Model Citizens is a model interview series brought to you by Pornhub. We're giving voice to those who matter most in this industry: the talent.
In the age of access, anybody with a smartphone can become a politician, a poet, or a pornstar.
The tools of creation are unrestricted. The only barriers to success are taste and discipline.
This transformation of creative gatekeeping is making headlines in every mainstream industry; look no further than 2018's newest crop of SoundCloud rappers for evidence that today's most celebrated art is more often made in bedrooms than soundstages.
And porn is no different.
We spoke with everyone's favorite couple, Leolulu, to see what success looks like for at-home content creators who are anything but "amateur."
Tell me how you met and how you started working together.
Leo: We met five years ago at the beach.
Lulu: At the beach in Berlin. I saw her walking on the beach in front of me and I just had to go and talk to her, and then we hung out a couple of times.
Leo: It worked out, and we've been together ever since.
Lulu: Sexuality has always been a big part of our relationship. We always liked to take pictures and make videos, but just for us in the beginning.
Leo: For a year, we didn't live in the same city. I often took some nice pictures and invested some more time on them. I really liked this part, so we started to enjoy showing ourselves.
Lulu: Yeah, exactly, showing off. We wanted to do something with that, so we started doing cam shows. That worked well for a while, but wasn't really our thing.
Leo: It takes a lot of time.
Lulu: Time and effort and energy, and you have to have a certain regularity.
Leo: And we worked a lot so...
Lulu: We both had fulltime jobs at the time, so it was quite complicated. We started publishing our cam shows on Pornhub, and then we realized that the video format was better for us than live shows...
Leo: Yes, we could invest more time and just be more creative. He liked the idea of producing something and just being creative and testing it out.
Lulu: Yeah, exactly - you have an idea, you try it out, and you control everything that you're about to publish. You can watch it again and again before you publish anything. That was really important for us and we really liked it.
Leo: But we did actually make some videos already before, we recorded ourselves and said that we liked it, but…
Lulu: For Pornhub, we tried to make it look good, for those who appreciate certain aesthetics.
Your videos and photos look amazing. What kind of cameras and lighting equipment do you use?
Lulu: Well, at first, for 80% of our videos, we just shot near a window and used a cell phone camera like the iPhone 5 or 6.
Leo: Yeah, it's the easiest.
Lulu: We only had cell phone cameras, and at first you don't really make money so you can’t invest in equipment. So we just took what we had and tried to make it work. So we could see that when we filmed ourselves in bed, the quality was shitty and there was no light.
Leo: Yeah, when we lived in Paris, it’s often really grey and cloudy. You don’t have much choice of where to go.
Lulu: It was basically one corner where the light hits the wall, where there's enough light to shoot. So we always shoot in this corner.
At the end of last year we bought a camera, a Panasonic GX80 that somebody advised us to buy because it wasn’t too expensive.
Leo: Not so complicated, also dependable.
Lulu: So we had a good quality option for beginners. And we're very satisfied with it. We really enjoy having this much detail and this kind of quality in our videos - you can really see the difference.
But then we also changed our way of filming, because when we had the iPhone we would just put it against a couple of books on the table so it stayed still. With the camera we could at least move a bit and have better angles, and action cams too.
Leo: We played outdoors a lot, and it's just not possible with a real camera.
People look at you. With people around it's just not that easy, so we started shooting with action cameras.
Lulu: We invested in an action cam. That was mainly for public videos and outdoor stuff, because it's easy to carry and easy to hide. It's not noticeable when you take it out and start filming, nobody looks at you, nobody sees it.
Leo: Yeah. But actually, even though we've got a good camera, we often still take our cell phones, just because we’re used to carrying them. Sometimes we don't plan to film, so it’s good to always have a backup camera like your phone.
Lulu: We spend a lot of time after the video to make it look as nice as we can, but before the video we don't really prepare much. We just start and hopefully we have good lighting at the time, but that's it.
What do you do to prepare before you shoot?
Leo: One funny thing is, whenever we prepare for shooting we think, "Yeah, let's stay in this position, we like the framing and background," but then you don’t always capture everything in the video. It’s often spontaneous. There are some videos where we're dressed in pajamas or whatever and we didn't set up at all. There are so many videos which could have been way better if we had just sat there and thought about it for a minute.
Lulu: Sometimes we do try to plan at least the location and the outfits. We try to at least have an idea of what we want to do. Like, "let's try to do a video there, in this corner or on this furniture or in this location," and, "Oh, yeah, I should dress up like this and like that."
Leo: Yeah, or sometimes it's just that you've got a nice outfit and you want to film in it.
Lulu: Then we just start fucking and set the camera somewhere.
Afterwards, there's a lot of work to decide what to keep and try to zoom in to hide our faces.
What software do you use for editing?
Lulu: We use Premiere Pro.
If somebody doesn't have a lot of money for equipment, what's something simple and easy that they could do to improve their videos?
Lulu: If the camera is shitty, you have to have a lot of light. That's the main thing to have good quality, even with a shitty camera.
Leo: Go outside on a sunny day.
Lulu: Or even just get close to the window and try to make something innovative in the action - something creative in terms of action or situation. If the quality is shitty and you do basic sex acts, people can see that on pretty much every video. But if there is something a bit creative, a bit interesting, people don't care about the shitty quality. They just want to see what's going on.
Even a nice outfit or funny situation in the beginning, but it has to be a bit different than just the norm. It has to be something a little bit more.
Did you read up on video production at all, or you just figured it out by doing it?
Lulu: Just by doing it.
Leo: If ever we don’t know how to do something, we can always watch videos on YouTube.
Lulu: Yeah, you try. When you don't know how to do it, you watch stuff on YouTube and then you repeat and repeat and repeat until you master the skills a bit.
Leo: Yeah, I hate Premiere Pro but I got used to it. *Laughs*
Lulu: Yeah, but in just a year you made a lot of progress.
Leo: It’s cool to see that our videos look better than they did in the beginning. It shows that you actually advanced and improved.
Do you pay much attention to your audio?
Leo: Not at all.
Lulu: I mean, in the beginning we tried to put some music in the room, but it was mainly for us, not for the video. Just because it's much easier to get in the mood when there's music, if you're fucking in front of the camera.
Leo: Yeah, and also we just enjoy ourselves and we always have music – no music would be just strange for us, I guess.
But no, we don't use any extra equipment or anything to make the sound higher quality.
Lulu: Just some music in the introduction and that's it.
Your recent photoset taken in the jungle looks amazing. What was it like filming in that location?
Lulu: Amazing. We were on holiday just going around with the camera and filming a few bits here and there. We really loved it - that's what we always wanted to do. Now that we are quite popular on Pornhub and we can keep making videos, that's what we want to do. We want to keep going places and finding nice locations to shoot.
Leo: We really enjoy being like in nature or outside. We both come from a city and whenever we can, we try to go out and just play with our videos. We like going outside as much as possible because it's just more exciting - or at least it's what we enjoy most, so that's what we wanna show.
Your Instagram account was recently shut down, but you're still on Twitter. How important is social media for you in terms of marketing and promotion?
Lulu: For us it's very important for marketing. We enjoy showing ourselves mainly because of the feedback - mainly because we get comments and messages and stuff like that. They either make us happy or laugh, or triggers some kind of reaction.
Leo: Yeah, it just wouldn't be fun if we had 100 views on our videos and nobody commenting, right?
Leo: It wouldn't feel like anybody would actually see them.
Lulu: Yeah, this is why for us it's also important. On Instagram, we had a lot of people on our page.
Leo: We were actually private, so it was only people really interested in us.
Lulu: So we really had a connection with everybody there. When we posted something in our story, we had tens of thousands of people looking at it or answering in the polls or sending messages and comments. This is a big part of what we do, talking with them and trying to find out what they would want to see next. And also, of course, promoting our content and telling them whenever there's a new video, or whenever we're preparing something for the next one.
What's something that your fans can do to help support you and other models and performers?
Leo: Like and comment on our videos! And share them on social media and with your friends.
Lulu: Anything helps! Put a thumbs-up on the videos, put comments to say what you like, or what you would like to see in the next one, and, yeah, just keep watching.
Thanks to our favorite travelers for putting the "lust" back into "wanderlust." Check out their brand new website, and follow Leo and Lulu on Pornhub, Twitter and Instagram to keep up with their escapades.
Comments