[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]Sex. It plays an important part in our social, personal and emotional lives – and increasingly featured on our screens. Sex, not just as a physical action, is an important display on screen as a means of bringing different sexualities and sexual experiences to the spotlight to create new and unique stories. Whether it’s through the experiences of a gay sexual health nurse, like series Sexy Herpes (AUS), the process of a new relationship forming, like Freudian Slip (AUS), or the sexual and emotional experiences from the greater community, like the ones featured in Confess (ISR), a distinctiveness shines through.
Often these great stories come from real life experiences. Creators of Sexy Herpes Madeline Dyer and Daniel Mulvihill shared their own experiences on screen, taking charge in the web series world.
“We were having a beer one night with a family friend who is a sexual health nurse. She was explaining how she was struggling with intimacy in her personal life and she wondered if her job was starting to affect her ability to find love.”
For the creators, it’s not just about a ‘coming out story’ and having everything revolving around it. “We were passionate about normalising gender and cultural diversity, along with sexual preference from the get go.” says Dyer and Mulvihill. “We had a very clear message and vision. We wanted to create a world (and characters) that reflected real people in the street – people we’ve met and interacted with.
We wanted to explore societal taboos like sexuality and therefore sexual health, but from the female gaze. A lot of our ‘sexual scenes’ are comedy driven but also a serious commentary on bigger issues.”
When working with topics like sexual health, things can get rather difficult to represent on screen. “We wanted authentic representation and wanted to explore negative stigma and stereotypes, such as with our characters of Greg and Mullen, through their journeys,” says the co-creators.
Clare Sladden, director, co-producer and writer of Freudian Slip took a different approach to sexual storytelling through it’s main two characters, but within six total voices. “It gives the audience a look at the internal conversations that play out in our character’s heads when they’re in the most intimate, awkward, romantic situations, and also explores how both women and men censor themselves and their desires,” says Sladden.
“…The way I chose to express these dilemmas was to externalise the competing voices inside our character’s heads (what Freud calls the ‘id’ and the ‘super ego’) so that those internal conversations could play out in real time.”
The choice to include the characters super ego and id physically wasn’t only for comedic purposes, Sladden says. “If we’d chosen to use a voice-over, we never could have properly captured the duality of our characters. By manifesting our character’s Ids and Super Egos, we put a face to those internal voices, and validate their concerns, and thereby validate our audience’s own concerns.”
“I wanted to make sure the series was as high-concept as possible. Including the Freudian slip in each episode allowed me to create a structure/construct that meant that all the internal banter and back and forth wasn’t just random or pointless,” says Sladden.
Choosing to focus on individual characters, Moshe Rosenthal’s Confess bases each new episode on an entirely new set of characters every time.
Based on true stories, Rosenthal gained his own perspective of each original story, also meeting with the people who experienced them. “I met these people in cafes and told them my most personal sex stories, in order to break the ice, and made them feel comfortable in telling me their own personal sex adventures.”
Wanting to stay as true as possible to the original stories, Rosenthal was enthusiastic about casting actors that had a personal connection to each story. “…they could portray them with no judgment and pure honesty… some of the actors even had similar romantic interactions as the characters.”
Focusing more on the emotional aspect of the stories rather than the physical was a important in allowing the series to tell a different kind of story. “All the representations of sex I saw in film and television was either erotic and superficial or violent and tragic,” says Rosenthal.
To see these unique stories, be sure to grab yourself and a friend tickets to Melbourne WebFest 2018.
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MORE ABOUT THE SERIES
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” width=”1/3″ tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]Sexy Herpes
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