VICE was granted exclusive access to spend a day inside the Melbourne studio of Girls Out West, an award-winning, female-owned porn production company with an all-female crew. It’s the first time in the company’s eighteen-year history a journalist has been allowed to interview staff and observe the action behind the scenes. This is the account of our glimpse inside a normally hidden industry – and one of its most interesting companies.
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Grace becomes “Fawn”.
Grace attended an interview and soon performed in her first in girl-on-girl and masturbation videos under the name Fawn.Surprisingly, her parents have been nothing but supportive. She suspects their accepting attitude has been helped by watching the Netflix series Sex Education. “They just say, ‘We support you, as long as we don’t see it.’ And I’m like, ‘Obviously, guys.’”Grace is telling me this over a lunch of jaffles and orange juice at the Girls Out West studio in Melbourne. She is wearing a dressing gown and speaks with a relaxed, post-orgasm ease. Twenty minutes earlier, I had been watching her masturbate for a video that will be called Rouge.
The premise of Rouge is that Fawn is at home practising for an upcoming burlesque dance performance, wearing a see-through red dress and with black tassels over her nipples. Somewhere in the process, Fawn gets turned on, removes her clothes, lies on a couch and masturbates.
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Before the shoot, Fawn and Tallulah, the 28-year-old shooter and director, run through everything. They discuss Fawn’s preferred position for orgasming and whether she wants to use a sex toy. From the many sex toys on offer, Fawn chooses a small, red vibrator shaped like a lipstick tube. It is ideal, apparently, for clitoral stimulation.
During the shoot, Tallulah and Fawn call “freeze!” when they need to talk to each other.“Freeze! Should I maybe find this,” Fawn says, referring to the lipstick-tube-shaped vibrator, “And be like, ‘Oh, I thought I grabbed lipstick’?”Tallulah laughs. “Yes,” she says. “Freeze!” calls Fawn again after a while. “Can I get some lube, I think I’m gonna use fingers as well.”“Silicon or water?” asks Tallulah.“Silicon.”“No worries,” says Tallulah, handing her lube and changing camera angles. “Oh, this is stunning. And action.”I am the only other person in the room and am sitting at close range with a frontal view of Fawn masturbating, groaning and shaking. Her legs are open and she uses the lipstick vibrator while vigorously penetrating herself with three fingers. I feel a little awkward.Afterwards, over jaffles, I ask Fawn if it was weird with me just sitting there.“Honestly, yes and no,” she says. “A little bit, I would say. I don't usually have somebody just sitting there, but I'm used to performing in front of audiences and I like to, so I don't exactly mind the extra pair of eyes.”
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Annie keeps it real
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Annie says her viewers “just love real and natural as opposed to all that fake American stuff that’s out there.”“What we’re trying to do, even though it sounds so simple, it’s actually quite difficult,” she says. “To capture someone’s uniqueness, their personality, their voice, their body on film.”Annie and the team achieve this by communicating and collaborating with the models. For example, the concept for the Rouge shoot I witnessed came from Fawn’s interest in burlesque dance.“We just get so deep, psychologically, with the models to get the best out of them,” Annie says. “And we have to give a lot of ourselves over to that process.”“We set the bar very high for ourselves… It’s like when you’re watching Better Call Saul versus an episode of Neighbours,” she says. “We wanna be really cutting edge, really ahead of our time. Just challenging all the mainstream stuff that’s out there and how women are perceived and projected onto the screen.”It is hard work and can be emotionally taxing for Annie and her staff, who shoot almost every day. This week the team is shooting nine videos.“You just need a lot of time for yourself after this work,” she says. “‘Cause you’re looking at naked bodies day in, day out. Sometimes you just have to look at nature or the ocean or something.”
The “Hectic” days
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But Victor loses his erection, claiming on camera that “three days of a raging hard-on is taking its toll”. Apparently, he had taken a Viagra three days ago and has had a hard-on since then. Now that it has worn off, he pops another one.While everyone waits for Victor’s hard-on to return, Annabel picks one of the male nudists to have sex with. The nudist agrees. He is given a condom and begins the task with enthusiasm, but only lasts about a minute.With Victor’s erection waxing and waning, one of the camerawomen and another female model jump in to help him out. As dusk falls and the camerawoman approaches climax, the foursome gets caught in a rainstorm.“That was the old days,” says Annie. “Really fun. High adrenaline, it’s all happening.”“We take less risks now, a lot less risks,” she says. “Now, as we've grown, we have a budget for accommodation, for rental houses, for food, for locations, for a larger studio… which means we don't have to be out just doing it in public. So, with more money you can create better sets.”"What's more, with the way the porn industry has progressed and evolved over the years, it's essential that Girls Out West continues to supply the standard of quality content that our members have come to love and expect as we are, after all, professionals shooting amateur models."But Annie remembers those wild days with nostalgia. She tells me about former staff who, after leaving work, would go have sex in the middle of a roundabout in North Melbourne, as well as staff who at the time were keen to party and shoot all night long.
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Girls Out West goes gonzo (again)
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“Aw, God!” yells Fawn.Annie apologises profusely, but Fawn is okay.We cannot all fit in the car and Roxy has lost her car privileges, so Roxy, Tallulah and I follow on foot. Tallulah has been working as a full-time videographer for Girls Out West for three months. She splits the shooting workload with Annie and one part-time videographer.“It’s a bit of a dream, full-time in the film industry,” she says. Tallulah completed a film degree from 2018–2020, never expecting to find consistent work from it. Before this job, she was working in customer service. She is much happier now.“It really has my core values taken care of,” she says. “I love connecting with people as individuals and who they really are. And then love the creativity aspect of it as well.” The car stops and they set up the next part of the shoot, in which Fawn masturbates in the car with the door open.Tallulah and I watch in silence, looking around nervously, as Fawn groans in pleasure. Annie, meanwhile, is in her element, whispering directions and weaving around Fawn with the camera like a kite-surfer trying to catch the wind. Back in the alley behind the studio, Annie looks over her footage. She is still buzzing with adrenaline.“Fuck, that looks sick. The blue sky and that winter light and the white flesh,” she says. “That was so hot.”Update: Some original photos have been changed and additional quotes have been added to this story to provide context.