Awesome Nikita Diakur

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.

As we previously saw in Fest, filmmaker Nikita Diakur has a trademark “ugly” CGI style, which replaces normal characters with blobby-looking humanoids with exposed wireframes and scraggly bits of hair. His latest animated short takes to the skies with a particularly unattractive group of parachuting enthusiasts.

A street corner party erupts in the strangest possible way as a group of visually-distorted computer-generated characters get their rave on. Enjoy more of director Nikita Diakur’s wonderfully creative madness over on the website for his short film Ugly.