It's Day 12 of your old high school friend's trip around the world, and you can't look at Facebook without seeing photos of her in a bikini, sipping mojitos on a beach in a tropical country. The captions are smug one-liners like "Just hanging out!" and "Gotta keep hydrated in this warm weather!"
Meanwhile, you're sitting at home, it's raining outside, and your job sucks.
But what if those lovely photos that fill you with envy were nothing but Photoshop fakes?
Dutch student Zilla van den Born used Photoshop and Facebook to chronicle a 42-day journey through Southeast Asia that never happened, all to point out the artificiality of social media. Van den Born faked pictures, videos and Skype conversations from her home in Amsterdam, where a photographer and post-production specialist helped her stage the whole thing for a university project.
Van den Born had her friends, family and fellow students duped with her technical trickery. She dressed in a hooded disguise to go out in Amsterdam, and decorated her bedroom like a hotel room so her Skype chats with family would look authentic.
Some of the fakes were simple, like the food photos she took at oriental restaurants and passed off as foreign cuisine. Other fakes were elaborate, like the snorkeling selfie she staged using a community pool and some Photoshop fish.
Sjezus zeg, Zilla - Snorkelen from Zilla van den Born on Vimeo.
Van den Born filmed videos to go along with her many doctored photos, showing how she faked each one. The videos show her travelling through Amsterdam in disguise, then changing into vacation clothes to fake her photos.
She also filmed her planning process, which included a massive calendar listing everything she would do during her "travels" through Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.
Judging from the videos, the whole project looks like a lot of work.
She could probably use a vacation.
