PinkLabel.tv’s newest release blends quality cinema, intimacy, and wit. We caught up with CLEVER GIRL PICTURES director Evie Eliot to learn more about her new company and its debut film, Twitterbating. (Featured photo credit: Sienna Coppa.)

PinkLabel.tv: Tell us a little bit about Clever Girl Pictures.

Evie: Clever Girl Pictures is my little art porn production company, It’s a brand new venture for me and I’m really excited to explore what can be done with the medium.

I think in art, western art especially, we have this need to take the sexy out of sex before we’re allowed to look at it. There’s this need to intellectualize away our emotional response. The only art I see where there is still that arousal present, is when the subject matter is no longer sexually explicit. I want to make films that are both explicitly arousing and also meaningful. I want to see if we can be both literal and profound at the same time. I want to be able to say “This thing, in itself, is actually enough.”

Your ideologies align with what’s been identified as a “Slow Porn” movement. There’s an attention to the process and meaning behind the eroticism. The tagline for Clever Girl is an “unhurried state of arousal” — in what ways does Twitterbating exemplify this?  

Obviously a big part of that is the lighting and cinematography. I think that’s really important in persuading the audience to stay with the piece, it has to be beautiful. I’m really fortunate to have a cinematographer who knows exactly the look I’m going for.

The other part is that while I had a mood I wanted for the film; I didn’t have an agenda beyond that.

Co-stars Krys, Jenny and I all directed from the bed, calling attention to whatever we felt looked good from our viewpoint. It makes filming slower, but it gives me the footage I need to create what is, I hope, the most truthful version of how all three of us relate to each other.

it’s funny, we spent about five hours filming for 21 minutes of footage, but watching the film now feels like how I remember the shoot. We just allowed the process to take as much time as it needed.

How did you cast your co-stars, Krys Noir and Jenny Minx?

The three of us knew each other through the poly community in Seattle. Krys and Jenny are partners, and he and I had filmed together in the first hardcore scene I ever shot. I’d put out a general ask for people who thought they might be interested in shooting a film with me, and they were really into the idea.

They’re both such incredible people, and we were all already really comfortable with each other as friends, so it made shooting the scene a ridiculous amount of fun.

Were there any surprising or teaching moments in the filming of Twitterbating? Any funny or blopper stories from the set?

I still have a bunch of outtakes that I’ll probably make a reel of, and there were some funny moments, but no real bloopers. The most surprising thing to me was that I actually didn’t think the film had a strong ending when we wrapped! I was pretty sure I was going to have to edit the whole thing out of order to get a good ending because I’d got totally lost in the moment while filming and had no idea what was going on outside of my own body. When I watched the footage back the next day I was like “Holy crap! This is really good!”

Watch Twitterbating here at PinkLabel.tv.