The world of fashion is no stranger to celebrity endorsement. Just last month, brooding Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington became the face of fashion boutique Jimmy Choo and basketball player Kevin Durant was offered US $30 million a year to endorse rising brand Under Armour. However, the latest celebrity collaboration – with UK lifestyle magazine Shortlist – somewhat bucks the typical endorsement trend.
Teaming with the CGI experts behind the newly released Dawn of the Planet of the Apes movie, the magazine has dressed the fearless leader of the ape revolution, more commonly known as Caesar, in a selection of high-end men’s formalwear, from a Gucci bow tie to an Armani jacket.
The style shoot was created as a firmly tongue-in-cheek take on celebrity endorsement and involved photographing a human model, before allowing Weta Digital – the team behind The Lord of The Rings and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – to animate and retouch the photographs in post production.
“To my knowledge, this is Weta’s first foray into high fashion photography,” said Erik Winquist, visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital.
“The process wasn’t that different [from the movie]. A virtual camera was matched to the photographs … and our animation department then posed the simplified digital Caesar ‘puppet’, so the head and hands aligned with the model’s.”
“The complex facial puppet was also posed to just the right amount of simian ‘smoulder’ to match the model’s expression,” he concluded.
Caesar appeared on the front cover of Shortlist magazine in late July, above the tagline ‘evolve your style’.
