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it wasn't released commercially until four years later

So four years later bare breasts were OK? The board of censors became 21?

The USA are among the countries with the most ridicully behaving public, as seen from Germany. It is totally possible to shock the country with just one nipple, it is totally OK to ban pictures of breastfeeding women from websites, and so on. OTOH the USA dominate world's porn industry. Go figure.

That said, I was drawing bras on bare breasts as well. That was in 1990 for "Werner - Beinhart!" which included some dream sequences of Werner and his totally naked dream girl. Totally naked? Well, in the original animation. The release version had a bikini drawn on her. The producers feared to not get a FSK 6 rating if the breasts remained bare. I really much felt like raping a crucifix when I had to draw directly (!) on Tahsin Özgür's wonderful animation.

Surprisingly enough I found an uncensored shot in the net: . It must have been some publicity shot published before release.

What's so wrong with prudence anyway? Give me one good reason why I should take unnecessary risks when it comes to spending three years of my labor and lots of other people's money to tell a story of the nineteenth century to a twenty first century audience of all ages. In any day I would prefer a prude to an exhibitionist, given the choice.

Let's face it, nudity is synonymous with sex. Plenty of nudity is perfectly O.K. and appropriate when telling a story of sex, if that is what you want to spend some of your time absorbing. Sex is done in private places by the majority of peoples in the world, meaning most people are prudent in their public behavior. Exhibitionists are in the extreme minority, and very fortunately so.

To throw nudity into the air in a cartoon story for a general audience is show-offy exhibitionism which I find completely unnecessary. Necessity is the operative word here.

nudity is synonymous with sex

No, not in my book. Not in any part of the world which still is unspoilt from christian missionaries or muslim influence. Not in any really secular society. If I tell a story based on my experiences nudity would be a part of it, and I don't want to censor myself in any way, for any audience. People are entitled to not watch my film, that's all.

And of course you may choose as you want with your films as well, I will not criticze that.

Not in any part of the world which still is unspoilt from christian missionaries or muslim influence.

Orthodox Jews must have sex through a hole cut out in the middle of a sheet. Of course nudity is connected to sex... anyone who claims that this is not so (but an orthodox Jew) is in deep denial. People have sex in the nude and dressed people usually don't -- with the exception of Bill Clinton of course.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:Orthodox Jews must have sex through a hole cut out in the middle of a sheet

It's an urban legend.
and anyway, in our times having sex this way is considered a fetish!

Well then, I stand corrected. Had to look it up and here it is:
http://www.snopes.com/religion/sheet.asp

By the way, what took you so long to respond?

Paul Fierlinger wrote:By the way, what took you so long to respond?

Somehow this thread slipped my attention.
I do too many things hastily nowadays...
I hope a regime of slowliness will take over me soon.

I thought you were out researching the plausibility of my wild statement.

Paul Fierlinger wrote: To throw nudity into the air in a cartoon story for a general audience is show-offy exhibitionism which I find completely unnecessary. Necessity is the operative word here.

an interesting article from this canadian source :

Madeleine Levesque, director of original productions at TV network Teletoon, spoke to the Montreal Gazette in 2005 on the birth of animation.
“Historically, animation did not begin as a kid’s genre,” she explained. In her opinion, the short cartoons from the Fleischer Studios serve as the perfect example. One of the studio’s most enduring characters, Betty Boop, made her debut in 1931. A voluptuous cabaret singer wearing skimpy clothing, Boop was featured losing her top altogether in Any Rags (1932) and Poor Cinderella (1934), exposing her bra to cinema-goers. In a cameo appearance for the first Popeye cartoon, Popeye the Sailor (released by Fleischer Studios in 1933), she was provocatively drawn wearing only a lei and a grass skirt.
The Popeye cartoons released during the same period by Fleischer Studios were also of a more adult nature. Featuring a streetwise lead character, the Popeye cartoons dealt with working class life.
The cartoons were able to get away with more than the live-action features because animation was seen as the perfect medium to cover grounds deemed too risqué to explore in live-action films at the time. As the characters were merely drawings, studios had more flexibility concerning sexual rights and wrongs.
The U.S. government soon began to take note of this late-20s trend as Hollywood gained a reputation as a place of loose morals. When several actors died of drug overdoses, the government quickly stepped in. In 1933, the Hays code—named after its architect, William Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America—was imposed on the motion picture industry. The code enforced three major (and vague) principles: no film should lower moral standards of the viewer, human or natural law should not be violated, and the film should adhere to correct standards of living. The code specified restrictions on nudity and suggestive dancing, as well as the depiction of murder, drug use, and “scenes of passion”.
The code was in effect until 1968, when it was replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America rating system used in the U.S. today. The code caused cartoonists to target a wider audience by toning down the risqué content, paving the way for animation of a more wholesome variety.

thinking of a cinema art expurgated, without any "depictation of scenes of passion" is frighten me much more than some nudity appearences on a wild island .

At Annecy the TVP team demonstrated TVP Pro 9.5 which featured the storyboarding panel in progress. This feature has substantially changed my workflow. I will storyboard a few clips ahead now, but still never a complete storyboard of an entire film. For this type of work the new TVP storyboarding function is ideal. I often (always perhaps) make a sketch of the camera setups as I go into a scene; a schematic of where the camera is positioned around the subject. This is important to adhere to once decided upon and is a necessary editing practice for maintaining continuity. I have fallen into the habit of sketching this floor plan on the timeline’s notes layer. It gets stretched and squished of course but that doesn’t bother me – it’s important to have it in view at all times. This type of storyboarding encompasses about 80% of all my editing functions.

To better understand how this new function works let me explain (with Herve's encouragement) how I use it. It is important to learn TVP's new nomenclature; each piece of animation from cut to cut is referred to as a CLIP. A sequence of clips that together forms an enclosed event is referred to as a SCENE. A sequence of scenes that makes for a completed film, a video, a demo -- whatever you think of "it" to be, is referred to as a Project.

The way I now work is that I sketch out my camera schematic as a sketch on the notes layer and create about 4 or 8 clips in the storyboard panel, drawing a very rough sketch of the first frame of each clip. Storyboarding a few scenes based on the repositioning of my camera in the camera layout schematic helps me avoid poor edits. This is the thrust of my storyboarding purpose. It is not to present my work to a client or a team of co-workers but streamline my work flow. If you do have the need to deliver printed storyboards, the new feature has a way of letting you print your clips on paper, including typed descriptions of Action, Dialog and Notes below each drawing in standard, storyboard fashion.

I stretch out an image layer of the first, single image that begins each clip which either follows a soundtrack, or if I am forced to work without one, I just make a guess of how long I think a clip should take within the scene. Now comes the beauty of 9.5's storyboarding feature: each clip is the beginning of an individual piece of animation but we can also play back all the clips in sequence as if they were on a single layer! The clips can be hidden when you don’t need them but are always present. You can also shuffle them around the way you would shuffle paper storyboard panels. Then instead of completing one clip, you just turn the first, storyboard sketch into an animatic and move on to the next clip which you work into an animatic and so on and all this time you can play these advancing clips as a single scene or you can cut and paste clips into new arrangements. It’s brilliant and enormously speeds up the creative process of animation.

If we wish, once the entire scene becomes completed, we will be able to transfer it to a true NLE, using the new Export EDL function. This is an Edits Decision List that merely points to the address and length of each clip. all NLE's these days can open an EDL and let you place your TVP scene into your NLE's timeline, ready to be finalized by further global tweaks.

Below is a link to a Slocum scene Sandra and I are working on at the moment. It depicts Slocum's collision with a rogue, tsunami-like wave. As I progress with the animation, Sandra progresses with her color work. Please take into consideration that not a single clip has yet been completed, including the color ones. This is due to the nature of our new way of working. We do not think in terms of drawing and painting and completing a clip before we progress to the next one, but in terms of working on one scene before we go to the next.

This is a big time saver because our work can now be done just as if we were animating directly in Vegas, without having to jump back and forth between two applications. Here's the scene:

http://www.oldanimator.com/video/tvp

Any idea if the storyboard module will be included in the standard edition? I've seen a little demo of it in Annecy and it looks very interesting.
The standard upgrade i might be able to afford, but the pro is not within reach, unfortunately.

I doubt it would; I think it needs a few of the innovations that have already existed in 9 but not in the previous editions.

Sounds really interesting, Paul.

So if I understand correctly, it's like when working in an editing program (for instance Premiere) with a sequence existing of clips (let's say; a number of quicktime movies) and then being able to go into any clip and change it. And then afterward seeing the changes immediately applied to that clip when back in editing mode ?

Is there a new "room" for this in 9.5 or just a panel ??

it's like when working in an editing program

That's exactly what it comes down to. No new room, unless you would want to create one within the four existing rooms. It's a tab, just like the tabs between x-sheet and timeline.

That seems even easier...
I can imagine how it must save a lot of time switching between applications (and all the compatibility trouble that comes with it).