Official Photo: Tom Hardy as Bane viral

Shortly after Warner announced that filming has begun on The Dark Knight Rises, the viral campaign has kicked off and it's pretty smart. If you go to the official film site http://www.thedarkknightrises.com, you get a blank page with an audio file of lots of people chanting. It's really eerie so check it out while it's still around.

Upong checking out the source code of the blank page, you can find the audio file itself*:
http://www.thedarkknightrises.com/sound/rises.wav

Download and run this audio file through an audio profiler and you see that the visual audio spectrum reveals a Twitter hash-tag, "#TheFireRises" (thanks SuperHeroHype for raising that one). Now comes the really cool part: Every one who tweets this hashtag helps reveal an image on http://www.thedarkknightrises.com/image.html made from a mosaic of their Twitter avatars. It's gradually building from the bottom up. They're using http://hashtagart.com

I recommend you follow TheFireRises on Twitter for any more clues and updates about the film.

Somehow, however, the cat's been let out of the bag and the original image has landed on the internet. I can't find the source but here it is:

What do you think of the first offical photo from The Dark Knight Rises? Clearly it's Tom Hardy as Bane, which was announced earlier this year, but is it what you expected? Does it look good? I think he looks less luchadore, more Hannibal Lecter.