The Puzzle of the Soccer Girls Wallpaper

The following computer wallpaper has been around for some time.

It has been around for at least five years and probably longer.

Someone recently e-mailed it to me and after quickly opening the picture and thinking something like “Oh yeah! Seen this before. Delete.” I suddenly noticed something about it that I had never noticed before.

All eleven girls are the same girl.

Now there are probably a few people saying “How could he not have realised that?”, but I hadn’t. Maybe it was the powerful distracting effect of bare beautiful under-booby, or maybe it was because, having seen so many cute-babe wallpapers in my time, I just did not give it a very good looking at.

But it is the same girl and obviously it is not a multiple exposure picture because there is no ghosting. So it had to be created using something like Photoshop somehow. But each ‘girl’ has a different hair arrangement. Also there are things like:

• The first girl has an arm band that says “Captain” and is holding a soccer ball.
  
  
• The second girl is wearing a black top.
  
  
• The shadow detail on the tops varies from top to top. Notice there is very little light hitting the side of the top for the first girl in the snippet below, then more for the second girl, about the same for the third girl, then the side of the fourth girl’s top is fully lit with almost no shadow.
  
  
  
• The facial expressions and the direction each of girl’s gaze is different for each girl.
  
  For the three girls in the picture at right the mouth is slightly different in each with the two outside girls having their mouth slightly open, but the middle girl has her mouth closed.
  
  The middle girl is looking up, the third girl is looking directly ahead, and the girl on the left is looking slightly to the left.
  
  
• The second last girl (shown at right) is the only girl openly smiling. Also her crop-top almost completely covers her right breast, which does not happen with any of the other girls.
  
  
• Each girl is wearing a different number and I have studied each number one-by-one in enlargement and, in my opinion, these numbers have not been changed or added using a raster editor.
  
  
• The girl wearing the number 3 has a white wrist band on (shown at right).
  
  
• Finally, each girl’s pose profile is different. The arch of the back, the position of the legs, the way their hands are held (shown below). The girl wearing number 11 has her right hand clenched in a fist.
  

So. How did they do it given that it is quite obviously the same girl filling all eleven positions?

I don’t know the real answer.

My best guess: They marked the exact positions on the ground for each pose and used a mounted camera and then got the model to change tops for each shot. One-by-one she stood on each of the marks and they took the picture for each position with her wearing the required numbered top, and then using something like Photoshop they cut each of the position poses into the one picture?

Obviously to do this they needed all of the crop-tops pre-numbered and pre-cut the same.

I can’t spot any difference in the socks or the shoes so she just used the same pairs of both of those. Also I can’t see any difference in the bikini briefs so they didn’t need changing.

Well that’s my best guess at how it was done. But this would have been a significant undertaking taking some time—assuming they managed to get it right in the first try—so the next question would be “Why was it done?”

If anyone knows the how or why please feel free to comment and provide any links if there is a site somewhere explaining it—based on the theory that these days there is site somewhere that explains just about everything.

P.S. Added 17 Sept 2011: For a little more about this posting plus a link to a larger version of the picture go here.