I first saw this video a few years ago. It's an ad called "Evolution" that was a part of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. It shows time-lapse footage of a woman going from "ordinary" to "billboard-ready" in under a minute, including all the makeup, styling and digital retouching involved.
Although I've seen the ad many times, it continues to fascinate me ... especially now that I have had the opportunity to see what goes on behind the scenes at a "fashion" publication and have witnessed firsthand what kind of manipulation images can undergo.
To my knowledge, the magazine I work for has never altered an image of the face or body of a person to this extent, but I've seen enough of the designers' work to know that it's unbelievable what a really excellent graphic designer or Photoshop wizard can do with the right software.
(Now that I think of it, I do recall one particular manipulation, but I think you'll agree that it was all for the best. One of the designers had to Photoshop another finger onto the hand of a girl at a party who had apparently been giving the camera a rude gesture at the time the photo was snapped. Why, I don't know. And why we had to run that photo, I don't know. But now she will be forever giving a peace sign instead.)
The short piece was filmed in one day and was then in post-production for a few weeks while a team of professionals condensed the two-hour makeup application process into 23 seconds, stabilized the woman's head in the center of the screen, added background noise and music and of course, digitally manipulated the image.
The advertisement has won a number of prestigious awards and is estimated to have generated over $150 million worth of exposure for the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and the Dove Self-Esteem Fund.
You can read more about the hows and whys behind the making of the video here.
Here is the ad:
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