Apple Releases Brilliant New Ad Capturing Colorful Carnival Festivities in Portrait Mode

Apple has released a new video on its Brazilian YouTube channel that celebrates the country’s Carnival festivities and shows-off the new Portrait Mode added in iOS 10.1.

The video strings together over 500 photos taken with Portrait Mode on an iPhone 7 Plus to achieve a stop-motion animation effect. The images are of various people adorned in festival dress and fanciful costumes typical of the Carnival season, and the entire video is set to “Eu Quero É Botar Meu Bloco na Rua,” a song by BaianaSystem and featuring Yzalú — which is available to stream exclusively on Apple Music.

“The beauty and joy of the Carnival gets even more prominent with the new Portrait Mode of the iPhone 7 Plus,” the company wrote in Portuguese in the video’s description.

Carnival is a colorful time in Brazil, and it typically runs through February and March each year. Suffice to say, the festivities offer the perfect opportunity for Cupertino to show off the photographic capability of the iPhone 7 Plus and the advantages of its new Portrait Mode. In particular, the company wanted to highlight the “diversity, variety, and freedom of expression of Carnival,” according to Brazilian publication BlogdoiPhone, which first spotted the ad.

The Brazilian video is the latest ad in the “shot on iPhone” campaign, and the most recent in the latest series meant to show off the company’s new Portrait Mode. Yesterday, Cupertino posted two 15-second video ads, titled “Soul Mate” and “Creek,” to its English-language YouTube channel. Both videos highlight the differences between a normal image and a picture taken with Portrait Mode on an iPhone 7 Plus.

First introduced in iOS 10.1, Portrait Mode — which takes advantage of the iPhone 7 Plus’ 56mm telephoto lens — uses a shallower depth of field to blur the background of an image, making the person or object in the foreground stand out.