Retouch responsibly: How VFX artists can help eradicate the damages of influencer culture

Working on the VFX for Dove’s recent Reverse Selfie campaign about self-image manipulation has certainly given me pause for thought.

It’s a powerful and timely message about self-confidence and the constant pressure social media has on young people. I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the 12-year-old protagonist’s bedroom retouching and some of the tasks us VFX artists are asked to complete. And hey, maybe that’s okay. We work in advertising after all, so it’s our job to enhance things visually.

At what point does craft become blatant, harmful lying?

But where do we draw the line? At what point does craft become blatant, harmful lying?

Above: Dove's Reverse Selfie, for which Oldham worked on the VFX.

Retouching is a cog in the advertising machine. It’s used widely across commercials and music videos and is a skill you’re taught very early on in the VFX game, but it’s a sticky subject. On my very first day on the job as a Junior Compositor, I was working on a music video for a popular girl band. This was in 2000, when promos had budgets and VFX equipment was still the price of a nice little flat in London.

Retouching is a cog in the advertising machine.

Excitedly, I sat and was taught the technique for retouching. My boss instructed: “You have to isolate the face, then block out the lips, nose and eyes”, resulting in a strange kind of mask. The senior went on, “now you have the skin isolated, just turn up the blur”. Armed with this skill, I spent the early noughties working on hundreds of music videos. Most of which required what the VFX world calls “beauty work”. The method over the years has become more sophisticated, with the transition from PAL to HD a big contributor in making beauty work more subtle. Dove’s 2006 campaign, Evolution, was a game-changing disruption towards heavily retouched ads.

Overnight, brands demanded far more subtle (if any) beauty work. And so, what was once a job for a junior became a skill that required high levels of technical knowledge, experience, artistry and diplomacy. Fifteen years on, beauty work is still a part of the post process. But it is viewed differently - more as an extension of onset make-up. It is natural and subtle and, like all good VFX, viewers should not notice it as an effect at all.

Above: Dove's Evolution, from 2006.

As a result, the shows and adverts you see on TV these days have a crafted level of reality. But looking down on the second screen it is a totally different story. The rise of influencer culture and perfectly curated life highlights, squeezed within the bounds of a 1x1 Instagram frame, has totally skewed the perception of reality for those of us scrolling along.

The rise of influencer culture and perfectly curated life highlights has totally skewed the perception of reality for those of us scrolling along.

It is now commonplace for highly sophisticated image editing tools to completely change the appearance of the person taking the photo. Tweaks to lips, skin and hair all add up to the digital avatars staring back at us. This is not a digital extension of makeup, but machine-learnt algorithms changing features in a way more akin to cosmetic surgery. And it’s having dire consequences. Snapchat dysmorphia is a real thing – something directors, Will & Carly, express perfectly in their film FILTERFACE.

In some ways, the really scary thing is that app-based image manipulation isn’t about individualism or identity. The underlying technology for social media is engagement driven. It’s a cyclical process, whereby the posts with more likes, comments and saves get sent higher up the ranking. Thus, a kind feedback loop is created, making it near impossible for new ideas and opinions to be seen or heard. The idea of what is beautiful is controlled totally by a mathematical formula, sitting on a server in Silicon Valley, so cleverly packaged into a portable dopamine dispenser that it keeps us coming back for more.

Above: FILTERFACE, a short film that looks at the unhealthy importance young people place on social media. 

I’m not going to suggest that retouching is going anywhere anytime soon. It plays a huge part in the image-making process and there is a strong desire for elevated, crafted imagery. The user-generated content that suddenly flooded the branding landscape during the UK's lockdown 1.0 is evidence of this. UGC serves a purpose. It unites us in times of adversity and there were some really great, uplifting ads to come out of it, like the BBC’s Together We’ll Get Through. 

We enjoy and appreciate craft and retouching is a part of that process.

But what we all really crave is expertly crafted storytelling. Direction, casting, cinematography, post production; it all has to work together to reach that next level outcome of a beautifully executed narrative. Needless to say, the directors and creatives sighed in relief when viewers quickly lost the appetite for unvarnished real. We enjoy and appreciate craft and retouching is a part of that process.

Above: The BBC utilised UGC well during the first lockdown in the UK.