Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm Lucie Blush, and I'm a feminist porn filmmaker and actress. Originally I was a web designer, but for more than a year I've been curating and reviewing erotic films, and I also started producing and directing my own, in an attempt to show a fresh perspective of sex and porn from my point of view. I run my own membership-based online cinema where the films are available for streaming or download.
What hardware do you use?
For shooting, I use a Canon 600D DSLR with several lenses: 50mm, 24mm and 24-76mm, and I shoot at 25fps to allow smooth online streaming. I shot my first film, Alice Inside, with my iPhone 5 and the FiLMiC Pro app which you can get for a couple of bucks on iTunes, and a tiny LED attached to the camera. I was surprised that it worked so well, for a phone camera.
Since light is crucial on a set, I tried both Kino Flo fluorescent lights and LED lights, and I fell in love with the LED, since they don't heat up and make the actors uncomfortable. Besides, there's a dimmer that allows you to adjust the intensity of the light and also a setting for the color temperature (cold or warm) as well as color filters. For sound, I use a Zoom H4N - it's pretty great, since the native sound from the camera is never really smooth. It picks up on everything, but since you basically hide it somewhere in the room it doesn't record the noises of the camera manipulation, which can be tricky to erase during the post production. At home I have a MacBook Pro 13", i7, 8GB RAM, 2.9Ghz (with Turbo Boost to 3.6Ghz) and an Intel Graphics HD 4000 (1GB) for stress-free rendering. I also have an iMac with 4GB RAM, but you can tell the processor is slower on that machine.
And what software?
For editing I use both Adobe Premiere and After Effects CS6, as well as Final Cut Pro X, in order to be able to adjust the color, insert animations like a jingle with your logo... and of course Photoshop and Illustrator for graphic design. I export the media in HD quality, H264 (codec), 720p and in Apple Pro Res (QuickTime .mov) for TV broadcasting. For web designing I use a mix of TextWrangler (code), Cyberduck (FTP) and S3 Bucket Explorer (storage), coupled with self-hosted Wordpress sites.
What would be your dream setup?
Shooting with a Canon EOS 5D and a 50mm lens would be fantastic, and I would love to try the new BlackMagic camera which is supposed to give cinema-like quality but with the accessibility of a DSLR.