Every Thursday I’ll be answering a relationship/dating/sex question on my blog. If you have a question you’d like to submit, leave a comment with the question in it. Or send it to me at hottwax at gmail dot com.

Q: If I want to become a porn director, are there classes that teach you how to shoot porn?

A: This is apparently one of those questions that porn directors get asked all the time. I myself being a director of said adult content (not with any consistency, and albeit rather sparcely) do not get asked this question often, more often I get asked about how a nice, Jewish girl from Long Island, New York ever got into the sex business in the first place.

My experience in making adult movies stemmed from being surrounded by talented, smart, grounded people who also happened to work in the fields of adult sex and dating. That being said, I took to the interwebs to search for classes and advice on the subject of porn. The last time I remember a classroom where people were learning porn, occurred in April of the early aughts. The Daily Show featured Project Redlight (be warned: it’s not pretty), after learning about a class on how to shoot adult movies.Over at Billy Watson’s ishootporn, I read this helpful, candid post “Super Fun E-mails: “How Do I Get Into the Porn Biz.” I would also check out Do-It-Yourself Porn, by Adam Glaser/Seymore Butts. I thoroughly enjoyed his guide to female ejaculation and think that Glasser is one of the best adult-performers/directors/sex educator combos out there.

As for books you can buy, I stumbled upon (haven’t read) Digital Video: How to Produce Low-Cost Adult Home Videos For Profit and do own a copy of Make Your Own Adult Video: The Couple’s Guide to Making Sensual Home Movies, the latter of which is geared towards doing it for your home, personal use, but still it offers thought-inducing advice on the subject. Like, when recording sex outdoors “angle the reflector so that it bounces the sunlight onto your bodies and makes your skin glow,” and in the bedroom, “a simple backdrop helps to disguise clutter and creates a neutral background.” It’s got a lot of Glamour and Cosmo thrown in, but still it’s thorough (it even gives you a definition of reflectors later on) and goes into detail on the tiniest of things, like various fabrics for skirts and a correctly exposed image and also offers creative lens techniques for filmmaking (like the mask, shadow and fire shot).

With help from the above, I don’t think the industry is something you need to take a class in, although if you make it into the big time you might want to take a class to learn lingo like mish, creampie and civilians - and also what is, and isn’t tolerated in the business, but until then a class or two on movie making would likely help. Take any film class and and apply the knowledge to sex films. You want to put as much care in your video as you would if you were making any other type of video project (within your budget of course) and it is, at times, like any other movie-making business.

On a personal note, you want to think about the long term affects this porn-director life could take on your non-porn director lifestyle. Because it sucks to live a lie, and if you live the truth, sometimes people judge. I’m just saying…