Abby Winters - Adult DVD Talk Interview, artykuły, wywiady
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Abby Winters - Adult DVD Talk Interview
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Abby Winters Interview
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by
Jayo
October 2007
Reviews of
AbbyWinters DVDs
AbbyWinters
is rapdily becoming the go-to studio for
quality solo-girl and girl/girl DVDs. The AbbyWinters
philosophy of "real" "natural" and "true" are fresh and
accurate in an industry where those terms are used,
misused and abused far and wide. The AbbyWinters
portfolio show that you can successfully marry "amateur"
models with quality production values and get an
outstanding result. On their 7th anniversary, Abby Winters
and Garion Hall were kind enough to share some of their
techniques for success.
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Girls Go Hardcore
Is Abby Winters a real person, or just a name like "Betty Crocker"
to personalize the company?
Abby
: I am def a real person! I founded the company back in
October 2000, but soon had other commitments, so I handed
over the reins to Garion Hall (now CEO) to grow the business.
He's done a pretty amazing job. We made the decision to keep
the Abby persona alive, as the hostess of the site. I pop my head
in now and then, post on the boards, critique shoots, do the odd
shoot.
Intimate Moments
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Garion
: So Abby created what we call the
paradigmÏ
what our
models look like, what they do in a shoot (actually, it's pretty
much just how young Aussies naturally are), how we shoot them,
and how the material is edited and presented. From that
foundation I refined her vision to make it a successful business.
While Abby is not involved in the day to day operations of the
business any more, we invoke her name as a noun, and
adjective, and a verb, all the time here.
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How did AbbyWinters come to be? What did you do before this?
Abby
: As a consumer I was disappointed with the quality of the
amateur genre on the netÏsites would get these fantastic
amateur models but dress them up (and make them up) to look
like porn stars, totally missing the inherent appeal of an amateur
model in the first place. On top of that the presentation was
poorÏsmall images, awful quality video, misleading websites,
poor design, and these dodgy guys directing models to do things
they clearly did not want to doÏugh!
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Originally, I planned to shoot models and sell the shoots to other
sites, but I got rebuffed many times by the sites of the day. They
said I should re-shoot the models with heels, make up and stuff,
then they'd buy my shoots. So, I thought, "how hard could it be?
I'll start my own damn site!". It was hard.
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AbbyWinters.com
Satisfyingly, those sites are not around any more, and
abbywinters.com
is pretty successful!
Garion
: Abby and I met working in the theatrical lighting
industry here in AustraliaÏwe both worked on shows (musicals,
festivals, touring concerts and so on), and struck up a friendship.
I was a consumer as well but never had any aspirations to work
in the industry.
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Abby Winters - Adult DVD Talk Interview
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Abby
: I was always keen on photography but never any good at
it. I refined my skills shooting for the first year the site was
running, then stepped back and let Garion be the driver.
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Were you confident of success, or did you think you were taking a
big risk?
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Abby
: I never,
ever
intended it to be a full time job for me;
though I did not really have any actual "intentions" at all. I just
thought it'd be fun to give it a go.
Garion
: I saw potential but knew very little of the industry, very
little of running a business. I figured I thought it was good,
surely there must be
someone
out there who'd like it as well?
Abby still thought it was all a bit of a laugh even when a dozen
people a day were joining the site; but I started to think, "Uh,
this is getting serious...".
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Abby
: Well, of course I knew... ok, I didnÓt really. I was just
messing around. Anyway I had about $4000 saved up, and used
that as the seed capital for it all. I had a pretty decent job and
room for plenty of growth there, so it did not feel like a risky
thing at all.
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Garion
: It was nowhere near as organized as Abby makes it out
to beÏ"seed capital," for fuck's sake! It was some cash she was
going to spend on whateverÏmay as well be this hobby as
anything else!
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When you started out had you had an idea of where you'd be by
now. Have things worked out the way you thought?
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Abby
: I def never thought it'd employ 45 people full time and
turn over more than $10m a year! In my wildest dreams, we'd
employ one or two people and have a bit of fun.
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Garion
: It's been more successful than I would have thought,
especially considering Abby's idea is pretty uncomplicated. It's a
lot harder to manage as the company grows than it was in the
early days. There are new challenges pretty much every day:
none of which I would have anticipated a
week
ago, let alone
when we started this jaunt. It's a lot less fun than it was before,
but it's also more satisfying, more challenging. I feel an
enormous sense of obligation to the employees and models who
have worked with us to get to where we are.
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What was the most surprising thing you've learned about the
business?
Abby
: That Garion could take my two-bit, hare-brained idea, and
make it as successful as it is now.
Garion
: The most surprising thingÏand the most frustrating
thingÏis how much time I have to spend on non-core activities
like managing people, politics, advertising, legals, paperwork,
policy, administration, compliance, IT, gear, systems, and so on.
We're very much a media production company that happens to
produce porn (rather than a porn production outfit geared to
make a profit as a business).
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AbbyWinters.com
I really want to spend more time on core stuff: making the
shoots be as sexy and breath-taking as possibleÏbut that's why
we employ excellent managers.
Knowing what you nowÏif you could go back and change
something when you were just starting out, what would you have
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Abby Winters - Adult DVD Talk Interview
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done differently?
Abby
: Not much personally, but I have had a pretty easy ride.
For Garion, though, we should have organized a business advisor
kind of person earlier on. Not having things like position
descriptions and performance reviews for staff made things
pretty chaotic.
Garion
: Yeah, someone to help us with that stuff would have
made a big difference. We got someone in early 2005. Now,
we're still resolving policy on things that should have been put to
bed years ago. Some of that is due to the rate of growth (we're
doubling in staff each year); if we had someone with some
business sense help us early on I would have been a lot less
stressed!
If we did it all again from now, we'd structure things totally
differentlyÏwhen we started we had no idea
at all
how to run a
business, let alone a successful one. And of course, we did not
really know it was going to be successful. That being said, I don't
regret itÏit's been a wonderful learning experience, though my
partner may disagree.
There is no public "face" of Abby Winters. Had you thought of
hiring an actress to play "Abby Winters" as host on the website or
DVDs?
Abby
: We've toyed with the idea. Garion has asked me a few
times to host things like that, and I am not into it at all!
Garion
: I don't think it's a big deal. Customers ask if Abby has
done a shoot as a model ("she should!"), but when they see she
has not, they get over it pretty fast, and go back to the site and
see what there is to see. And there's a heckload of cool stuff to
see!
Right now you've been concentrating in solo-girl and girl/girl
content. Are you going to stay with that, or do you see
yourselves applying your philosophies to guy/girl content? What
about a male version of " Intimate Moments," or gay-male titles?
Garion
: We have done a few girl-boy shoots, and they are pretty
popular. It's our #1 request from customers.
Abby
: I had this theory: if we're going to do it, we'd only do it
with our models' own, real-life partners. The models are more
keen this way, and there's undeniable passion there (that is
often lacking from mainstream shoots).
Garion
: The problem is, for most non-professional boys it's all
over in the first two minutes of the video (or 20 frames of stills).
One shoot, we had to go back five days in a row for the video,
and the poor guy still could not get a grip. It's
understandableÏour models are all damn sexy!Ïbut it makes it
hard to shoot.
There are ways around it, but we need to decide if it's something
we really want to do. We also need to consider if it'd freak out
our existing modelsÏsome models choose to do the gentle nude
only posing (knees together!) and we don't want to freak them
out at the recruitment stage by telling them we shoot hardcore
stuff as well (we're really big on keeping our models fully
informed, so we'd never omit the truth in the auditions).
Abby
: Again, there're ways around it. One day I expect we'll
produce GB, and maybe BB stuff a well. We know nothing about
the market, and I don't know what our shooters would think of
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Abby Winters - Adult DVD Talk Interview
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shooting that stuff! Never say never, and all that...
Garion
: Yes, we never rule things outÏwe have a big list of
potential ideas for shoots and whole sites. Right now the site we
have is keeping us plenty busy.
How do you pick your models?
Garion
: We have a pretty structured system for recruiting
models. We interview around 30 new models a week; we show
them the site and talk a lot about it. Because our models are all
amateur, and the industry has a bit of a bad rep, they are relying
on us to be truthful and honest and straight up. So we spend
time telling models about the chances of being busted, about
what they get paid, what they do and don't have to do, what the
contracts allow us to do, and stuff.
As I said earlier, we allow models to choose their own level of
posingÏsome want to keep it nice, other are bang up for
everything. We do a few topless test shots of each model and
give her a booklet with more info. Our recruiting staff gather all
the info into our database of models and the production team
gets together and discusses the merits of each.
Some are
no-shoots
right awayÏthey donÓt match the paradigm
for some reason. Those that are shootable, we rate in terms of
how
suitable they are for us. We have a quota for what kind of
stuff we put on the site each week, so if we're low on
solo-masturbation videos, we'll rate a new model up for that
higher than someone who is not.
Around a third the models we interview "convert" into shoots,
and most models will do a few shoots of different types. We're
always looking for new models, but we always have enough to
get by as well.
Who are some of your most popular models--your crowd
favorites?
Abby
: A key part of the site is that it's greater than the sum of
its parts. We donÓt have exclusive
stars
, and we're careful to
never have lists on the sites of "most popular" models (though
we get asked for it all the time). Also our models are all
amateursÏnone of them make a living from the modelling, and
we need a constant influx of newbies on the site.
Garion
: That being said, some models we have we know we can
count on for an amazing shoot, and because of that we shoot a
lot of them. And because of that, they are very popular. Julietta,
Petria, Sue Ann, Jacki, Anneke, Melita, Violet, Jilly, Marigold,
Chloe B are some of these models.
Coincidentally, they are also working on a long term special
project that comes to fruition in January 2008Ïit's top secret,
but we'll be releasing more info about it soon. Meantime, many
of them are on DVDs or will be soon, and they all have stacks of
shoots on the website.
It takes an unusual kind of person to want to pose nude (or
masturbate) on camera. Do your models all have something in
common that's sadly lacking in most people (like say, Scarlet
Johansson)?
Garion
: A sense of adventure would be the main thing. Some of
our models are exhibitionists: they really get off on shocking
people, on getting a reaction by being sexy. But others are
verrrry shy and quiet, doing modelling for a confidence booster.
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Abby Winters - Adult DVD Talk Interview
http://www.adultdvdtalk.com/talk/abby-winters.asp
Some do it only for the money, some others would do it for free.
Some are unemployed, some are employed in professional jobs
with a planned career path. We have really seen all types, but
we always meet new models who you'd think would
never
do this
kinda thing, and they end up being amazing at it, and loving it.
Where do you shoot the scenes? Either you have a great budget
for set design or you're going into people's real homes to shoot.
Garion
: We do most of our shoots at the models' own homes.
Some models live with their parents which makes life a little
hard (and dangerous! Oh, the stories!), but some models live in
huge share houses, and they let us shoot other models there. In
the warmer months we shoot outside a lot as well.
Abby
: It's really integral to the paradigm, that we shoot the
models in their own clothes, in their own homes. These are just
every day young women, and we try to reinforce that as much as
we can.
The masturbation scenes have a static camera, and the girl
appears to be literally alone in the room. How much input does
the model have in what will be done?
Garion
: The model goes out with the videographer, who chooses
a specific location with the model (say, a bed), and sets up lights
(though we try to use natural light as much as possible), and the
camera on a tripod. They give the model a short briefing
Ïbecause the camera is alone with them, they cannot move out
of the frameÏso we work with the model to see where she thinks
she will move when she has an orgasm (this can be an
interesting conversation).
We leave the technique to the model. Part of the whole "Intimate
Moments" thing is how it's fascinating to watch the different
methods people use. We ask that she be open to the camera, but
we donÓt give too many instructions, because we want it to look
pretty uninhibited and natural. In fact, in one of our best IM's
you cannot see anything more revealing than her breasts
because of where she has positioned herself in relation to the
camera. That's Toni BÏit's not on a DVD, but maybe it should be!
In terms of direction, ask them to do what they do
normallyÏsome will not even take their underwear off, others
will get it all off in the first 30 seconds. One model could only
masturbate with a particular kind of shampoo bottle (she
discovered when she was 16), so she brought that to the shoot
(Jade T).
We used to shoot to 60 minute Mini DV tapes, so we'd ask the
models to be done in 45 mins max just in case they went longer.
This is also fascinatingÏsome models pop off in two minutes flat,
some (frustratingly!) go to one hour and 20 minutes, which
meant useless footage and a re-shoot. One of the longest ones
(on DVD and the website) is Jilly. It's the first time she has used
a vibrator and it's an amazing 45 minute journey!
Now, we shoot Hi Def to harddisk, and the disk holds 111
minutes. No one has broken that barrier yet.
The girl/girl scenes obviously have a crew shooting the scene.
How many people are behind the scenes?
Garion
: We try to keep as few people as possible on set, because
we want the models to have a natural, uninhibited experience.
But as we grow we need to train new shooters, so we often have
an assistant/intern there learning. The basic crew is a stills
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