Anti Smoking Day 'Look Younger, Longer'

Anti-smoking charity 'Quit' has launched a cinema campaign showing a young woman aging prematurely due to the effects of smoking.

The ad, created by agency Iris, shows a young girl, Sophie, smoking a cigarette. With each drag, she becomes increasingly wrinkled, until she wears the face of a much older woman.

To create the effect the actress was filmed smoking multiple cigarettes before a much older actress, chosen for her similar bone structure, was filmed sat in exactly the same position.

As the older lady's face could not be an exact match to Sophie's, visual effects artist, Paul O'Brien used Smoke to edit the footage by cutting her face into sections and painstakingly drawing out the wrinkled lines and hand patching them onto Sophie’s face.

He said: "The reason I took bits was because the face moved in such an intricate way. I took cuts from under the eyes, around the mouth and so on and then placed them onto Sophie's face."

Any slight move either actor had made during the filming added to the difficulty of the patching. Also, because Sophie was smoking and the older lady wasn't, he was forced to use numerous layers and various methods of highlighting and lowlighting to blend the two together. In total, the ad took two weeks to edit.

Ad director Steve Hudson from production company Hungry Man said: "Any post production person will tell you that human faces are the hardest to deal with, but Paul did a fantastic job."