real-refractions.com

That’s the title of the Italian billboard ad for the health care system, referenced from the movie Pane, Amore e Fantasia, it was quite criticized. The stereotyped sexy nurse with a big smile, kinda creepy I might say, suggests that everything is fine and that “we take care of you”, is it so? Mmm, also looking at the white cross with a red background, that actually looks more like the swiss flag, the Red Cross logo in fact is the other way around, red on white.

Considering the facts that two teenage girls recently died in the hospital after minor surgeries, and the overall problems around the whole system, make this ad appears as an insult to those Italians that struggle everyday with bureaucracy, low incomes, high food prices and least but not last, health care.

The reason I altered the ad came after the request from a fellow blogger, I happily agreed to photoshop it and I think in this case the zombified nurse underlines perfectly the message perceived by many.

The Zombify Process

First thing was gathering ideas, how is she gonna look like? Rotten flesh, exposed skull, blood and a creepy smile, what is a zombie without blood and decaying skin? Once the main idea was rolled out it was time to collect reference material, since there are no real zombies around I googled zombie and skull and luckily the first images that came out were perfect, a guy in Halloween zombie makeup with blood all over his face, a gal with pale skin and white contact lenses, and a frontal view of a skull.

Opened up the ad image in Photoshop I started by duplicating the original layer in a new one by pressing Ctrl + j, never ever work directly on the original, next with the lasso tool I selected the the teeth and again Ctrl +j to take them to a layer. on their own

I worked on the teeth with a 2 pixels brush and 30% opacity, alternating orange/yellow and red/pink colors to add dirt, decay and holes on the teeth surface, than with the liquify filter I deformed and misshaped them a bit.

Next I moved on the lips, the guy in the Halloween outfit I found on Google had a nice bloody mouth so I draw a selection around the bloody chin and lips and pasted them in new layers above the nurse layer. Since I try to work in a non destructive way as much as possible, that means no eraser to remove part and lots of adjustment layers for color correction/hue/levels etc, I created a vector mask and by painting with black I remove the unnecessary parts, by doing this I can alway restore what was removed by painting with white in the vector mask to reveal the needed areas.

To conform the blood to the lower lip of the nurse and the shape of her chin I went back into the liquify filter, same thing for the upper lip, setting the blending mode to “Darker Color” halped too.

Basically this is the same process for all other parts, the skull, the eye etc. Only the growing veins were added in a second moment with After Effects. When everything was done in photoshop I saved different stages of the nurse, one with only the rotten teeth, another one with the bloody mouth and one more with the final image.

The Animating Process

It was done in After Effects, I loaded the photoshop files in a new comp, stacked them up in the time line according to their completeness, clean image at the bottom, nasty teeth in the middle and the zombie on top. Key framing opacity of the different layer with some mask to reveal partial areas of the various images was the overall trick, I made the growing veins with the paint tool, the coll part of this tool is that the stroke is animatable over time, so I simply painted each vein, from the thicker to the smallest and key framed all of them over few frames to give the impression of growing.

Finally added the credits and some sound fx, not much cause I could not find a proper sound for the whole clip, actually I was running out of ideas and time but it was fun.