Evolution was directed by Canadian director Yael Staav and Tim Piper, with sound design handled by the Vapor Music Group, and post-production by SoHo.

The film opens with a "pretty, but ordinary girl" (Canadian cartoonist and television producer Stephanie Betts)[2] entering and sitting down in a studio.

The final image of Betts, now rendered almost unrecognizable, is then transferred to a billboard advertisement for the fictional "Easel" (or "Fasel") brand of foundation makeup.

This culminated in the 2006 Little Girls global campaign, which featured regional versions of the same advertisement in both print and screen,[10] for which Unilever purchased a 30-second spot in the commercial break during Super Bowl XL at an estimated cost of US$2.5M.

It was during the production of Daughters that a series of short films titled "Beauty Crackdown", one of which was Evolution, was promoted to Unilever as an "activation idea".

[4][11] The concept was one that art director Tim Piper pushed; he proposed to have Evolution produced using the money left over from the budget for Daughters.

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,[14] and he felt that she would be an ideal "representation of the norm", highlighting the extreme changes that models undergo in the fashion industry.

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.

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.

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.

Spaces at the mother and daughter workshops sold out almost immediately,[18] and the total exposure generated through the $50,000 piece was estimated by Ogilvy & Mather in October 2006 as being worth around $150M.

The Super Bowl spot cost an estimated $2.5M, reached an audience of 500 million, and generated only one third of the boost in traffic to the Campaign for Real Beauty website of Evolution.

It was the favourite in the run up to the Cannes Lions to win the festival's Grand Prix in the Cyber category,[22] generally considered one of the most prestigious awards in the industry.

Ultimately, the prize went to three entries: Nike+, advertising the Nike brand, Heidies 15 MB of Fame, promoting fashion company Diesel S.p.A.'s website and products, and Evolution.

[31] The popularity of Evolution and its presence on many video-sharing websites led inevitably to a large number of alternate versions and parodies being uploaded by the public.

The image is transferred to a billboard advertisement for the fictional "Lardo" brand of "man cream", and the piece ends with a fade to the statement, "Thank God our perception of reality is distorted.

Their hair is cut and their make-up removed as they slowly morph into Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, the joint hosts of Ruddy Hell!

The making-of also includes a shot of Evolution's storyboard and a short segment of behind-the-scenes footage from the shoot itself, showing Stephanie Betts before and after the make-up process.