A girl sitting with her back to camera
Photo: Girls Out West
Culture

Inside Melbourne’s Porn Production Palace, Girls Out West

This is the account of our glimpse inside a normally hidden industry – and one of its most interesting companies.

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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A woman sits in a chair ready for a shoot

Photo: Girls Out West

Grace becomes “Fawn”.

Grace, a 23-year-old pansexual woman, was always at a loss for what to do. After graduating high school, she took whatever jobs she could find in hospitality. Then, early this year, a friend of hers who had modelled for Girls Out West mentioned they were recruiting. 

“I watched a lot of porn growing up,” Grace tells VICE. “So, I was like, ‘Yeah, that would be fun to do. Surely! Like, that would be super fun.’ So, actually getting the chance to do it is like an impossible dream come true.”

“As with everyone else, I enjoy the sex. But I guess I like performing as well,” she explains. “And not gonna lie, I’ve been told I’m pretty good-looking and have a hot body.”

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.

A model looks at the director

Girls Out West

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.

Sex toys

Girls Out West

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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An ideas board for future scenes

Photo: Girls Out West

Annie keeps it real

Girls Out West was founded in 2004 by Annie. I do not know Annie’s last name or age. 

“I’m in the adolescence of my old age,” she tells VICE, laughing, with a classic Aussie drawl on the word “age”. Her voice is permanently saucy, as if calibrated by her years of directing erotic video and photography shoots.

After studying filmmaking and anthropology at Deakin University, Annie worked as a freelance photographer for magazines including Picture, People, Ralph, Aussie Post, Outback and Australian Women’s Forum, most of which are now defunct.

She also showed her work in galleries. While preparing for an exhibition called Assholes at Photo Technica in Sydney, featuring poster-sized prints of women’s butts, someone at the photo processing lab suggested she self-publish online. 

That idea became Girls Out West. Now, 18 years later, she employs seven full-time and four part-time staff, including staff in the Philippines, Slovakia, Florida and Portland, Oregon. Her teaser clips – shortened, promotional versions of the full videos – have been viewed billions of times on sites like Pornhub and Xvideos.

One thing that has not changed since 2004 is the aesthetic that has made Girls Out West an internationally famous brand: a naturalistic or “amateur” shooting style, models with natural body types and body hair, and Aussie-accented dialogue. 

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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.”

A set

Photo: Girls Out West

The “Hectic” days

I ask Annie if she has a favourite ever Girls Out West video and she shows me a five-part series called Hectic.

In Hectic, shot in the early days of Girls Out West (pre 2008), a couple named Victor and Annabel have sex on a nudist beach. A crowd of male nudists forms around them, some of whom masturbate on camera. According to Annie, there were more nudists behind the camera, helping out, lugging gear and holding reflectors.

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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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A model looks over her shoulder

Girls Out West

Girls Out West goes gonzo (again)

Maybe it’s the talk of the wild old days that leads Annie to prepare something special for the next shoot. All I’m told is that it will be outdoors.

Filing out into the alley behind the Girls Out West studio, Fawn is wearing a red trench-coat, short skirt, high socks and her hair in pigtails. She holds a can of orange spray-paint. We all whisper and dart our eyes furtively.

Jamie, the studio manager, is on lookout at the end of the alley, along with Annie’s 10-year-old Staffy cross, Roxy, on a leash. Jamie normally stays off set but is filling in for a sick crew member.

If someone is about to walk past, keeping in mind that the alley is private property and a part of the studio rental that see’s very minimal foot traffic, Jamie yells, “Red light!”, the cue for everyone to stop and pretend they are not filming a porno. Once they walk past, he yells, “Green light!”, and the team continues filming. 

Fawn is now spray-painting orange love-hearts onto a garage door already covered in graffiti while Annie shoots her from multiple angles, including up her skirt. Mid-graffiti, Fawn starts masturbating. It is so sudden I almost drop my audio recorder. 

Jamie pulls up in a white four-wheel-drive with its number plates covered by white pieces of paper. Fawn and Roxy get in the car, but Roxy the staffy, in her excitement, accidentally scratches Fawn’s thigh. 

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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.