Porn Valley- [Wired News] Imagine what you could do with erotic entertainment if you weren’t bound by the laws of physics or 18 U.S.C. 2257.

By physics, of course, I mean the limitations of gravity, proportion, body mass. And by 18 U.S.C. 2257, I mean the federal law that requires every node in the pornography network to maintain records on every performer appearing in an adult film, including their real names, addresses and the probable sex of their first born.

At the moment, producers do not need to worry about either of those laws if their performers are computer-generated. And since illustration is the oldest form of pornography NSFW, it strikes me as ironic that despite the photographic and video capabilities of the digital age, drawing might prove to be the foundation of the Next Big Thing in entertainment.

“The adult industry is too stale,” says Tahl Price, co-founder of Priceless Films NSFW, a 3-D modeling and animation studio based in a quiet gated community just off Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood hills. “Porn really needs to add some spice, to be more creative, more innovative.”

For Tahl and his brother Darron, that means having a sense of humor, inviting audience input and remaining flexible enough to adapt to a changing market. But most of all, it means having the balls to experiment even if some of your creations reveal a warped imagination.

The second-best part of my job is the opportunity to meet creative people who are trying something new and interesting around sex — especially people who are willing to put stuff out there even if it might fail.

So I was delighted to spend a couple of hours with Tahl and Darron in the townhouse that serves as both home and headquarters, relaxing on the patio with bottles of water and enjoying the warm November sunshine. Our conversation ranged from home improvements to how their mom feels about their business, but we kept returning to a premise all three of us agree on: Animation and porn go together like beaches and bikinis.

Unfortunately, it’s been a difficult paradigm for the industry to grasp.

After spending four days showing their demo around at the 2006 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last January, the brothers Price returned to Los Angeles stoked by the positive response. “Everyone said ‘If you can pull this off, we’d definitely like to see what you’ve got,'” says Tahl.

But the follow-up was not as encouraging. “People in the adult industry can be very nice, very receptive, but it didn’t seem like they were always there,” says Tahl. “You’d call them up one day and they’d not remember you.”

I was surprised to hear about the resistance, as we like to think that porn paves the way for new technologies and that do-it-yourself spirit. Yet the porn business is also accustomed to churning out the same old stuff with the same old marketing on the same old (low) budget. And what Priceless Films produces looks expensive.

“I think [adult studios] are afraid of CG coming into the market because it will affect them, and they aren’t able to do it themselves because they do not have the creativity or the skills,” says Darron. “If they do hire someone, they’re not willing to put up the budget or give it the financial backing required.”

The brothers grew up in London and came to the United States for college. Darron earned a master’s degree in illustration at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design in Denver, Colorado. Tahl got a bachelor’s degree in business marketing and management at the University of Denver, followed by an MBA at Woodbury University in Los Angeles.

“We started out doing environments for commercial real estate,” Tahl tells me. “Building 3-D walkthroughs of homes and office buildings. One day we started experimenting with little characters walking through the buildings just to add more dimension to our models.”

While working on a model house for a client, they decided to put two characters in the bed, sleeping. For Darron, this was the moment of inspiration that led to Priceless Films. “I saw this beautiful empty room with this bed and I wanted to have some action on it,” he says.

Their first feature, Sex Agent – 0069, took almost a year to complete. But these days, the brothers say they can make a feature in about four months — the same time it takes a studio to put together a live-action DVD.

“We’ve been doing environments for many years, and we can create any environment someone wants in a couple of days,” Tahl says, matter-of-factly. “The more we practice doing the animation, the faster we get.”

They approached their second project, a gay film called Penetration Penitentiary, with an admirable sense of community. Before they started scripting, they set up several surveys on MySpace to find out what people would want to see. Overwhelmingly, the votes came in for bodybuilder-style characters and “standard” environments like a jail and a locker room.

But they also received several requests to show affection between the characters.

“A lot of the e-mails said that gay porn has a lot of wham-bam, but not much affection,” says Darron. “We have some romantic, tender scenes that really push the envelope.”

Pushing the envelope could well be the company’s motto. Tahl waxes enthusiastic about his ideas for combining sex and violence in ways you can’t pull off in live action, but without the tentacles and aliens common to hentai. He shows me an unreleased scene in which a woman is stabbing a man to death during coitus — a comic-book interpretation of the praying mantis mate-then-eat-your-male concept of sex.

I don’t know whether to be disturbed by how amusing I found it.

As I see it, this is erotic entertainment for the generation that made geekdom cool, those of us who grew up reveling in nerd culture and who don’t see why online porn is a big deal. We like sexy, we like edgy, but we’re suspicious of big media and marketing engines that repurpose the same characters and memes over and over and over again.

The Prices say that at the moment, the money is in mobile games, and they are developing a few — including a strip blackjack game marketed toward women. We leave the patio so Tahl can show it to me in the office, but it doesn’t go so well. After several losing hands, he barely gets the male dealer topless. But I see enough to get the idea.

If you’ve seen Pixar’s short film, One Man Band — my first iPod video purchase — you know just how much you can say with animation without uttering a word. Priceless Films’ productions don’t have much dialog, if any; the team can crank out content quickly because they don’t have to sync faces with dialog and then translate or dub for each language.

Clever use of 2-D splash pages — “like comic book pages” — and Flash animations introduce the sex scenes and tell a story, framing the action with a sense of place and plot.

The Prices have also recently finished slicing and dicing their longer work into shorter segments that are more appealing to mobile consumers and that better match the way we watch porn in general.

“An hour of solid sex animation is novel, but so what? Splitting it into little stories, maybe one to three minutes each, is more interesting for mobile,” says Darron.

For all their humor, the brothers are serious about their business. They’ve hired nude models to come be filmed in the studio, so they can study how various body parts look in motion. They get up early and start the workday with a phone or video conference with the rest of their team in London. They have a huge television and very little furniture and a healthy skepticism about the mainstream porn industry.

Despite the creative freedom it offers, adult animation is not entirely exempt from external forces. Earlier this year, erotic art exchange Renderotica NSFW had to remove several images from its site after its credit card processor got scared by some of the fantasy pictures and the BDSM.

Now, the terms of service state that you cannot post images that include young-looking creatures, even if in your vision a 1,000-year-old fairy looks about 15 in human years. You also can’t post images of humans having sex with beasts except for the mythological kind, and then only if they don’t resemble Earth creatures too closely.

Tahl and Darron will deal with obstacles as they arise. Meanwhile, they are hard at work, directing their virtual performers in movies and games.

“Directing is a lot of fun,” says Darron. “Our characters never talk back, they’re always ready to go and they never need Viagra.”