SEQUENTIAL SELINAH: How an emotionally beautiful and haunting TV ad (with a twist) stole the hearts of the 2010 Vuka! Awards.

Look out for a hauntingly beautiful, surprising, and heartfelt TV commercial that you'll be seeing a lot more of in the coming months on M-Net and across the various DStv channels. It's an advert called ''Selinah'' by Egg Films and Ogilvy Johannesburg that deservedly aced the professional category as outright winner and also scooped 5 other categories as well at the just concluded 2010 Vuka! Awards held by M-Net.

The astounding ''Selinah'' public service announcement (PSA's) starts off with black intertiles using a Times New Roman font telling the viewer that Selinah has Aids and that she agreed to be filmed for 90 days. Then, using sequential time-lapse photography, Selinah gets into the bed and is seen . . . slowly deteriorating. In a matter of mere seconds Selinah is wasting away, getting weaker, becoming gaunt and bones becoming visible. Selinah is apparently dying in an emotionally heartwrenching sequence to watch.

Then a nurse comes in to sit at her bed and gives her a pill and water. Suddenly it dawns on the viewer. The mesmerizing advert actually started at the end of the story to make for an emotional and surprising twist. What you saw was actually Selinah close to death at the beginning, slowly being nursed back to health and getting better thanks to the use and availability of antiretroviral drugs.

The ad for the Topsy Foundation is emotionally jarring in its simplicity and beautiful in its incredibly effective dual perception change: changing the perception of the viewer of not only what seemed to happen and then the realization of how it really happened, but also changing some of the perceptions around people with HIV/Aids.

The Selinah TV commercial, besides winning the 2010 Vuka! Awards also won a Golden Film Lion at Cannes (the first for a South African agency in over a decade, a Golden Loerie and a Golden Pendoring award. The copywriter was Stephanie van Niekerk, with art directors Robyn Bergmann and Videtse Kay, and creative directors Fran Luckin, Gerry Human and Bridget Johnson. The director was Kim Geldenhuys.

ALSO READ: M-Net's 2010 Vuka! Awards honours the best local public service TV adverts; amazing 'Selinah' commercial the outright winner.