About This Project

It started off with lunch break in Gorizia, Italy last year. We had been in Italy for over a week already, attending Film Forum with the International Film Studies Conference and Spring School. The workshops in Gorizia focused on four different areas of film – cinema & contemporary visual arts, gaming/animation/comics, film heritage, and porn studies.

Overlooking Piazza della Vittoria from the windows of our apartment, and inspired from the many, many talks and workshops on film and great screenings at the local cinema every evening – an idea was born.

At this moment we were disobeying one of THE major rules every one of us learned as a kid: Don’t play with your food! (Sorry MaMa!) Playing around with the GoPro’s time-lapse feature, we recreated a romantic encounter between vegetables. (It sounds weird – but actually really wasn’t that weird at all) =) Re-watching our creation, we decided that we had found the topic for our next project – (yes, it gets even weirder…) we wanted to film food porn. Ha, yes food porn. No, not that type of food porn! We wanted to take typical filming techniques, used in pornographic films, and apply them to static objects – vegetables and fruit to be exact.

While this idea might sound crazy to you, at that point we were convinced that it would be an awesome project to work on once we were back in Berlin. So, in the summer of 2014 we analyzed camera angles, shots, as well as editing techniques of different pornographic films to later on apply them to our static objects.

For our project we wanted to explore whether such camera and editing techniques used in pornographic films would already be enough to ‘make something look pornographic’. We believed that, even without naked actors and intercourse of whatever kind, it might become clearly visible what the intention behind the film really was – to portray pornographic elements. Once we had done the analysis and taken plenty of notes on how to go about it, we then started right away with our first short video.

1. Shaking It Up: Bouncing lettuce, corn rubbing against corn, and jiggling spring onions – this first video aimed to recreate human lust and sex by manually manipulating the objects. We created a parody – not yet paying full attention to camera setup.
2. A Kitchen Without Taboos: In the second video our aim was to recreate a typical pornographic story – a new person (vegetable in this case) is introduced into an existing group. Here an eggplant is brought home from the market and placed into the fridge where the other vegetables explain that after the fridge there will only be death (oh… such a dark story) and because of that reason they make sure to enjoy life to the fullest while they still can. We incorporated several “sex” scenes of different lengths – typical for most pornographic films are seven sex scenes with only very few elements of a background story. Other elements such as the voyeur, water games, S&M, an orgy, as well as homo- and heterosexual intercourse are also included.
3. Set Up Properly: This third and final video aimed to completely let go of any content or background story. We focused on only one sex scene and incorporated traditional pornographic elements for zooming, shot order, and cuts. Without any manipulation of the vegetables we used jump cuts, cuts from the face to the sex of the object, zooming in fast followed by a slow zoom out, sweating, and a final cum shot-scene to provide technology’s purest effect.

Those three videos are all very different from each other and therefore allowed us to try out many different ways of how we could possibly recreate the typical pornographic feeling. However, just by using camera and editing techniques, traditionally used in pornographic films, we were not successful in recreating the feeling we were looking for. BUT we had a lot of fun during the process and absolutely love how different all three videos turned out.

Anne & Claire