Two Versions of the Same Body: Notes on Filming Naked, Part Two

There are two cuts of this video. If you've watched part one, you've seen the gentler one — the version I'd happily play on a laptop at a kitchen table with a friend looking over my shoulder. Part two is the other one. Same afternoon, same light, same body. Different edit.

I've been sitting with why that distinction matters so much to me, and why I keep coming back to it.

The shoot was not romantic

Let me start with the least glamorous truth. Filming naked, alone, in a rented room with bad heating, is mostly administrating. You set the tripod. You check the frame. You walk back, walk forward, walk back again because your foot keeps leaving the edge of the shot. You get cold. You put a towel around your shoulders between takes and stand there shivering like anyone else waiting for a kettle to boil.

There is a moment — maybe four seconds in the whole afternoon — where the camera catches something that feels like the thing I was trying to say. Everything around those four seconds is logistics.

I say this because I think people imagine nude film as one continuous state of being desirable. It isn't. It's a body doing a job, and the job is patience.

What "NSFW" actually decides

Part two gets the NSFW label. Part one doesn't. I made that call myself, and I want to be honest that it's a strange kind of decision to make about your own body.

The label isn't really a description. It's an instruction about where the footage is allowed to exist. The same hip, the same stretch of skin, gets read completely differently depending on whether it's framed by a caption about body acceptance or by nothing at all. Context does most of the work. The body just stands there.

So part two shows more, and it also asks more. It asks you to sit with an image that hasn't been softened for you — no clever cropping, no careful angles that let you pretend you're looking at something else. That's the part I actually care about. Not the exposure. The refusal to apologise for it.

Why I still edit carefully

I'm not against editing. I'm against editing that lies.

In part two I cut for rhythm, not for shame. I keep the parts where my shoulders drop and my breathing changes. I keep the awkward half-second where I forget what I'm doing and glance at the lens like a person caught thinking. I cut the bits where the light went flat, because flat light is boring, not because my stomach looked a certain way.

There's a difference between shaping a film and correcting a body. I've done both in my life. Only one of them left me feeling like myself afterwards.

Consent doesn't end when filming does

One thing worth saying plainly, because I get asked: nobody is in this video but me. No one is filmed incidentally. No one is watching from off-frame. If I ever make work with another person, the conversation about what gets released happens before the camera comes out, and it happens again before the edit is published. Consent that only covers the shooting is not consent. It has to cover the version strangers will see.

That's also why both cuts exist. Part one is for people who want the idea. Part two is for people who want the honesty. Neither is a trap, and neither is a secret.

Watching yourself back without flinching

The first time I reviewed the part two footage, I flinched. Not at the nudity — at the ordinariness. There's a shot where I'm just standing, and the light comes across my ribs, and you can see that I'm a person with a ribcage and a slightly tired back and a scar on my knee from being nine years old.

I flinched because I'd spent years believing that being seen meant being evaluated. Somewhere in the last few years that quieted down. Now I watch it and think: yes, that's what I look like when no one is telling me to hold my stomach in.

That's not confidence, exactly. Confidence sounds loud. This is more like permission.

The part I can't put in the film

What part two can't show is the walk back to the car afterwards. The ordinary evening. A cold hand around a paper cup, a phone buzzing with messages about something unrelated, the strange flatness that follows finishing a piece of work you cared about.

Nudity gets framed as a peak experience — a threshold, a revelation. Mostly it's just a Tuesday, and then you go home and put the heating on. I think that's the healthiest thing about it. I want the work to feel like that too: intense while you're in it, unremarkable afterwards, no residue of shame to scrub off.

Watch it however you need to

Part two is up. It's labelled honestly, and it's meant to be watched by adults who chose to be here. If that's not you today, part one is still there, and I mean it when I say it's not the lesser version. It's just a different sentence in the same paragraph.

If you do watch part two, I'd love to know what you noticed. Not whether you liked the body — what you saw in it. That's the conversation I keep wanting to have, and it stays open as long as we keep it kind.

Thank you for being here. Genuinely.

— Will #naturism #bodypositivity #artisticnudity #nakedwill #selfacceptance