BAFTA posters

I love these great posters for 4 of the nominees for best film at the 2011 BAFTA awards. The Kings Speech went home with seven awards in the end, including this one. The posters have a great atmosphere and effortless style to them.

The Kings Speech and The Social Network

Inception and Black Swan

Average is beautiful

This is a hypothesis that goes back to the work of Sir Francis Galton in the 1800's. He projected the faces of many different people on to one piece of photographic film to create an average. His idea was to produce the average face of a criminal to help with crime prevention or to depict the average face of a good soldier to improve the quality of recruits. However when he showed his colleagues the results, they all unanimously agreed that the composite image produced was far more attractive than each of the component images. This lead him to think that the key to being beautiful was to be as close to average as possible.

Researchers have now developed some software which does a very similar thing but manages to create a much sharper image. As part of this research they have also managed to create the average face for women from 41 different countries. You can even make your own composite from images you upload. It's all very interesting so why not check it out for yourself.

http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average

The Super Bowl ad spot

It was that time of year again over on the other side of the pond but you can be sure that the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers players were not the only people with nerves that were starting to fray over the weekend. With a television audience of at least 80 million people and the cost of a 30 second advert during the game rocketing to $3,000,000 the marketing executives must have been just as apprehensive.

There were a few stories on the advertising side of things in 2011 as Pepsi returned to the scene having opted out last year in order to channel more funding into digital and social media. Could this be a reflection of a wider shift back to more tradition TV advertising? There was also an appearance from Eminem in a nice Wieden and Kennedy spot for Chrysler and a couple of feel good examples from Coca Cola, the best of which had a slight Lord Of The Rings feel. There was also an offering from Motorola which can be seen below. Interestingly it had a less than subtle reference to the original Apple Macintosh advert which can also be seen below.