Below are the 11 most recent journal entries recorded in wvillagevideo's LiveJournal:

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
2:34 pm	Sex-Positive Blog Hey, gang... I know it's been a really long time since I posted here. I don't even know if any of you are still reading your Friends Lists. :-) But I recently started reading a fairly sex-positive blog here on LJ, it's barmaidblog. Enjoy! :-) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, November 4th, 2005
8:52 am	Remember Me? :-) I'm back! It's been quite some time since I last posted, and I apologize for that, but Real Life (tm) got in the way of pursuing this business for a while. That is no longer true, and I am once again posting ads on Craigslist looking for couples to participate in this project for a $400 fee. Hopefully the increase in payment will attract more people who will follow through with doing shoots. If you don't remember who I am or what this is about, please do feel free to read back into my journal; there weren't all that many posts, so it shouldn't take more than ten minutes. :-) Anyway, if you have any comments, or if you're interested in participating yourself, please let me know! Current Mood: excited (Comment on this)
Monday, August 2nd, 2004
4:49 pm	Progress? It's been a week since I posted, mostly because there's been no significant change in the situations that I previously reported. We place our ad on Craigslist every few days, we get 6-10 responses, one or two of them express continued interest after we explain the details... However, that's the point at which we send our proposed contract, and nobody had yet replied to that. Until today, that is. We may have some takers. It's their first time doing something like this, but they're apparently quite excited about it; so I'm going to try to schedule something for this weekend. If all goes well, we will have done our very first photo/video shoot of an amateur NYC couple having sex - and we will not only have samples to show other interested couples, we will have salable product for our website. Stay tuned; we may yet get this project off the ground without first spending ourselves into the ground. :-) Current Mood: excited (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 26th, 2004
4:53 pm	The Continuing Saga Well, we keep posting the ad in "Casual Encounters" on Craigslist... for lack of any better place to put it, really. I know I've asked this before, but if anybody has suggestions for other places to post our ad, I'd be very grateful to hear them. As for the responses - yes, we generally get a larger response now that we're offering $300 per couple. Plus, we've revised our "more details" response e-mail, taking several of your suggestions into account. Unfortunately, we still have nobody willing to commit. In fact, today I heard back from one guy who'd seemed quite interested, but said that he and his girlfriend want to make more than $300/person. Given that we're offering $300/couple, he probably misunderstood either the ad or our "more details" e-mail - but in any case, more than $600/couple is starting to get into the realm of fees beginning to mid-level pros get, and we're talking about amateurs here. Am I kidding myself, or is he kidding himself? Anyway, I'm sure his remark - "I promise we are truly exceptational [sic] and will perform like no others" - was meant to encourage me, but I imagine most people feel that way. Besides, what if they don't out-perform everybody else? Do we get our money back? I certainly knew, going into this, that it would be a challenge to find a steady flow of couples willing to have sex on camera for money. But I really did think we'd have one couple by now. I hesitate to go to $400, though that's probably the next step... Any other suggestions would also be welcome. Current Mood: disappointed (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 20th, 2004
2:15 pm	Whoops... Here I am ready to send out a sample contract to the one actively interested couple, and I've misplaced their e-mail address. Ah, well - I've got it at home, but it'll be late tonight or early tomorrow before I can get to it. If you're reading this, thanks for your patience. :-) Current Mood: embarrassed (Comment on this)
11:49 am	Our Response Below is the text with which we reply to e-mails responding to our ad. Any comments or suggestions, particularly with regards to whether we might genuinely be scaring people off unnecessarily, would be most welcome. Thanks for replying to our ad! Here's how it works: 1) You send us photos of yourself and the woman or women you'll be having sex with. They don't have to be nude photos, they just have to give us an idea of what your faces look like and what type of body you have. 2) Please, please, PLEASE - make sure your girlfriend/wife/friend-with-benefits/distant cousin KNOWS what you're doing and approves of the idea BEFORE you send us the photos. Otherwise it's a waste of our time and yours. 3) If we think you're people we'd like to work with, we'll e-mail you a sample contract - it's not a big deal, just a pretty standard release form that says you're going to pose for us, we're going to pay you for posing and for your time, we're going to use your images on a website and make up a story to go along with them, and we're not responsible for you losing your job, your family, your house, or your hair if your mother-in-law sees your photos on our site. :-) 4) If you're cool with the terms of the contract, we make a date to meet in a public place where we'll all sign the contract, then go find an appropriate place and start shooting right away. 5) We'll pay you and your lady a total of $300 for the entire session from start to finish, assuming that you're able to perform well and for a reasonable amount of time, and that you don't use any sort of disguise. If you use a disguise we'll pay you $200. Let me know if you're still interested. Thanks! Jeffrey Daniels, Talent Director West Village Video http://home.earthlink.net/~westvillagevideo Current Mood: curious (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 19th, 2004
2:05 pm	The results We got several more e-mails in response to our ad offering $300 than we had gotten to any of our ads offering $200. This is not a huge shock, capitalism and supply/demand being what they are. :-) But curiously, though we now seem to be heading toward working with one couple who had first expressed their interest during the $200 phase (but have now been offered $300 in fairness), none of the people who responded to the $300 ad have replied to our "more details" e-mail. It could just be the "Grandma might see us" factor again, but I honestly do wonder just how much money we'd have to offer - and how many times we'd have to place the ad - to get some kind of critical mass of people interested in participating to the point where they follow up. Perhaps in a day or two, I'll post the content of our "more details" e-mail and ask for comments; often people are too close to their own work to see how they might be causing their own trouble. In any event, I had truly hoped to set up at least one shoot for this coming weekend, since I will have some availability and flexibility for the first time in several weeks. Perhaps we'll be able to arrange something with that one couple - though I haven't yet gotten a contract to them for approval, which I hope to do in the next day or two. The "day job" and social obligations have been mildly in the way. Current Mood: optimistic (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 16th, 2004
11:56 am	Experimentation It's been suggested more than once by people reading this journal that $200 is on the low end for paying two people to have sex on camera, even when they're amateurs, and even when they're a couple who already has sex together to begin with. I'm willing to buy that premise, though we're already in contact with at least one couple who was interested enough at $200 to send us photos and ask for a contract. As an experiment, I've posted a new ad on Craigslist today at $300. Perhaps after the weekend, I'll post an ad at $400 as well. I doubt we'll be willing to go too much higher than that, however; the business model we've mapped out simply doesn't allow for much profit once we're handing out more than $400/week to models. Perhaps if we start raking it in hand-over-fist once we go live, we'll raise our fees, then go back and pay all previous models the difference as well. (And yes, since we're now advertising at $300, those who were already participating in any way at $200 will be extended the same offer of $300.) But basically, I'll be curious to see if there's really any appreciable increase in the number of responses we get - or in the number of people who remain interested after we reply with a more thorough explanation. You can be sure I'll post a full report. In the meantime, there's another question that's been on my mind. Rather than provide much "direction" to the couples we film, I thought we'd be likely to get the most interesting scenes, and the most true variety, by suggesting that they pick their favorite positions or acts and do them for us. I figure one couple will 69, the next will spoon, another will go doggy-style on the fire escape... :-) I really suspect that we won't have to create that variety artificially if we just let couples go with their instincts. Anybody have opinions on that idea? Current Mood: tired (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 15th, 2004
2:32 pm	Our Ad In case you're curious, this is the sort of ad we've been posting on Craigslist. I'm interested to know the following: What people think of the ad, and what they would think seeing it themselves How we could change the ad to more effectively attract the people we want Whether there's something out there similar to Craigslist where we'd be able to post for free and would get anywhere near as many eyeballs on the ad Any other suggestions as to how we can find the couples we're looking for would also be most welcome. Thanks! Current Mood: contemplative (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 9th, 2004
11:17 am	Revelations First of all, we'd like to take this opportunity to welcome those LJ users who have added us as a Friend. Our intention with this journal is not simply to narrate to ourselves as we go through the process of building a website, but to have other people observe and comment. So we're gratified to have you, and we'd like to strongly encourage you to draw other people's attention to our journal so that they can observe and participate as well. Second, writing in the first-person plural gets annoying after a while. :-) So we are - I mean, I am - discarding that practice as of now. West Village Video is a company, and more than one person is involved, but I am the sole writer of this journal, and may as well write like it. Now then... It may or may not surprise people to know that I am in a serious, monogamous relationship. We've met each other's parents, and we talk about our future on a regular basis. I think we're in it for the long haul, and that's both exciting and scary. Naturally, though, "I'm a pornographer" is not among the things you tell your girlfriend in the early stages. But I finally decided over the holiday weekend that it was time to talk about it, because sooner or later she needed to know. She let me tell the story from beginning to end (much in the same way that I did in the previous entry), and then had a lot of questions. Ultimately, she told me that she didn't have any philosophical objections to my running this kind of business. She did want reassurances that I hadn't had, and wouldn't have, sex with any of the models, which is fine; even if I had the opportunity, I don't think it's a good idea to risk complications like those. She is naturally concerned about what my involvement with these endeavours could mean for my future in my "day job" - a future for which I have specific, somewhat ambitious plans. And I share her concerns, but had, up until now, been willing to take the risk. Now that it's possible her future could be affected as well, it's something that bears more serious thought. But for now, I'm continuing to go ahead with this project, because I believe I can do it and do it well (and safely). One interesting sort of "by-product" to our conversation, however, has been our musing out-loud over what exactly the limits of the law are when it comes to financial compensation for sex acts. We already know that it's not illegal to pay someone to have sex when it's in the context of "acting" in an adult film. But in exploring Craigslist's seamier side, we've come across a number of people willing to pay couples to let them watch, and one or two couples who charge people to watch them. And it has led us to wonder whether that can possibly be a chargeable offense, in either direction. It has also led us to discuss the possibility of asking a friend to film or photograph the two of us having sex. But interestingly, she indicated last night that she would genuinely prefer having a stranger pay to watch us (at least if we work out all potential safety issues) than have a friend or even acquaintance film us. I realize that what you say in bed isn't necessarily what you mean about real life, but this is very encouraging to me, because we could use the extra cash and it would be exciting as hell (again, if we get the safety issues worked out to our satisfaction). So stay tuned. Meanwhile, response to WVV's ads seeking couples willing to have sex on camera for money has been trickling in. There is definitely interest. Unfortunately, once I send a response with details, nobody has yet replied with continued interest. Since nobody has yet replied with an explanation for their discontinued interest, however, I'm really not sure why. It's possible we're not offering enough money; it's also possible that our strongly-worded reminders that eventually, someone you know might see you naked on this website, are actually having the desired effect, and warding off people who aren't willing to take the risk. But honestly, I thought we'd have more interest by now, or at least one or two of the few dozen people would've said, "Okay, what's next?" More later; have a good weekend. Current Mood: pensive (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
2:33 pm	In the beginning... This journal will document the creation of a subscription-based website, from beginning to - well, to whenever. It's not quite a reality show, but it should be interesting to any who wish to follow the saga. West Village Video has been in existence for a few years already, but for the most part we've done a limited amount of photography and only built a few websites. None of the sites lasted very long, either. The reason for this? We tried to build each website around a single girl, who would pose for weekly updates. We had signed contracts in each case, and were rolling along at some stage of production or other, at which point every single girl we worked with "suddenly realized" the consequences of what she was doing. Never mind that we had expressed, in dire, explicit terms, the fact that someone they knew was eventually likely to see the website. Never mind that they acknowledged these warnings and insisted they knew what they were doing. First, there was Danielle. She posed for two sets of photos, then panicked that her boyfriend would find out. (Frankly, it's probably not a good idea to try to make money posing nude for an adult website unless your S.O. knows about it.) She asked if we could block access to the site by geography, then when we pointed out the impossibility, she backed out. We hadn't spent any money on the site yet, so we simply asked her to pay for an ad to replace her. (She never did reimburse us.) Then was Alicia. She was very promising - seemed open-minded, enjoyed the six photo shoots we did. She was also into the whole "creating the character" thing behind making an amateur site credible. Then, after the site went live and we had started to get paid subscriptions, someone at her job found out and threatened to fire her. We'd warned her something like this could happen; it even specified in her contract that we could not be responsible for it happening. But being decent human beings, we let her out of it and shut down the site. We had to repay all subscription fees, and we were out several hundred dollars in hosting, registration, and processing contracts. She started reimbursing us, but stopped a while back. Bianca was next. She also seemed intrigued and interested in the idea, and particularly by the fictional element to it all - creating a separate persona to go with her image. She had second thoughts, though, and managed to back out before we had spent any money (or for that matter done any shoots). Jessica was the last one. She negotiated her contract with us before she'd even turned 18, a fact which we discovered when she arrived for a day of contract signing and photo shoots and she presented a driver's license showing she was 18 years and 6 days old. She had serious plans for an adult career, and insisted on a six-month renewable contract instead of one year. She also planned to integrate mainstream magazine shoots with the fictional story on our website. But after we spent money on the site (again) and did a few shoots, her mother of all people insisted it end. Luckily her mother reimbursed us for our expenses. So why, you may ask, would we ever try again? Shouldn't we have learned our lesson? Perhaps we have - it's just not the lesson you might think. The lesson we think we've learned is that, while we think we'd have the most fun building a website for an individual amateur where we get to tell a story every week, it simply may not be in the cards. It's not in the cards because we're not willing to keep throwing good money after bad, not willing to let one more woman sign a long-term contract that she then believes she can break based on a risk that we made sure she knew about before we ever considered letting her sign that contract. So instead, we're going in a different direction. We're building a subscription-based website, yes - but not around an individual. We're just going to find normal, everyday New Yorkers - from the goth to the hipster to the lawyer to the alt - and pay them to let us film and photograph them having sex. We are firmly convinced that with some effort, we will find these couples - maybe only a few couples a month, but we'll find them. And since we only need to shoot each couple once, if they sign a contract and perform that day, it's over. We have what we need and we'll use it. So stay with us if you're interested in following this saga. We hope it makes for a good story. Current Mood: excited (10 Comments |Comment on this)