Evolution (advertisement) - Production

Production

The team brought together for the ad included director Yael Staav, the first female director to win a Cannes Lion (for Hugging, a campaign for the ALS Society of Canada), fashion photographers Tiko Poulakakis and Gabor Jurina, makeup artist Diana Carreiro, art director Tim Piper, and Piper's then-girlfriend, Stephanie Betts as the model. Betts, a cartoonist and producer of Canadian animated television programming such as Producing Parker, was chosen as the model for Evolution in part because Piper was first inspired to write the piece after seeing the amount of time his girlfriend spent applying make-up, and he felt that she would be an ideal "representation of the norm", highlighting the extreme changes that models undergo in the fashion industry. She was originally dubious about taking on the role, but later stated that she was proud that she joined the campaign.

The actual production itself took place over the course of a single day, and over two-and-a-half hours of footage was taken for the make-up portion of the film. This was eventually condensed to 23 seconds in the final version. The stage was dressed in a manner identical to that of modern fashion shoots, with the lighting and camera being positioned to remove any shadows from Betts's face to aid in the post-production retouching. Sound design took three weeks, and was divided into two sections. Fifteen hours were spent creating several mixes of "Passage D", each tested and discarded before the version used in the final film was settled upon. A further nine hours were spent adding in the various background noises to the piece, including sped-up human voices, a starter pistol and galloping racehorses.

Post-production at SoHo was originally planned to take approximately three days, but it was extended to two weeks. Gabor Jurina, the photographer responsible for the digital retouching of the actual photographs taken of Betts during the shoot, supplied the post-production team with 118 digital stills of the intermediate stages of the transformation from the "real" photograph of the made-up Betts to the final image shown on the billboard. These were re-cut and assembled to create the functions shown in the "Photoshopping" sequence, such as stretching Betts's neck and adjusting the size of certain of her facial features. Other post-production work included stabilising Betts's head in the center of the shot during the make-up sequence, covering certain continuity errors, creating and compositing the billboard advertisement, and constructing a false image-editing interface.