Looking for tool, that appears in Maya 3D, but remains unkown, to me, in Blender

Hi everyone. Today I watched the video below, that demonstrates human head modeling done in Maya 3d and I’ve got a question.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFqopkUTO0Q
what kind of tool ( operation) artist uses (from 0:48 and further ) to move edges and faces in that weird way? It looks pretty difficult to be done full-manually. Is there any similar tool (operation) in Blender?

Add Edge Loop (CTRl+R) http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Editing/Subdividing/Loop_Subdivide
Knife Tool (K) http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Editing/Subdividing/Knife_Subdivide
Proportional editing http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/3D_interaction/Transform_Control/Proportional_Edit

Some of the stuff there looked like shapekey animation…