After a failed attempt to do a backflip in real life, animator Nikita Diakur thought it would be safer to have a digital stand-in perform the maneuver. With the help of engineer Maximilian Schneider and machine learning tech based on the paper Deep Mimic, he attempted to nudge his avatar in the right direction to achieve his gymnastic goal.

Funko is best known for its POP! collectible vinyl toys. Now, you can create your own POP! character. Just head to the POP! Yourself website, choose your body shape and skin color, add hair and hats, select an outfit, and add accessories. There are millions of possible combinations, and you can download your avatar for free or order it as a figure.

Voice mimicry is getting easier and easier to achieve thanks to rapid advancements in AI tech. Musician Kid Klava shows just how impressive the technology has become by taking a Lennon-inspired song he wrote and programming the late Beatles’ digital avatar to perform it.

New Zealand’s Wētā Workshop takes us behind the scenes to look at the incredible costume work that went into Avatar: The Way of Water. The outfits took an average of 200 hours each to create, and artists applied over a million beads. Each real-world costume was then digitized for use on CGI character models.

While Avatar: The Way of Water shot its underwater scenes by training actors to hold their breath, there are lots of other tricks that moviemakers use to create the illusion of underwater action. Insider explores some of the visual effects techniques – both practical and digital which bring underwater scenes to life.

Each year, editor Sleepy Skunk puts together a compilation edit of movie moments from the past 12 months. His 2022 trailer includes impactful scenes from The Batman, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Avatar: The Way of Water, Glass Onion, and many lesser-known titles. See if you can name them all.

Having designed and worked on creatures in movies from Galaxy Quest to Avatar to Hellboy, artist Jordu Schell knows a thing or two about mask making. WIRED sat down with the professional artist for a glimpse into his creative process, starting from a concept sketch to creating a finished monster mask.

Foley artists create sound effects for TV shows, movies, and video games. Sanaa Kelley and Monique Reymond are two of the industry’s best and brightest. This video from Insider shows us how they produce sounds for SpongeBob SquarePants, Kung Fu Panda, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and more.

Musician Leo Moracchioli is known for his heavy metal covers of pop music. We guess the classic singalong Row, Row, Row Your Boat is as popular as kids’ songs get. So Leo and his puppet avatar got down to business to give us the most metal version they could come up with. Life is but a dream, woooooooooooah!

Paul McCartney gets gracefully de-aged in the imaginative music video for the song Find My Way, a track which truly sounds like equal parts McCartney and Beck. We’re not sure Macca ever had those dance moves even when he was younger. Directed by Andrew Donoho, co-produced by digital avatar maker Hyperreal Digital.

(Gore) The idea of dropping a crowd of people into a helicopter blade from above is some pretty warped stuff. But as we’ve seen before, CG animator atomic marvel isn’t squeamish about turning anatomical avatars into digital mincemeat. The guy standing over the middle of the rotor gets to take the longest ride.

3D printed objects are typically made out of plastic. But as Robinson Foundry shows us, these computer-generated pieces can be used to produce detailed castings for more substantial materials. In this case, he output a 3D print of a menacing alien emperor and used it to create a ceramic mold for an awesome brass sculpture.

One of the sillier Twitter accounts we’ve come across in a while, low poly animals captures and presents images of some of the most rudimentary animals in the history of gaming. From the paper airplane-like seagulls in Daytona USA to the deranged rat-with-a-gun from Max Payne, there’s a new avatar for everyone.

As we saw in his Batman & Superman clip, Animator DeeKay’s style is light and cheerful. In this clip, he takes us inside the process of creating one of his fun animations, as his digital avatar portrays the character doing the animation, and who creates a new friend in the process.

With the increased need for video calls these days, those with low-bandwidth connections may experience poor video quality. This tech being developed at NVIDIA dramatically reduces bandwidth needs by sending a fixed image, then using an AI-controlled avatar to track and replicate their facial movements in real-time.

We’ve all seen those ads for Masterclass, with their haughty explanations of skills to be taught by leaders in their respective fields. Jim Cameron is an expert too. But he’s not the guy who made Terminator or Avatar. Nope, he’s just Kathleen Cameron’s dad – and he knows the one right way to load a dishwasher.

(Gore) Screen Junkies reminisces about Paul Verhoeven’s classically campy action sci-fi movie that asked the question “If I’m not me, who the hell am I?,”, literally sucked the air out of the room, introduced us to three-boobed women, and eventually went on to inspire the plot of Avatar.

(PG-13: Language) “When we weren’t playing, we… We were almost always playing.” Jonas Odell’s thoughtful short film features three recovering video game addicts talking about their experiences in the guise of their old video game avatars.

Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance sat down with the founders of Lyrebird, a startup developing artificial intelligence tech that can learn the sound of any human voice, then make it say anything. Amazing, yet creepy stuff. Try an early version here.

A brief look at the latest in CGI tech, which allows an actor to take on a synthetic role in real-time, capturing every nuance of the performer’s movements and projecting them onto a virtual avatar. Demo by Unreal Engine, 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, Tencent, and Vicon.

Mondo’s latest statue calls back to the ending of The Legend of Korra, where the Avatar and her girlfriend Asami take a much needed break in the Spirit World. The Mondo exclusive version has backpacks that can be swapped out with the plant.

With the release of the iPhone X, we were pretty sure that Animoji were just going to be a dumb gimmick. However, videos of creative uses for the silly avatars are starting to prove us wrong, like this amazing version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Head to YouTube for much more.

Ryan Gosling stars in a hilarious sketch that will be most appreciated by graphic designers, as he portrays a man who just can’t seem to get over the fact that James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar used the Papyrus font for its subtitles and logo.