictures or especially investing a lot of time in advertising). But at the moment I am sure we would not get the point to make it viable. The number of people, who is interested to subscribe is too low and the offer of pay-content and especially free available content too great.

Yet I would be glad, when this contribution helps to improve the situation and I hope it was not too much.

Best regards, Jo.
(www.shecarries.com)

[Daniel]

Wann wird das neue Video?
When will the new video?

[rflcblue]

Originally Posted by Daniel

Wann wird das neue Video?
When will the new video?

Dear Daniel,

Mir fehlen die Worte, (...what shall I say!)
vielleicht in meinem n?chsten Leben, (...maybe in my next life)

viele Gr??e,
best regards,

Jo.

[Daniel]

Originally Posted by rflcblue

Dear Daniel,

Mir fehlen die Worte, (...what shall I say!)
vielleicht in meinem n?chsten Leben, (...maybe in my next life)

viele Gr??e,
best regards,

Jo.

Warten Sie bitte ein Brief von mein Freund.

[intolnc]

Very interesting and detailed post, rflcblue.
Sadly I already own all the online video-pools on your site, so as long as there's no new content, I can't pay! Well, I'd even go for the other un-edited material that you haven't uploaded yet, if there's any way.