If 3D content is the wave of the future, Funky Monkey Movies is positioning itself to be the next Kelly Slater. The company is one of the adult industry’s earliest adopters of what portends to be a bold new frontier and is aggressively shooting and releasing adult movies in 3D.
3D technology is actually not new, but the adult industry’s implementation of it is, and if you talk to any 3D evangelist, they believe that this exciting new format will provide the shot in the arm that the DVD market so desperately needs.
AVN has such an evangelist on its staff: reporter Mark Kernes, who covered the resurgence of 3D in the December 2009 issue of AVN. At the time, Tommy Gunn and Pure Play Media had just released the interactive Cummin’ at You! 3D. Since then, Dominic Ford’s Whorrey Potter & the Sorcerer’s Balls, a gay feature, and Funky Monkey’s Octopussy 3-D: A XXX Parody, released through New Sensations, have hit the market.
Next month will mark the arrival of Hustler’s This Ain’t Avatar XXX 3D, and Adult Source Media has animated 3D versions of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland on the horizon.
With the widespread adoption of 3D television sets right around the corner—try calling a Best Buy and see how long they’re back ordered—and the blockbuster success of mainstream Hollywood films in 3D, Funky Monkey truly stands at the cutting edge for both production companies and porn fans.
“The new technology to film and view 3D content is growing at a rapid pace,” Funky Monkey President J. Lalls told AVN. “3D is a snowball coming down the mountain—it’s gathering steam and getting bigger and better. 3D is what could rejuvenate the adult industry and breathe some new life into a stale format. The future literally is now.”
Funky Monkey will be displaying its next-gen technology at The AVN Show on Aug. 7 at the Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa, in Hollywood, Fla., during a workshop in which Lalls will offer insight into the 3D production process.
Lalls also will join a panel taking place the previous day to discuss the future impact of 3D content on the adult industry, which includes panelists Axel Braun, director of Hustler’s Avatar, and Rebel Base Studio’s Daniel 3D.
For those not in the loop on the latest 3D developments, the hardware for both the cameras and the glasses, has grown by leaps and bounds since anaglyph technology appeared in comic books and cinemas in the 1950s. You remember those red and blue glasses? That’s anaglyph, which is still around. But think of anaglyph as standard definition compared to polarized content’s high-definition image.
Once you saw a movie or sporting event in high definition, did you really want to go back to standard def? We didn’t think so.
“The bottom line is that 3D is an interactive format that pulls the viewer in,” Lalls said. “It’s something new and different and the content is jaw dropping. When you see 3D polarized it opens your eyes up to another dimension. It’s here to stay. The picture quality, the depth, the sharpness—it’s the closest thing to watching a hologram.”
Not to get too technical, but anaglyph glasses use two chromatically different colors, one for each eye, that when used to view two differently filtered colored images produces a 3D image. The brain’s visual cortex fuses the two images into the perception of a 3D, or layered, image.
Polarized glasses, the gray-colored ones you get in the movie theater or the ones that come with the new 3D TVs, create the illusion of a full-color 3D image using light filtering technology. Polarized content is clearly superior to anaglyph but considerably more costly.
Funky Monkey shoots all its movies in the polarized format, but until January is releasing them in anaglyph for a few reasons.
“Polarized content is clearly where it’s at,” Lalls said, “but until mass adoption of the technology, when the price points of 3D TVs come down and are widespread, we thought it made sense to stick to anaglyph because that’s what the consumer has access to right now. Anaglyph shows consumers what’s possible with this format—just enough to whet their whistle. It’s the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible.”
All the anaglyph Funky Monkey releases will be rereleased in the polarized format beginning in 2011, with each title including a pair of polarized glasses.
Lalls was quick to point out that of all the mainstream films released in 3D, only Avatar utilized polarized technology. Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans and The Last Airbender, among others, were all converted into 3D, he said.
“Unfortunately that conversion cannot be done in adult because of expenses,” Lalls said. “To convert upwards from 2D to 3D costs between $40,000-$50,000 per minute of film.”
Lalls predicts, the presence of polarized 3D glasses in everyone’s living room—or bedroom, as it were—will be as ubiquitous as the remote control.
“Putting on the glasses isn’t cumbersome,” he said. “It makes it a fun experience with an emphasis on the word ‘experience.’ It’s cutting edge; it’s cool. It makes the viewer feel a part of the action.”
For all the hardware geeks out there, Lalls uses a pair of Sony EX3 cameras in a stereoscopic custom rig to shoot all Funky Monkey titles. He even got his hands on a special Panasonic camera that hasn’t been released yet.
“Panasonic was very kind to let me be the first adult content producer allowed to use their new cameras in our last production, Team Teen 3D,” he said. “I used their cameras to shoot next to my custom rig and the quality was fantastic. The camera comes out in late September.”
At The AVN Show, Funky Monkey will be displaying the content shot on the yet-to-be-released Panasonic camera so all attendees can check it out for themselves. The company plans to shoot an Avatar parody called Analtar with this new camera.
At press time, Funky Monkey has released Octopussy 3D, MILF Memoirs 3D, Pornstar Fantasies 3D and Team Teen 3D and is set to release Killer Curves 3D next month with Analtar slated to begin production in September.
Lalls, who directs all of the company’s releases, incorporates something fun and flirty in each scene that really shows off the potential of the depth-of-field in 3D—tossing feathers at the camera in a pillow fight, playfully splashing water in a pool at the viewer, or popping bubbles from bath suds that look like they’re floating away from the screen.
While it’s assumed that most porn watchers seek the simplest, most accessible way to pleasure themselves, the experience of seeing, say, Alexis Texas’ bubble butt or Sophie Dee’s humongous hooters blast out from the screen and into your lap is a draw that can’t be replicated in standard def.
So if 3D is the next-gen format, why haven’t adult producers embraced it in droves? If you ask Lalls, it’s a combination of the prohibitive cost, lack of skilled crew and a sense of passivity to sit back and see how the market plays out and how quickly consumers embrace it. By the time the trend peaks, he expects, Funky Monkey will be on top, riding that wave.
“We’re going to be the leaders of polarized 3D content in the adult industry,” he boasts. “We’re ahead of the curve. When other companies jump on the bandwagon, we’ll be so far out in front of them, they’ll be playing catch up.”
This article originally ran in the August 2010 issue of AVN.
