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In a new interview with former Fleshbot CEO Lux Alptraum for The Verge, our very own Mr. Skin, Jim McBride, gave some comments about the rise in CGI nudity, and what it means for the industry as a whole.

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Check out this excerpt from the piece below, and be sure to head over to The Verge to read the full story...

Jim McBride isn’t thrilled with the turn toward CGI. The founder of Mr. Skin, a website devoted to tracking celebrity nude scenes, McBride has been maintaining an exhaustive list of celebrity nude scenes since his site launched in August 1999 (Disclosure: The parent company of MrSkin.com purchased Fleshbot.com from me in early 2014). In addition to providing detailed lists of when, where, and how female celebrities have shed their clothes on camera, the site also keeps viewers abreast of when those scenes feature the actress’s actual body and when we’ve been served up a body double instead. Though Mr. Skin’s posts are celebratory in tone, equally excited to see any actress disrobe, regardless of her body type or age, the site has spawned numerous copycats and clones, many of whom view on-camera nudity through a more critical lens (which, it should be noted, might very well fuel some of the insecurity that leads performers to pursue some CGI assistance).

"We would prefer that the actress did her own nude scenes, that would be our number one choice," he says. But he also doesn’t see digitally enhanced nude scenes as anything new: "It’s no different than when they were doing body doubles through the years Not every movie actress is going to want to do a nude scene. Maybe something’s wrong with her body at the time, or maybe some other actress had a better butt, so they use a body double. There’ve always been body doubles, there’ve always been scenes where there was nudity and it wasn’t the actress you thought it was. This has been going on forever."

What’s different now, however, is that CGI makes those body doubles more difficult to detect. In previous eras, a nude shot that featured body as well as face was very likely to be real; nowadays, it’s harder to guarantee that that’s actually the case. For McBride, it was 2011’s The Change-Up which featured "nude" scenes of both Leslie Mann and Olivia Wilde that made the promise (or, depending on your view, danger) of CGI nudity all too clear.

"[Leslie Mann] did this incredible topless scene, but it was all done in post-production. And she admitted it on Jimmy Kimmel after the fact. I remember seeing that nude scene and finding out later that it wasn’t her, and thinking, ‘Uh oh, it’s going to be a lot tougher to know if it’s an actress or not.'"

McBride remains confident that whether it’s through DVD extras, interviews, or leaks to the press the truth will always come out. But others aren’t so sure. When asked what percentage of nude scenes are faked, the CGI editor I spoke with wouldn’t even hazard a guess. "A lot of times those things are kept really low key," he says. "There’s a lot of beauty work in a lot of movies but in terms of nudity, I don’t know." Studios that are paying editors a good deal of money to create the illusion of nude scenes have a lot of incentive to keep their work under wraps: as my source put it, "the best visual effects are the ones you don’t see."

That tendency toward secrecy can fuel an audience’s sense that they’re being subjected to trickery or, when the truth comes out about a digitally altered scene, that they’ve been the victims of nudity-filled bait and switch. In the aftermath of theGame of Thronesfinale, none other than Howard Stern felt compelled to speak out about how the scene had betrayed him. As McBride describes Stern’s reaction, "It was such a let down when he found out, when they went on our website and we talked about how it wasn’t Lena Headey He was really upset about it. He felt cheated, he felt that, ‘Wow, I’ve invested five seasons in this show, I think Lena Headey’s beautiful, and she finally did this amazing nude scene...’ and then he found out it wasn’t her, and he felt bad."