This is a pretty clever publicity stunt for Twentieth Century Fox’s upcoming film “Unfinished Business,” a comedy about a business trip starring Vince Vaughn, Tom Wilkinson and Dave Franco. The studio partnered with Getty Images’ iStock to create a series of free, downloadable images in the grand tradition of cheesy, painfully bad stock photography. Frankly, the movie doesn’t look all that great, but I think the humor in these images is pretty sharp.
There are twelve of these images in total, and Getty is doling them out in small batches at this site.
So Long, Facebox
Speaking of stock photography, this is a good time as any to mention that my frequent collaborator Matt and I recently decided to retire Facebox, our collection of fifty stock user avatar images for UI design and business presentations. We released Facebox in September 2013 after a sprint of photographing, editing and packaging that took a few short weeks. It was great fun, and we’ve been really pleased by the reaction—seeing Facebox photos show up in all kinds of product marketing on the web has been a blast. Ultimately, however, we decided that in fairness to our models, who were very generous with their likenesses, we should stop selling the package so that their faces don’t get overexposed. We accomplished what we set out to do; create a useful resource for ourselves and share it with others, so it’s time to move on to new projects.
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