VCA Goes to The Next Level in Virtual Sex

"The project we've been working on very diligently for the past several months," announced Wit Maverick of VCA Interactive, "is our entrée into the virtual sex genre. We're starting a new line called 'Fantasex,' and the first title in the Fantasex line will be Chasing Stacy, which is a very rich, very elaborate and very deep interactive experience."

He wasn't kidding. The last Stacy Valentine project scheduled for release by the company, Chasing Stacy will employ state-of-the-art DVD technology to create a virtual POV environment where the viewer can interact with the busty blond actress in more ways than one. "It's not a menu-driven game; it's a true-to-life game," Maverick explained. "It's all time-code-based SP layers; simple technology, but we're applying it to real-life situations, live video. You follow Stacy around in the course of a day, and you have different opportunities to ask her out, and depending on when and where you ask her out, she may either accept or reject your overture, and that will send you to some sort of rejection scene or acceptance scene and give you access to a point-of-view date with Stacy, where she talks to you, reminisces about some of her sexual exploits, and that segues into a couple of bonus scenes from previous material.

"There are several bonuses and boobytraps throughout the disc," he continued. "When you're trying to ask her out - if you ask her out at the wrong time and get rejected, when you get brought back into the game, you get brought back after a bonus scene. If you don't ask her out, you're rewarded for being patient by getting to see a bonus scene. We shot two of them specifically for the project, a striptease scene in a dressing room, and a solo scene in the shower, both featuring Stacy.

"Then, of course, there's virtual sex. When we approach virtual sex, we look at it as not some sort of derivative of video; it is video, and we took great pains to make sure we shot specifically for it, but we wanted to maintain production value. It's not on a black background; you don't see camera tripods in the corner - this is a VCA production.

"We use the DVD technology to enhance the virtual sex experience, not to create a gimmick. Stacy is Stacy; you can't manipulate her personality. What you can control, as in any situation, is the intensity of the situation. So we have each position broken down into three variations of her personality depending on the intensity of the action. There are two ways to control the virtual sex, and that's either by the on-screen icon - a very clean little interface that we designed and you can use your remote control to navigate it - or we have an advanced play function, where you can remove the [on-screen] interface and just use your keypad to navigate; all one-button commands. So you can change position, sex acts, control when she cums, when you cum, or you can control what we call 'the heat.' Part of the interface is a little thermometer; you can start slow and easy; and you can scroll up to kind of a medium, driving kind of thing; and then scroll up to a really loud, nasty kind of intensity. You can navigate between those three at will, depending on what you want to do to her, and she responds accordingly. That's what makes for any good sex experience or sex scene."

The disc contains over three hours of original footage, and the interface is so fully loaded, they've included an interactive tutorial right on the disc rather than simply relying on a package insert to explain all the program's possible functions.

"One of the things we designed for was repeat use," Maverick stated. "Some of these games you can buy, you go through them once and you've done everything that's on there. With this, there's so many ways to go about it - the advanced play, the auto play, the different variations - you can enjoy it a lot of times, a lot of different ways.

"You can change angles, of course, in almost every single position, and you can also control the environment. You can choose to have an experience at Stacy's house, at the office, or you can choose a public location. You can also choose one of four audio tracks. If you want to play your own music and just hear Stacy interacting with you, you can choose that. We've also provided three different soundtracks for three different ambiances: slow and romantic; a hot-and-driving, kind of grooving soundtrack; and a hard, nasty kind of track to back her up.

"And if you don't want to do any of those things, and want to go right into it and land wherever you're going to land, you can do that too. There's a speed-start function. You just go and you don't know where you're going to end up, but you're going to end up doing something with Stacy Valentine. Also, if you want to just set [the disc] to 'play' and put your remote down and have nothing more to do with it, we have some preprogrammed options for auto play, again with three variations of sequence of scenes.

"We've really used every facet of DVD to enhance the experience for the viewer. Of the capabilities that DVD has to offer, I think this disc pretty much does everything. You have to use almost every button on your remote, and each will activate something on the disc."

VCA has put plenty of thought into the marketing aspects of this creation as well.

"As far as promotional stuff," explained sales chief Alan Gold, "since it's a disc to focus on someone masturbating to Stacy, we're giving out cum towels with 'Chasing Stacy/Fantasex' printed on them, along with a little pillow-packet of lube that says 'Fantasex' on it. So we're basically giving the customer a little starter kit."

But Chasing Stacy is just VCA's first virtual sex project; one they've spent enough time on to work out the bugs and more fully develop the possibilities of the DVD capabilities.

"We're going to do our first full-blown Fantasex feature with Juli Ashton," Maverick advised. "It's going to be called Being with Juli Ashton, as opposed to Being John Malkovich. Instead of going into the head of Juli Ashton, you go into the head of someone who's doing Juli Ashton. We wish we could make it fully interactive all the way through; but the Fantasex footage takes up a great deal of video space, because there's anywhere from 30 seconds to two-minute long video segments, and when you put every position in multiple angle together - one location in one position on Chasing Stacy is over an hour, so there's over three hours just of Fantasex in one angle. So you can't afford to do that in every scene and have any kind of feature production value. But we're also going to do multiple storyline branching; there will be a lot of POV angles available in a lot of the scenes, so we're using the various aspects of DVD that are specific to the medium to enhance a feature presentation."

VCA is pushing ahead full-bore with their Fantasex engine, with plans to incorporate the feature into future DVD releases.

"We're including a mini-Fantasex experience as a bonus on Ginger Lynn's White Lightning," Maverick revealed. "We shot some virtual sex with her and Michael J. Cox, and how it's going to work is, when you're watching the movie, when that scene comes up, you'll have an option to just watch Michael J. Cox and the scene; or leave the movie and have your own experience with Ginger and then come back to the movie; or just access it as an extra bonus - something you will not get on the videotape, because it's just not possible."

Maverick realizes that it's the extras that make DVD stand out from the video release of the same story and encourages owners of the tape to spring for the disc as well.

"We're always very conscious of trying to create content that relates to the project," Maverick told AVN. "If it's an extra on a full feature, it somehow relates to that feature." For instance, on the DVD release of Veronica Hart's spy thriller Booby Trap, Maverick and his team have designed an updated version of the game "Clue," where viewers have to match a girl, a guy and a location in order to see the bonus scenes.

"We have a quiz on Trash-Talkin' Coeds, which is coming out in June, and all the answers to the quiz are in the movie," Maverick said. "We took his theme of college coeds and included a quiz for 'extra credit.' [Jim] Holliday wrote the questions. With all of our discs, though, we provide a cheat sheet somewhere on the disc, and you don't even need DVD-ROM to find it. Everything we do is DVD and DVD-ROM compatible. But we like to hide things. Like on Diva Girls, we hid a bonus scene; it's a 'forbidden' scene, and you had to find it.

"We also have Antonio Passolini's Raw coming out in a couple of months, and we have some very interesting extras on that," Maverick added. "Kylie did a dance at one of our local clubs here in L.A. where she wore a costume from the movie, so we covered the dance in multiple angles and included that as an extra. It's hidden: You've got to find it. And also, using the technology in an interesting way, we're providing a private screening of one of the scenes where we shot a POV solo with Kylie, where she is getting off to the very same scene the viewer is. You can choose to just see Kylie; or you can choose to see her, picture-in-picture, within the scene of the movie, so you can see the action that she's referring to, and see her as well. Or you can see the scene as it was originally cut for the movie."

While all VCA DVD projects so far have been playable on either DVD home units or DVD-ROM computer drives, with all material on the disc accessible to either playback hardware, VCA will be entering new territory with its release of Michael Ninn's Shayla's Web on DVD.

"We're going to Web-enable it so [by playing the disc in a DVD-ROM drive] you can go to the Internet and by using the Internet, gain access to additional content on the DVD that you wouldn't be able to otherwise get," Maverick explained. "It's brand new technology, and we're going to be putting as much material on there as possible. The benefit is that you can use the disc to access the Internet to get to content that is Web-based, and by virtue of having gone to the Internet, you can access content back on the disc that is more video-based."

But interactivity is only one side of VCA Interactive, which is also responsible for digging through VCA's massive catalog and selecting features for release by VCA's Classic DVD line.

"We'll have a meeting maybe twice a month and sit down and go through it," advised Gold, on how VCA chooses which classic titles to release, "and we get a lot of e-mails from customers saying they'd like to see this or that, and we try to add those to the list. We'll sit down with [VCA owner] Russ [Hampshire], who's been in the industry for many, many years, and he knows; so if we pick out 20 that we think are good, he'll whittle that list down and add what he'd like to see, and it goes back and forth." Retailers have apparently been happy with the selection so far.

"Distributors used to say, 'Cut me back on the classics,' but that's not the case now with the DVDs," Gold happily related. "They say, 'Give me the same amount. We'll take 'em.' Sex/Sex 2 did phenomenally; over 600,000 pieces. We like doing the double features, and we're not charging more for it, and the distributors aren't charging more, so the customer is getting two movies for the price of one, basically, back to back."

Gold also noted that fans were very happy with the Deep Inside Ginger Lynn disc, which contained footage from old Essex Video releases not seen in nearly 20 years. Other upcoming DVD Classics include American Garter, Virtual Sex, The Tease, Bad Habits, The Last Resort and Alex deRenzy's Girlfriends... but even bigger things are in the works.

"We're currently working on The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Barbara Broadcast, and these are going to be collectors' editions," Maverick disclosed. "We're restoring the previously censored material to the DVD. We went back to the original 1-inch masters and drew the material fresh. There are still some modifications that had to be made due to legal issues, but a lot of what was cut out [in the video release] has been restored. The DVDs will only be missing a few seconds here and there, but several minutes from the VHS [including a full scene in Misty Beethoven] will now be back in place. Also, we'll have running commentary by the stars of the film - Gloria Leonard and Jamie Gillis for Misty Beethoven; and we're working on getting Jamie and Annette Haven for Barbara Broadcast. I'm sure the fans are really going to appreciate the effort we put into restoring the content."

VCA releases four to six discs per month, split half-and-half between classics and more recent features.

"We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from fans," said Gold, "and they're one market segment we always want to please."