"My aim this year is to produce better films, more creative and more artistic than I did last year" – Kendo 

It’s funny sitting here in the print room at college makes me think about how I have changed as a person. How we all change as people or maybe we don’t. I have an assessment in one hour and it took me two hours this morning to put up 100 photographs on a wall and install a conceptual piece, but this is about who is Kendo is it not? Well I suppose my art and my work are Kendo.

Over the past five years it’s interesting for me to look back at the many many films I have produced for companies like Private, Playboy, TVX and Daring. I was producing twenty films a year when I signed my exclusive deal with Daring that cut the films produced  to twelve a year. Twelve is a good number as I have two great editors who work on the films and simple mathematics says that if they do six films each that allows them eight weeks per film. Yes we spend eight weeks editing per film we have cut down the edit time from three months, yes three months is what Bondage Thoughts took, to two months per film.

I see how my style has changed over those years and I see how I have evolved. For me it’s more about human chemistry, emotion, the kind of substance that I cannot really write into a script, its rather the baggage, what the model brings with them. How they are feeling that day, have they had an argument or row on the train journey to me, anybody can shoot porn and I mean anybody. I could take any Joe Blog off the street and within a day I could teach them how to shoot porn, anybody, FACT. But shooting chemistry, understanding emotion now that’s a beautiful challenge, especially when you shoot it with a artistic flair. So yes I am interested in shooting beautiful people, and I have said this before but anybody who falls in front of my camera will always be beautiful. I am interested in capturing real chemistry, emotion, beauty and realism in a very artistic way, the sex is purely the vehicle to deliver the REAL essence that I am in tune with, is this a bit deep?.

A couple of years ago I was so bored with shooting my Z1, or more in particular I was so bored with the look I was getting with the Z1 that I put it down, picked up my stills camera and started shooting the rest of the film and that film was Sheer Nylon with my Canon 5DII. I love the shallow depth of field that this camera with a prime lens gives me. It allows me to take the viewer to exactly where I want to take him or her within the field of focus, within my field of focus. Funny but when I started shooting with the 5DII it shot 30 frames per second and it would take us up to two months to convert the footage into the format and codec we needed, that was before we even started editing with it, MAD? Oh yes I have been told that many times.

I always try and push myself when I am shooting a film, when I finish a shoot I am totally exhausted, my brain works like this. We shoot three cameras on a shoot. Each camera is shooting hard then each camera is shooting soft, three at a time, sound confusing? It is a little. Most producers/ Directors  either shoot one camera which shoots hard then soft or they shoot two cameras one camera shoots hard whilst the second shoots soft. So why am I telling you this, not to impress you I don’t really need to do that but rather impress upon you how my brain sees whats going on in front of me, it sees three different images at any one time, it sees how the edit will unfold as the scene is happening, so I am thinking about three different images at any one time and I am also  thinking how they will all cut together at the same time, that’s why I am knackered at the end of a shoot. Oh yes and I only give myself one hour to actually shoot the whole scene, start to finish, one hour.

So about a year ago I had this idea to take our current filming style and cut it to shreds and re edit the film with all the time lines and scenes unfolding together, a spliced film so to speak, well thats what I call it, my editors call it a pain in the arse. I spoke to Lisa my wife about the idea as I do everything, she is the person who talks sense into me and is my best friend, she said to me well this film will either be crap or brilliant. I don’t do crap. So we started to shoot these inter spliced time lines, the first film to have this idea  was Stilettos. I called the film Stilettos as almost a homage to the first film I shot for Private whish was called Stiletto which was nominated for six or eight AVN’s I cannot remember. I thought that when I shot the film for Private it was like a milestone for me and this new shooting style felt the same kind of milestone. A few years ago I told Lisa that I wanted to work for Private and within six months I was. I put so much pressure on my shoulders when I shot Stiletto it was unreal. I shot the film and I decided I wanted to edit the film myself, Private said “no problems Kenny but we won’t pay you for it as you have signed a contract”. I said no problems I wanted, rather I needed to edit that film as I saw it, as I knew it needed to be, when we gave it over to PRIVATE, they said “Kenny from now on you edit your films and we will pay you for it”.

I put the same pressure on myself with Bondage Thoughts. This was the first film I shot for Daring, why do I do this? Why because I care, I care more than anything else, I have a deep deep desire to succeed, to be different, I have a self belief that has to be fed. I have to push myself further than anybody else can push me. Money is not the most important thing to me, the most important thing to me is to create something beautiful and something very different. I believe that there is not one other Adult Film Director who produces the same look as I do and in this industry. That is a massive statement to make. I have created a style that is recognisable instantly, you may or may not like it. I hope you do, but it is a style and it is mine and when we all shoot the same subject matter with pretty much the same kind of cameras to create something unique for me that is a great thing. But I have such a long way to go, but the journey is great and fun.

Wow do I ramble, I don’t even think I have said what  I thought I was going to say when I started writing this blog post, but like I have said before I will write from my heart. I am not a writer and ramblings will be encountered along the way, sorry.

Part 4 next week, have a beautiful week and believe in yourself, because if you don’t why should anybody else – Kendo x

Well firstly thank you so much for all your support and advice on blogging. So to carry on who is Kendo where was I? the only reason I ask that is because at the moment I am sitting in college typing this on my iPad, the iPad 1 I thought the iPad 2 was not going to bring to much to me so I would wait for no3. Anyway I had to bring a large 6ft square painting I had been working on at my film studio in for my assessment which is tomorrow and being at college I can’t get onto the blog as it is restricted being a naughty website I suppose. Let’s see I think I was stripping with twelve hundred screaming women and a lizard called Jakey on my shoulder for company.

So Stripping was one step, be it a big step away from being a pop star or living the life, screaming mad women, drink and drugs, or so I was told by the rest of the strippers I came into contact with, well not that type of contact with. I did learn to enjoy stripping but you do have to have a level of confidence that might usually be hidden away.

One good thing about being in a group was the laughs you had travelling around and maybe I will touch base with the laughs so to speak in another blog.

So freshly out of HMP on the Friday and getting my kit off on the Sunday in London, that Sunday I was trying to get out of London and after great advice from Simon I drove the wrong way over a major bridge, yes and knocked, what did he say “Welcome back to climax” wanker.

Then he hit me with the do you fancy doing a porn film line and he was back in my good books. My first shoot I finished the shoot and thought to myself, how the fuck, sorry every so often I will slip from the queens English into my native southern tongue. How the fuck does anybody do this on a day to day basis, stressful yes, very stressful yes yes yes.

I met the guys at Playboy and they commissioned our first pilot, we shot the pilot and they commissioned another eight films. We shot those and they commissioned sixteen, then thirty we shot around two hundred films for Playboy with me playing the Sex Therapist Neil Down and a fellow strip group member playing my sidekick Phil Mycock. you’ve got it the words were, Hi Neil Down and Phil Mycock, what do you mean corny? Come on we used to take the piss so much out of ourselves dressing up like a couple of idiots that the whole of the British public loved us, even my nan. Well that’s what we kept telling ourselves. We shot a series called So You Wanna Be A Porn Star, that was funny as fuck. That all came about due to me making a mistake with a newspaper advertisement.

Back fifteen years ago there were no model agencies like today, and the models wee not on the whole as good looking as they are today, a lot were fucking mingers to say the least, not all mind. So in my wisdom I decided to place an advert with some newspapers looking for models, but I forgot to put female models required. Yep every man and his dog wanted to be a porn star, and yep every man and his dog thought he could be a porn star, and then when the words ACTION were called the realism there are very very very very very few males who can actually do the job, or do it well.

We shot a series called The Ministry Of Sex, again all about the humour and then it hit me like the man flu that only men get, Boom, like a tonne of bricks, boredom. Yes I got bored, I got bored with shooting the same old gonzo sex, red head lights everywhere the studio looked more like Wembley stadium. If I don’t have a challenge I get bored quick and when that happens I can’t be assed, that’s me. So I had to reinvent me.

I was at Erotica when the reinvention happened. I walked onto a Queensway stand spoke to the guys there about their best selling DVD and they gave me a Tanya Hyde film called Waistland. I took it home watched it and Kendo was born.

I never thought of myself as being into fetish films, it was not so much about the fetish aspect that I loved with this film, rather the stylisation. I loved that, studying Fashion at college for a while before giving it up to peruse my Bodybuilding dream, I had always had a love for style. This was my in, my in to a new look a new beginning and my first film that I shot for about two thousand pounds, Masks The light and The Dark, got nominated for three AVN’s one being Best Cinematography not bad for a film that cost in total what most scenes start at.

Part Three to come next week all about how my style has been honed into what it is now.