They may be Naked and Afraid, but the nude survivalists on Discovery’s reality franchise needn’t be scared of being exposed on national TV. And that’s thanks to the crack team of blurring experts working to make sure all their bits are obscured.
Now that the spinoff Naked and Afraid: Global Showdown is premiering on Sunday, May 17, at 8/7c, we’re going behind the blur with the team responsible for the censoring.
The pixelation pros form a team called the Blur Man Group.
So who are these behind-the-scenes heroes? A New York Times reporter ventured to the Naked and Afraid production offices in Sherman Oaks, California, in 2016 and found a group of graphic designers who’d dubbed themselves the Blur Man Group.
“This is a totally weird work environment,” said team leader Shaun O’Steen, who was working on the post-production process alongside Ilgin Esemenli, his wife. “I mean, what job can you say, ‘Oh, my God, look at that penis,’ and not have to worry about H.R.?”
The team was working off a spreadsheet tracking necessary pixelation tasks, with notes like, “Boobs blur insufficient” and “More opaque crotch blur for him.”
Mathilde Bittner, an executive producer of the show, recalled walking by the Blur Man Group workstations and seeing notes like “More vagina,” “Extend the crotch shot,” and “Bug biting vagina.”
Team member Erin Gavin told the Times, “I’m definitely used to looking at spreadsheets, but not like this.”
And though the job might seem titillating from the outside, the Blur Man Group workers were quick to mention the grueling aspects of the work. O’Steen recalled one colleague quitting after two weeks.
That’s because the work isn’t just high-stakes — a participant on VH1’s Dating Naked once sued over what she considered an insufficient blur — but painstaking, as the team tries to blur as little as possible while still redacting anything R-rated. Blurring just one episode takes at least 50 hours.
“People talk about the whole aspect of nudity,” Mr. O’Steen said. “That goes away really quick. … There’s a job you have to do.”
The team has in-house rules for its censoring work — and slang terms for body parts.
That same year, Gavin described some ins and outs of the Blur Man Group’s work in a Hollywood Reporter essay. “There are instances where we have to blur more than the actual body parts, like danglers,” he said. “That’s when you see a shadow that makes your mind think you’re looking at a penis. And we’ve got several scenarios with the butt blur. Currently, the general stipulation is to show the butt unless someone has a wide gait.”
He added: “We have a lot of in-house terms. There’s the weenie waggler — that’s the stuff moving around. There’s the nip slip, of course. Side boob is popular. Our mandate is to cover the side boobs as much as possible. We’ve got boob shad — you have to be aware of their shadows as well — and, if they’re in water, we call them floaters. There’s also spillage, peen, naughty bits, the chinchilla … I’d explain that one, but you probably don’t want to know.”
And as Gavin told THR, contestant insecurities do come into play. “We’ve had guys ask for a bigger blur,” he said. “We won’t necessarily accommodate that. We strive to make them as plain as a Barbie doll.”
The contestants are less modest than producers expected.
Production members from Naked and Afraid also discussed the blurring work in a 2019 Emmy Magazine explainer. O’Steen told the mag a typical episode of the show requires around 600 blur shots, with 10 to 14 graphic artists working on those tasks each season. And their work is all the harder because the Naked and Afraid contestants don’t try to cover themselves.
“Often they seem quite content, once they get over the initial shock, to be completely naked,” executive producer Steve Rankin told the site. “That took us by surprise. We weren’t expecting to have to blur every frame of every show because of nudity.”
But sometimes, as O’Steen revealed, attempts to cover up the naughty bits on camera backfire. “One of my most-feared producer comments when they come back from the field is, ‘Hey, we helped you out. We had them make clothes,’” O’Steen says. “It’s fine the first half-hour they wore the palm-frond bikini, but within half a day those palm fronds have shriveled up and spread apart, and now we have all those holes that expose all of the interesting things we’re trying to cover.”
Added O’Steen: “It takes a specific type of person to work here. Probably just barely on the side of sane.”
Naked and Afraid: Global Showdown, Series Premiere, Sunday, May 17, 8/7c,
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