Amazon Prime Day is tomorrow. We're nearing the manic retail season right before the run-up to the big 'C' word, and there are deals galore on creative tech, but more importantly, Prime Day discounts on 3D printers.

This is great news for anyone not wanting to wait until Black Friday to grab a bargain, or if you already own one of the best 3D printers, then it's an opportunity to stock up on materials, accessories, and filament while it's cheap.

While not officially a Prime Day deal, the biggest discounts I'm seeing right now are over at Bambu Lab where you can snag up to 50% off materials like TPU and PLA Pure thanks to the Halloween Sale. On Amazon, it looks like 30% off the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 Combo is the offer to beat.

Stick with me on this live blog for regular updates on 3D printing October Prime Day deals as and when I find them, and check out the Quick Links section below to be taken straight to the offers.

Retailer Quick Links

• Bambu Lab official store: Halloween flash sales and discounts galore
• Amazon: Prices slashed on a variety of brands
• Anycubic: Combo offers and clearance deals
• Elegoo: Top deal - 31% off + spin the wheel for extra savings
• Creality: Up to 50% off Flash Sale (printers, engravers, scanners)
• FlashForge: Prime Day Sale - with up to $150 off
• Snapmaker:  $150 off the Snapmaker U1 + filament bulk sale

Top 3 deals

Equal parts ingenious and wonderfully silly, the new Street Fighter ad breaks the conventions of typical billboard ads, not just thinking outside the box, but destroying it entirely. A delight for fans and an eye-catching marvel for passers-by, the design is a prime example of how billboard advertising has recently levelled up.

Looming over the streets of LA, the dramatic billboard ad features an image of Street Fighter's iconic protagonist, Ryu, performing his legendary hadouken move. The force of his attack has seemingly obliterated the ad, with torn paper details and a trio of construction workers hanging on for dear life, marking its destruction.

"I thought the people were real at first," one X user commented. "Sheesh, who's gonna pay for the damage?" another joked, while one fan added, "Love this creativity! More."

This immersive billboard advertising style has been growing in popularity in the last few years, proving that plain ol' ads just aren't enough. With creative digital ads dominating our screens, the world of OOH advertising has been forced to step up, giving us amazing campaigns like Dreamies' cat invasion or Final Destination's terrifyingly real ad destruction.

When the original Gears of War landed on Xbox 360, I'll be honest, I wasn't thinking about Marcus Fenix or wondering how I'd look with a soul patch (terribly); I was staring at the walls. Unreal Engine 3 made slabs of concrete and rusted girders look like the future, and Epic knew it, so the engine was as much of the pitch as the chainsaw bayonet. Nearly 20 years later, Gears of War: E-Day pulls the same trick with Unreal Engine 5, only now the walls are in on the fight – you can climb them, hide behind them and, a few minutes later, watch them come down on your head.

Don't worry, it's still gloriously meatheaded. This is a game where a man the size of a wardrobe revs a chainsaw bolted to an assault rifle and saws a giant underground monster made of fingers in half while blood gushes over the screen, where the guns boom like an afterburner, heads leave bodies in a red plume – “look ma, no face!” shouts Fenix – and every few minutes something enormous crawls out of the dark to remind you humanity has made a terrible mistake.

It would have been easy to leave Gears of War as an Xbox time capsule, soul patch and all, but The Coalition did something smarter and loosened the whole thing up, adding new weapon mods, explorable min-sandboxes, and more ways to move and kill. And while this review only covers solo play through the campaign, with online four-player co-op, horde and versus modes, and more to enjoy at launch, it shows an impressive blend of old and new ideas paired with strong tech.

The biggest change is movement, which is now more flexible and adaptable. Gears has always been a game of finding cover, leaving cover, finding more cover, and occasionally performing unpleasant chainsaw surgery on whatever got too close, but now you can sprint, slide, jump, crawl, climb and mantle without snapping to a wall first, and you feel it immediately. It keeps that heavy, armoured Gears weight, just with a bit more give in the joints for Marcus and Dom.

It means I began to change how I look at a street and what's possible. I’m no longer scanning for the nearest waist-high wall any more; I am instead looking up, across, through gaps in buildings, and with Locust pushing hard and the AI more aggressive than I remember, I find myself scrambling onto a truck, mantling onto a balcony and taking a sniper shot from above instead of backing into the next chest-high slab of concrete. Two decades of Gears taught me to look for cover, but now it’s E-Day, a series entry that occasionally asks me to find a route. It changes the level design because it no longer looks like a street of usefully placed blocks; instead, it resembles a real-world place littered with possible cover spots.

Welcome to Kalona

Kalona isn't an open world in the Gears 5 sense; it is still a linear shooter at heart, but bigger chunks of the city let you wander off, poke around, tackle side objectives – usually helping hapless civilians from a gruesome death or defending a position – and hunt weapon mods before heading back to the main mission. The Coalition has learned from Gears 5’s open world, wound it back, and layered in more ideas. These are maps that work best as mini-sandboxes built around Gears combat, and they work better than I expected because verticality matters and there’s always a little hidden skirmish to elbow your way into, a secret ‘hardcase’ containing weapon upgrades or world-building lore to uncover.

Then there's the destruction, which is where Unreal Engine 5 earns its keep and does what UE3 did for Gears - a tech demo supporting new game design ideas. A rumble somewhere off-screen, the corner of a building folds into a cloud of dust that rolls across the screen, and the city has changed shape – gorgeous, obviously; this is one of the best-looking games I've played, but it's also a warning, because seconds later an E-Hole glows red and the Locust come pouring out.

Wretches skitter over the rubble and onto my chainsaw, Drones push up, Boomers soak up everything you've got, and the bigger beasts from the Hollow turn a simple firefight into something nastier, all good, all very intensely Gears. But the tempo has shifted: a teasing open space becomes a sniper’s killbox, but I counter with a portable gun turret, scale a house and find my own spot to scope from. The trick is that battles here rarely feel staged; the world is shaky and open enough that the fight seems to happen because I took a wrong turn, not because I tripped a checkpoint and kickstarted something pre-planned.

This obviously ties into the setting and moment in time, and E-Day is at its best when it's about Emergence Day: the moment nobody knows what's going on, things are crawling out of the ground, and the city is crumbling. The opening hours lean surprisingly hard on the unknown – the armour, the swagger and the big guns are temporarily gone; civilians are running, buildings are coming down, and creatures are chasing people down previously serene streets, and for a moment I'm right there with them.

Obviously, it doesn’t take Fenix long to suit up - we learn the lore of the chainsaw - gather a ragtag new squad and rub against authority. The gunplay remains heavy and furious; ammo empties like a loo roll aisle in a pandemic, and within a spin Gears is back. But the series has always managed to skirt two worlds, the power armour fantasy and pure horror, and The Coalition understands how to push and pull you through its world with aplomb.

One sequence stuck with me: a foggy forest following a crash leads into a ‘tank cemetery’ littered with the carcasses of old war machines and brimming with creatures to chainsaw, and beneath it the collapsed streets, tunnels built from whatever has been sucked down from the city above – chunks of road, subway cars, whole houses – all smashed together into something grim, oppressive and weirdly beautiful. I like the Gears best: the spectacular and the horrible sit side by side, and you can laugh at a chainsaw execution one minute and creep through a blood-soaked building the next.

New mod cons

Scattered around the maps are supply caches for optimising loadouts and Hard Cases that hand out mods to turn familiar guns into something more personal, such as explosive ammo, improved weapon handling, scopes, magazine sizes, and reload buffs. And much of it is designed around mastering the Perfect Reload mechanic, so timing a reload precisely can now kickstart a stack of buffs.

This mix of useful stat tweaks and changes that fundamentally alter how a weapon behaves gives me a reason to care about every back street and side quest in Kalona. It isn't Gears-as-RPG, thankfully, but it lets you build around how you actually play, and I ended up with a health-recovery build that fed on cover kills, enemies revealed by the Pulse Drone, and chainsaw executions, so the more aggressively I played, the longer I lasted.

The weapons you can tweak are a mix of old and new. The Prototype Lancer and Lancer Mk1 deliver the series' familiar assault-rifle brutality, the Hammerburst goes back to the punchier feel of the original, and the Gnasher is still the Gnasher, which is to say point-blank problem solving at its finest. New toys like the Ripper, Incinerator, Striga and Gut Puncher stop it from feeling like a Greatest Hits compilation, and the enemies have had similar attention – Reavers reshape a battlefield by moving around it rather than hovering as flying targets, and Seeders are proper encounters now instead of something you plink and take potshots at from a safe distance.

My favourite thing, though, is just wandering around inside the city. Every shop window, hotel lobby and car-strewn street seems to have a reason to be there; emergency lights glimmer on wet surfaces, abandoned stores hold the leftovers of ordinary lives, and Kalona feels like a city that existed long before the Locust turned up.

Gears has always mashed together military sci-fi, Americana and brutalist concrete, but here we see the world before it turned into the grey ruin of the original trilogy, and the art team has gone for a collision of 1940s and 1970s Americana, disco-glam, Art Deco, military hardware and retro-futurism. It shouldn't work, but it does because it feels like a place that evolved its own design history rather than an art department being told to make everything look Gears. An ornate Art Deco building half swallowed by a technological war, a spotless piece of civilian infrastructure ripped open by an E-Hole, a familiar gun redesigned as an early COG prototype. And this is why a prequel is worth doing (and I did have my doubts about going backwards, not forwards) because it's less about younger Marcus and Dom than about Sera before it became Gears of War.

Cracks in the concrete

E-Day isn't perfect, as the game's scale and its dramatic ebb and flow can occasionally funnel you into bullet-sponge traps and face off against new and frustrating enemies that can one-shot you with little warning, though I did find a comical hack by tapping dodge and pinballing from literal pillar to post to avoid sudden death (the dodge system is quite lenient). The side content also too often feels like an excuse to chase another collectable or upgrade, and it can feel like repeated horde encounters. And for all the new flexibility, this isn't a systemic immersive sim; the rhythm is still move, shoot, flank, reload, execute, repeat, which is both the game's greatest strength and, now and then, its most obvious limitation.

But I never wanted E-Day to reinvent the core Gears formula. The original changed shooters because it showed up with the right tech at exactly the right moment, and now everyone knows what a Gears game is supposed to feel like, so The Coalition has done the sensible thing and made that formula less rigid – bigger but not too empty spaces, more verticality, destruction that changes a fight, enemies that behave differently, weapons you can build around and a city you can explore rather than just run through. It's still silly, still violent, but now there's simply more room to play around inside its core systems.

Which fittingly brings me back to the engine. Unreal Engine 5 is a flex here too, just as Unreal Engine 3 was all those years ago, now with MegaLights, Nanite, Lumen, Chaos Destruction, and more, all coming together to smack you over the head and impress. The ray-traced lighting, freeform destruction and sheer density of Kalona make the original look almost quaint.

But just as what happened back then happens again, E-Day grows beyond a tech demo and finds its own personality as part of the series and as a great shooter. And when you stop noticing the tech and just wallow in the world-building and combat, when I’m rerouted by a fight, when a Locust hoard made me rethink how I move around and up and over the environment, and when an E-Hole opens in an unexpected corner of the battle, it’s fitting that the tech has become the thing that makes the game design possible.

My Gears of War: E-Day review code and access was provided to you by XBOX.

Whether you're shopping for a die-hard who owns every Blu-ray or someone who just loves the DB5, here are the best Bond gifts, from cars to puzzles and books to boxsets. You'll even see a deal on that exploding pen from Goldeneye (exploding capability not included).

Over the years, we've seen a variety of designs, proving that there's no formula to the best Olympic logos. Equal parts vibrant and playful, the new Brisbane 2032 logo is certainly worthy of joining the ranks.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic logo features a vivid design that emulates the dynamic Olympic flame, but a closer look reveals an ingenious triple design. Inspired by Australia's native cockatoo, the iconic pink-and-red crest turns the emblem into a living, breathing logo bursting with character, while its shape represents Brisbane's home state, Queensland.

"If we had our time over, maybe ​there ⁠are different ways that we could have done it," said Brisbane 2032 chief marketing officer Brent Hill at a press conference. But despite the unplanned premature reveal, he shared, "the reaction to [the emblem] has been really positive."

For more creative news, check out the 15 best Olympic Games poster designs or take a look at how the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 identity was created.

Across social, younger brands are reaching for analogue aesthetics, old-school formats and cultural references that pre-date them, not simply because retro is having another moment, but because nostalgia offers something increasingly scarce online: familiarity. And they’re hardly alone. From the fixation on “2016 vs 2026” to the resurfacing of Tumblr-era aesthetics, pop culture is increasingly looking backwards for its creative cues.

If heritage once depended on history, the more interesting question now is whether brands can detach heritage itself from chronology.

Creating a time that never was

There’s a word for this: anemoia, nostalgia for a time we never experienced. We can feel familiarity with worlds we only know second-hand, from the crackle of vinyl to the whir of an old games console.

And for brands without a century-old archive to raid, that has weight. Heritage can be built from recognisable codes: typography, packaging, photography, sound, language and behaviours that evoke a particular time or feeling. Done well, those elements create familiarity before a consumer has any history with the brand itself.

That doesn’t mean inventing a fake founding story. Heritage is traditionally factual; the opportunity here is emotional. Brands can create a world that feels as though it has always existed without pretending that it has, manufacturing familiarity rather than history.

Nostalgia as an antidote to sameness

That familiarity is particularly powerful when you consider the environment brands are operating in today. Social trends now move at such speed that identities can become disposable. A visual language can be adopted, replicated and exhausted within weeks, leaving brands chasing relevance rather than building recognition. The sans-serif blanding that overtook tech branding is a useful warning: optimisation can quickly become indistinguishability.

Nostalgia offers an emotional anchor.

In a digital world where everything feels new, fast and optimised, references to the past can suggest something slower, more tactile and more human. The appeal isn’t about being old-fashioned or living in the past. It is about creating contrast with an algorithmically driven present.

But this can’t just be a grainy filter or retro typeface. Nostalgia works when brands understand the emotional qualities underneath the aesthetic. Is it optimism? Rebellion? Escapism? Community? The creative challenge is to identify that feeling and reinterpret it, rather than simply reproduce its visual shorthand.

This all makes specificity important. When VML introduced the new EV charging brand IONNA to the market in 2025, the team looked back on the nostalgic age of the American service station. Instead of a futuristic visual language that is usually seen in the market, they instead bought in retro architecture, welcoming canopies, and familiar roadside cues that drew on the optimistic hospitality of an earlier time. IONNA didn’t have that heritage, but through this specific intent and brand vision, it felt like something that had been a part of the American psyche for decades.

From museum to cultural playground

Perhaps the biggest difference between traditional heritage and this new form is who gets to shape it.

Old-school heritage was a museum: brands controlled the archive and audiences were invited to admire it. New-school heritage is a playground. Audiences can remix references, resurrect forgotten products, turn old advertisements into memes and give cultural artefacts entirely new meanings. The role of the brand is to give them something to participate in, not simply something to look at. The best nostalgia becomes social material: something people can play with, personalise and pass on.

That is why the current nostalgia cycle is more interesting than another round of retro-revivalism. It suggests heritage is becoming less about how long a brand has existed and more about how successfully it can create a recognisable world people want to enter, inhabit and help shape.

For newer brands, that creates an unusual possibility. You don’t need decades of history to feel established. You need distinctive creative codes, consistency and enough emotional truth for people to feel that they already know you.

In an age obsessed with what and who comes next, looking backwards can be a powerful way to build forwards. The real power of anemoia is not pretending to have a past. It is creating a world that feels strangely familiar, then inviting people to make memories inside it. Heritage may once have been something brands inherited. Increasingly, it is something audiences help them build.

We’ll look at how I develop the concept, build a composition that guides the viewer’s eye, establish clear focal points, and use lighting, depth and contrast to strengthen the story. More importantly, I’ll explain the reasoning behind every decision, because a cover is more than simply technique – it’s visual storytelling.

For this workshop I’ve chosen the Corpse Knight: Story So Far variant cover. This special edition brings together the story from the first three volumes of the series. I was commissioned to create all three variant covers within a very tight schedule of about a week, and that challenge made every decision even more important.

There wasn’t time to overthink, so every line, shape and design choice had to be clear, purposeful, and serve the story. Today, we’ll follow the first of those covers, from the initial concept to the finished artwork. By the end, I hope you’ll understand not just how this cover was created, but why each choice helps turn a single image into an invitation to read.

If you need to build your own art setup, see our guides to the best drawing tablets or the best laptops for drawing.

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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For some, the upcoming series looks wrong, not because the actors are different but because of the colour. It looks colder and darker than the warm, saturated Warner Bros movies. Some say the aesthetic is Voldemort's work, but one expert identifies more muggle-influenced reasons for the radically different visual style.

First, here's the trailer so you can see what people are talking about.

The new Harry Potter series is getting a major holiday release, with the first eight-episode season – Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone – to premiere on Christmas Day. HBO's thinking it will make for perfect festive family viewing. But given the massive popularity of the books and the movies, it's inevitably sparked a huge amount of debate on social media. There are over 17,000 comments on the video above on YouTube alone.

Discussion covers everything from the actors to the soundtrack and whether we need another adaptation of Harry Potter at all. But one topic really stands out: people are trying to get their heads around the colour grading.

The trailer might not be representative of the series' final grade, but fans immediately noticed that it's a stark departure from the 2001 movie. People have been dissecting the trailer frame by frame and posting side-by-side comparisons to highlight how much darker and moodier the series looks.

Some are reminded people of recent movies that saw debate about their colour grading, most infamously Wicked. That's raising doubts about whether it's a considered stylistic choice or just part of a trend.

Some of those commenting on social media have been asking for professional explanation. Jakub Golis has one. He's the in-house videographer at MPB, a major online platform for used photo and video equipment.

Jakub agrees that part of the reason for the Harry Potter's new look is fashion. There's been an inexorable rise of teal and orange colour grades, from the big screen to the small screen and the even smaller screen in social media content. The trailer certainly goes heavy on the teal.

"By pushing shadows toward cool teal tones and skin tones toward warm orange tones, filmmakers create strong visual contrast, which makes the human skin tone stand out more," Jakub notes.

"Like everything else, the look of movies and TV series also follows trends. The dark, moody, desaturated colour grading with colours often leaning on the teal-orange axis has become something of an industry default for blockbuster movies over the past years."

But a bigger cause may be technological. Filmmaking has changed a lot in 25 years. The eight main Harry Potter movies were all shot on 35mm film. Today, most movies and series are now shot digitally (unless they're made by Christopher Nolan).

Digital cameras have a much wider dynamic range and better low-light capabilities than traditional film cameras This gives directors of photography the leeway to film in lighting situations that would previously have been impossible. They can film with darker lighting and still capture detail in a scene, and they can shoot high-contrast scenes without worrying about blown highlights.

Finally, fashion and technology aside, the new Harry Potter's colour grading also reflects creative intent, Jakub reckons. the movies were aimed at kids, and the first two were directed by Chris Columbus, who made comedies like Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire. HBO's Harry Potter cinematographer Adriano Goldman has said that he wants the new series to be more realistic and grounded.

"Every generation of filmmakers gets new tools, and those tools change what's possible creatively," Jakub says. "Digital cameras today have amazing and far more functions compared to what was available in 2001. Combine that with the popularity of the teal and orange style, and the darker mood of this generation – it's a different set of creative possibilities for DOPs, shaped by both the technology and the tone of the times we're in."

Speaking of controversies, Warner Bros and HBO now belong to a new parent company: check out the branding for Skydance.

What makes the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art stand out is that it includes not only classical art, but also modern works. People often see old oil paintings as "art" and hold them in high esteem. But media like comic books aren't necessarily given that same deference. I mean, there's a bias against animation as a lesser art form, primarily aimed towards kids. Sometimes, video games aren't even considered "art" either! (That's the approach our sister magazine ImagineFX takes, and has taken, over the years: interviewing everyone from Frank Frazetta to Moebius, and artists behind Dune and Star Wars.)

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art brings these different mediums together, ensuring each is seen and experienced with equal veneration. Throughout the galleries, you can see how art changes over time, and how any of the pieces can inspire new forms of storytelling.

The museum itself is located in Los Angeles, California, near Exposition Park. What I particularly loved about this location was how accessible it was. Los Angeles is known for being a car-reliant city, but it has a pretty decent metro and bus system that's been continually improving over the years.

If you come in by car, there's a nearby parking garage where you can drop it off. A nearby Metro station puts you within walking distance of the museum, making it less of a hassle than getting to other places in Los Angeles.

Entering the Library and learning something new

When you walk into the museum, you see two large buildings. On the left is the educational centre, which mainly houses the three-floor Research Library. The right side is home to the main attraction: the many different kinds of galleries. It's worth noting that the library is free to go in and see, but most of the museum, namely the galleries, is off-limits unless you purchase a ticket ahead of time. Since the museum just opened, demand is high, and you likely won't be able to get a ticket on the day, so you'll need to plan ahead and buy one online.

I went ahead into the library first, with the ground floor dedicated to books that informed the art and artists featured in the museum's galleries. It was filled with so many books I'd never heard of or seen. These include the coffee table photo book A Day in the Life of America by Rick Smolan and David Elliot Cohen, as well as the biography The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love by Alice A. Carter.

The former's deep blue nighttime cover depicted the age of cowboys as a seminal era of American history, while the latter's flowery cover reflected the lives of various female artists in the 20th century. While this is my first time encountering these books, their covers grabbed my attention simply because they're eye-catchingly beautiful and, admittedly, not much else.

You're encouraged to read these books in the library and return them after you're done. Even if you do nothing else in your life except read these books, I don't think you'd even have the time! But what makes the library even more special are the second and third floors.

The second floor is called Skywalker Ranch Library, which contains books that Lucas and other filmmakers consulted for research and worldbuilding. The third floor contains about 3,000 art books donated by actor Steve Martin and his wife. Unfortunately, these two floors were off-limits, so I couldn't get a close look at any of it. But the sheer amount of literature confounded me and showed me that inspiration can really come from anywhere.

Going into the gallery

Next up, I headed into the main attraction: the galleries. On the first floor, there's one titled "The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, the Sacred." It was a pretty short showcase, and the art was exactly what you'd expect in a museum. This gallery was filled with famous fine art, including reproductions of Rembrandt's The Night Watch and the Portrait of Henry VIII. To be honest, I started off my sightseeing tour a bit disappointed and bored. So far, this first gallery felt like most other historical museums I've been to.

But I'm glad I stuck around, because the exhibitions suddenly became more interesting. The second floor is where you'll spend most of your visit, and it has the most visually diverse art in the entire museum. These galleries were categorised into genres like fantasy, the Wild West, and science fiction. There were also specific spots within the galleries dedicated to a single artist, such as N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell. As someone who's not really in tune with fine art, the artist-specific galleries flew over my head, but I appreciated how splitting the artwork by genre helped customers pick and choose what they're personally interested in.

For starters, the Manga gallery really interested me. It focused on older properties rather than the modern shows, such as Astro Boy and Akira, as well as other seminal Japanese shows like Kamen Rider. My personal favourite was Naoyo Kimura's self-portrait of Pikachu in a grey felt hat. Yes, it's the same one from 2023 during the Pokémon x Van Gogh collaboration. It brought back surprisingly nostalgic memories of a time when Pokémon card scalping wasn't quite as bad as it is now. Maybe I'm looking back with rose-tinted glasses. But even so, I still remember people trying to sell that particular card for inflated prices, given how rare and novel it was.

The shining star of all the galleries, however, was the dedicated Star Wars one. It was the only one with a line for those who wanted to see it. But don't worry, it went by really quickly. As someone who didn't grow up with Star Wars, I thought it was an incredibly impressive gallery. It's filled with paintings from every era of the venerable sci-fi franchise, including original trilogy concept art by Ralph McQuarrie. One that stood out to me was Aaron McBride's production art for Revenge of the Sith depicting Anakin and Obi-Wan's Battle on Mustafar. I've never seen the movie before (the only one I've seen is Solo: A Star Wars Story), but through many cultural references in other media, I'm well aware of their showdown.

The gallery also had a few 3D sculptures showcasing the franchise's costume designs, including Trisha Biggar's Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith and John Mollo's costume for Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back. My personal favourite was seeing Doug Chiang's Darth Maul on a Sith Speeder, part of the production art for The Phantom Menace. Keep in mind, I don't have strong nostalgia for these characters! But I remember seeing Darth Maul in a commercial as a kid and thinking he was the coolest villain ever, more so than Darth Vader, which is probably why this particular piece resonated with me the most.

I came into the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art expecting mostly George Lucas and Lucasfilm-related material. But I came away surprised and satisfied that there wasn't much of that at all. The Star Wars gallery, in particular, made up only a fraction of what the museum offered. It has an eclectic collection of artists and pieces from multiple genres and time periods. This approach creates much more breadth and depth in the visiting experience. Lucas and Hobson intended to bridge classical fine art and modern art in a single location where they're revered in equal measure – and they succeeded.

They can also be beautiful pieces of design. There are lots of aesthetically pleasing vinyl players out there, from budget gems with vintage looks to sleek minimalist masterpieces providing superior sound.

Whether you’re looking for a separate or an economical combo with speakers, I've picked out some options that all have decent discounts at Amazon that make them as cheap as just $29! I've ordered them by price, going from budget to more high-end audiophile turntables.

If you really want to delve into the audiophile world, check out our guide to the best audiophile headphones.

A24 has made some iconic indie movies in recent years, but merch has typically been kept to the usual movie posters and T-shirts. Taking thinking outside the box to a whole new level, the new Robert Pattinson nesting dolls prove that A24 knows its demographic.

There are six mini Pattinson's in total, featuring the following characters: Reynolds "Rey" from The Rover, Constantine "Connie" Nikas From Good Time, Monte from High Life, Thomas Howard from The Lighthouse, Charlie Thompson from The Drama, and finally his latest roll as Chris Hansen in Primetime.

The collection is not only conceptually iconic, but a great display of Pattinson's wide range of A24 roles. While I'm slightly sad there's no Edward Cullen (Twilight sadly isn't an A24), the nesting dolls are just the right amount of niche bizarre to get me reaching for my wallet.

"This month I'm working to buy myself my Robert Pattinson Russian dolls," one dedicated fan wrote. "Just bought Robert Pattinson nesting dolls at almost 30. I love being me," another confessed. I initially thought these were little Robert Pattinson acrylics for your toes to get a Patticure," a more confused fan wrote.

Sadly, the Robert Pattinson nesting dolls are already sold out, but you can join the waitlist on the A24 website. For more film news, check out how The Backrooms' director used Blender to build a 30k-square-foot set or take a look at why Robert Pattinson’s Primetime performance is cinematic perfection.

Although I don’t depict them, they are an essential part of the narrative; they serve as a background story element to inform and inspire consecutive decisions made during the creation process. Having a solid story idea really helps at all stages and keeps you focused on what’s important.

However, what made the biggest difference on the technical side was using 3D and a proper reference board. Here's how I approached the piece.

If you need to build your own art setup, see our guides to the best drawing tablets or the best laptops for drawing.

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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The publication of a huge batch of patent filings shows that the creative tech giant has plenty of ideas about where it could take things next, and that includes into field where Adobe doesn't currently have a strong presence.

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As noticed by the patent tracking site Patentlyze, the US Patent and Trademark office has just published a series of patent filings from Adobe. One of them describes a method for creating navigable 3D worlds from text descriptions.

An example use cited describes a user typing "a foggy Japanese garden at dusk" to generate said 3D environment. A non-specified AI model would first build an intermediate "spherical" 2D picture of the space, like a 360 view produced by stitching 3D scans. That would then be fed back into a second AI process that would use it as a basis for the construction of 3D geometry.

The output would be viewable from multiple perspectives, and the user would be able to move forwards and backwards to explore the environment.

Even with today's procedural tools that allow artists to generate assets using rules, building 3D environments is a time consuming process that requires potentially hundreds of individual assets that are digitally sculpted and then painted with surface details.

Adobe has a suite of 3D programs in its Substance collection of apps. Substance Painter is fairly popular for that part of the process, but Substance 3D modeler remains a relatively niche choice compared to the likes of ZBrush and Blender, with its main advantage being the seamless switching between desktop and VR. For now, it's one of the Adobe programs that hasn't added Firefly-powered generative AI tools.

Adobe's not the only company exploring the idea of text-to 3D world generation. For the moment the nearest thing are tools like Blockade Labs' Skybox AI , which generates 360-degree scenes from text prompts, but these are quite some way from navigable environments for games or VR and AR.

This is just one of the dozens of patents from Adobe published in recent weeks. Other filings include concepts for an AI tool that builds new camera angles from a single photo, one that finds matching materials across 3D models and a tool for rendering a 3D garment preview.

A patent application doesn't necessarily signal a development intention. Companies file patents for various reasons, including to try to prevent competitors from using an idea and to show shareholders that they're being innovative.

Personally, though, I do like using Adobe software. In fact, I've been doing so for 30 years now, which suggests they're doing something right. And honestly, I don't enjoy writing critical pieces too much; I'd far rather praise people when they've done something good. Which is what I'm about to do here.

The good news is that Premiere mobile, which launched on iPhone last year, has finally arrived on Android, and it's free. And let me be crystal-clear. You don't need a Creative Cloud subscription to use it. Which I think is epic.

Indeed, if you're happy with the basic editing experience it offers – trimmed down from the full-blown desktop software – you don't even need an Adobe account. Nor are there any watermarks, ads and interminable upgrade prompts. Double hooray!

What you get for free

So what, exactly, are you getting? Well, the free tier is surprisingly meaty. There's a multi-track timeline for layering video, music, text, voiceovers and effects. There's frame-accurate editing for timing cuts to the beat. You can record voiceovers directly in the app. Plus something I think content creators will prize above all else: Enhance Audio, which cleans up background noise in a single tap.

Add in creator-made templates and unlimited 4K exports to that mix, and you've got everything most social video creators will be looking for from a quick and easy-to-use app.

Not all features are free, though. Firefly-powered features such as Generative Fill, Image-to-Video and Generate Sound Effects run on generative credits, which you'll have to buy. But that seems fair enough to me.

The limitations

A word of caution, though, before you get too excited. The app requires Android 13 or later and at least 5GB of RAM, which rules out plenty of Android budget phones. That's a shame, because affordability is one of the main reasons people plump for Android phones over iPhones.

Plus, as I mentioned, a lot of features you're used to using on desktop are currently MIA. Keyframes, beat detection, Adobe Fonts, enhanced captions and, a little frustratingly, the ability to continue editing a project on Premiere desktop are all marked as "coming soon".

And let's not be realistic. The free app is also a shop window. Adobe is clearly hoping that once you're hooked, you'll start spending for extra features.

Why this is good for creatives

That said, overall this is exactly how Adobe should be treating its audience. For many years, its approach has been: sign up for a serious standing order first, then we'll talk. Free Premiere, in contrast, earns trust first and asks for money later, or maybe never.

That's good sense because the next generation of content creators aren't starting out on a desktop; they're starting on phones, with something like CapCut. If their first serious editing tool is a free, watermark-free Premiere instead, Adobe has a real chance of keeping them for the long haul. No wonder the latter includes features aimed squarely at vertical video and YouTube Shorts.

And who knows? If Adobe carries out releasing useful tools like this, with no strings attached, it might finally start to feel like a friend of creatives again, rather than a heavy handed landlord. Here's hoping...

As you might guess from the name, Messi and the Giants is not an animated biopic charting the young Messi's journey from Rosario to Barcelona, through his treatment for growth hormone deficiency and on to La Liga and then World Cup glory. All the same, few people expected it to be quite as wild as the RPG-inspired story revealed in the trailer below.

Set to stream globally on Disney+ in summer 2027, Messi and the Giants appears to have little to do with Messi beyond its use of his name, vague likeness and ability to kick spherical objects.

A 12-year-old Leo finds himself trapped in an alternate reality ruled by giants. To get home, he must compete in football-like battles using powerful “orbs”. He must also try to reunite the fractured realms of Iko.

Unlike his opponents in these battles, Leo can’t use the world's "code powers" to boost his game. Instead, he has to rely on skill, teamwork and pure grit. That makes the series sound a bit like it could be a human versus AI parable, which could be interesting.

The trailer was unveiled at San Diego Comic-Con Málaga by executive producers Lacey Stanton and Bryan Korn of Sony Pictures Television, director Dan Creteur of Atlantis Animation and Sony Music Vision executive producer Sergi Reitg.

Disney announced its acquisition and distribution of the animated series back in December 2024. Messi himself is listed as an executive producer along with his later father alongside various Sony execs.

Atlantis, a studio based in the Canary Islands that previously worked on Miraculous Ladybug, is doing the animation. The Argentine actor Milo Burgess-Webb provides the voice of Leo, and there's an original theme song from Argentine singer Luck Ra called Vamos, Vamos, Vamos.

The video game concept, action sequences, polished 3D animation style and fantasy aesthetic with glowing powers and anime-influenced action sequences, along with the underdog story angle, could make the series appeal to children who aren't football fans. For now, it seems to have avoided the backlash that often greets celebrity-driven projects. Perhaps celebrity animation works best when it stops being a celebrity cartoon.

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But Pixar's latest animation quickly takes some unexpected turns, turning into a surreal, psychedelic origin story with a very unexpected animation style.

Pixar bills the seven-minute film Fruit & Nut as the "untold story of the most famous duo of all time". It was directed by Pixar artists Rej Bourdages and Tony Maki, who previously worked on films including Coco, Soul, Inside Out 2, Elio and Hoppers.

They used a handcrafted stop-motion animation with tangible puppets and sets, combined with 2D animation sequences. The result has a quirky indie look that gives Fruit & Nut a very different feel from Pixar's feature films with their 3D CGI animation style. In fact, it's only the second stop-motion film that Pixar has released to date, following the experimental short Self in 2024.

As for the plot, it's a deliberately absurd origin story for a popular snack presented as a Thelma & Louise style road trip adventure. A lonely peanut inadvertently becomes a getaway driver for a bank robbery after picking up a hitchhiking strawberry while making a run from dive bar without paying. They're another surprising twist at the end.

Many of those commenting on the short have highlighted its meme potential along with surprise that Pixar would release an animation with such a boldly different direction.

That's the beauty and value of the studio's internal artist-driven programme, which is intended to give employees freedom to experiment with different styles and techniques – a kind of spiritual successor to the earlier SparkShorts initiative. While the films are shorts only released online, they could help inspire Pixar to consider new directions: it's already expanded its stylistic range with the 2D animation of upcoming Gatto.

That kind of small fix runs through Dear Van Gogh and shows how art lays the foundations for indie games, in a season that turns some of the world's best-known paintings into places you can walk, climb, and fly through, and is available for PS5, Switch, PC, iPhone and Android. Yingxian Lu, Content Producer at thatgamecompany, explains how it came together, from the first brushstroke tests to a finale shared with millions of other players.

Which paintings can be levels?

While something like The Potato Eaters could be troublesome, some Van Gogh paintings are easy to turn into an interactive experience. "If the painting is a natural landscape, it's more straightforward to translate into a 3D environment," says Lu. Van Gogh's output is much wider than landscapes, though: flowers, plants, characters, self-portraits. The team didn't want to drop those, "simply because they were more difficult to translate into the game experience."

Almond Blossoms became an enormous tree in the game, with Sky's avatars around the size of the flowers, free to walk across it. "It feels surreal but also very dreamy and poetic," she says.

The Van Gogh self-portrait needed a different approach. "Having avatars jump across Van Gogh's face obviously didn't feel appropriate," Lu says, so it went into the story. A Van Gogh character paints himself in the game, with a mirror on the canvas. The camera pushes in on the canvas, then pulls back to show the finished portrait.

The people in the paintings became cosmetics, and players can play with aspects of life inside a Van Gogh painting – you can get the postman's hat and suit, and outfits drawn from Fisherman's Wife on the Beach and Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat, so they can dress as 19th-century people.

Brushstrokes first, story later

The team looked at the brushstroke system first, before they knew the narrative or gameplay. "The visual identity of the project was so crucial that we wanted to make sure we could achieve the look we were aiming for before committing to the project," Lu says. "And we did!"

She credits the graphics engineers and 3D environment artists with the heavy lifting. Her own job was to help define the visual goal and coordinate the teams around it. The finished tool lets artists adjust the colour, thickness and size of strokes and apply them to the game's 3D models.

The system went through many rounds of iteration, with features added along the way. One is "museum light," added by the graphics engineer, which gives uneven brushstrokes highlights and shadows as they're lit, like a painting in a gallery. Lu says it "creates a much more convincing sense of brushwork and elevates the overall visual quality." Another is a gyro effect, where the highlights move as you move your device. "It's just a really cool feature and something that can only really be experienced in the medium of games," she says.

Asked about the biggest technical limitation the team faced, she gives a short answer: "Honestly, the brushstroke system was the biggest one."

When the painting is the concept art

For most of Sky's content, concept art comes first, then 3D. Here, "the paintings themselves were the concept art, and very much what the 3D environments started from and referenced."

Getting the colours right took some effort. Digital images of the paintings online often didn't agree with each other, so the team had people visit museums in Europe and MoMA in New York to photograph the originals. The concept team used those photos to colour-correct the digital versions, and those became the references for the 3D artists.

The team also researched architecture in the Netherlands and France from the period. For Van Gogh's room in Arles, they found material on the building's structure and rebuilt it as it was. Arles itself needed extra concept work, because the team wanted more than the bedroom, the Yellow House and the café. Concept artists imagined what the buildings and other areas might look like beyond those landmarks, so the town would feel like a place where other people lived.

Lighting needed a rethink too. The bedroom painting is bright and well lit, so the team used more light sources than usual. "We couldn't just look at the painting as a reference for the environment itself," Lu says. "We also had to think about what created the particular atmosphere of the painting, and then figure out how to recreate that atmosphere with the tools and limitations of a real-time game."

Almond Blossoms, and the limits of the tree

Lu says Almond Blossoms is probably the most difficult painting to turn into a level. The early idea was to make the tree huge so players could platform across the branches. Getting it to work took a lot of iteration. "We wanted the experience to be fun, the navigation to feel intuitive, and we wanted the frame to look as close to the painting as possible," she says. The team simplified where they had to, but kept the main branch structure matching the painting.

The quest designer and environment artists worked closely together, and after all that testing, the team reached a conclusion about the top-right branch. They wanted it in the shot, but a second giant tree "would make the composition feel too busy and take away from the poetic quality of the scene." Hence the branch in the sky.

Lu says the team wanted to keep two things true to the source. One was Van Gogh's subjects. His focus on workers and farmers shows "Van Gogh's interests and attention as an artist," she says, which is why the farmer stays in the environment for Le Moulin de la Galette.

The other was the history. Lu worked closely with the design and art teams to keep the experience faithful to the historical material while still feeling interactive and respectful of the real events. "We didn't want to add a character or create a story that would change what actually happened in Van Gogh's life," she says.

That's why players enter the experience "spirit-shaded" rather than as their usual selves. "We wanted to communicate that players are not actually meeting or interacting with Van Gogh. They are stepping into his world and witnessing parts of his life, but they remain separate from the historical events."

The team took liberties with Van Gogh's inner life. Nobody can know exactly what he felt while painting, so they read his letters to his brothers and friends and made their own interpretations from that research.

Sky has very little dialogue, and the team used that limit creatively, telling Vincent's story through symbolism, which Lu says "helps enhance the meaning of an object." In the game, sunflowers represent hope and love, and Theo's island, built as his gallery, has a safe with sunflowers in it. Crows stand for the darker parts of Vincent's life. A crow attack represents the scene of his death by suicide. "This was a heavy incident, and we wanted to approach it in a more abstract way and make it less triggering for our players," she says. The team also wanted to keep things artistic and beautiful, and avoid some overly violent scenes.

Two ways to play Vincent's story

The bigger design problem was how to make the story interactive without altering it. A big part of Lu's role was working with the team to work out how players could take part in Vincent's story without changing historical events. If players just watched, she says, "that would become a movie, not an interactive game." The team settled on two roles: the postman and the brush.

As the postman, players read the letters between Vincent and Theo and feel the emotional and financial support Theo gave. The delivery sequences change with the period of Vincent's life. In Arles, you deliver a letter on a river, a peaceful and beautiful experience meant to evoke the peace and joy of that period. In Saint-Rémy, the delivery happens in a dark space, and players have to go against the wind and find their way out to evoke a harder time.

As the brush, players become the brush in Vincent's hands. They might complete an element of a sketch, colour a painting in from black and white, or turn an ordinary texture into a brushstroke texture. Players are helping him finish the paintings, Lu says, "while still staying true to the history."

The letters

Reading the correspondence surprised the team, even though they already knew Theo backed Vincent. Vincent "really liked writing letters," Lu says, and wasn't shy about asking Theo for money, with lines like "I hope you will be able to send money soon."

Van Gogh is estimated to have written and received more than 2,000 letters, but he wasn't good at keeping them. Many of the surviving ones are from Vincent to Theo, partly because Theo kept them carefully. Only around 40 of Theo's letters to Vincent survive, which makes those especially meaningful to the team. Lu, who has recently become interested in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, says it made her feel Vincent is probably a P type and Theo a J type.

Those few letters are encouraging because Vincent wasn't well recognised in his lifetime, and Theo told him his paintings were beautiful and urged him to keep going. One line stayed with the team: "the courage for work is far from abandoning you." "It's really touching to me and the team as well," Lu says, and the words inspired the finale. An early blockout of the finale worked so well that the team kept its pace and feel until the end of production.

Making Starry Night

Lu names Starry Night as the scene where the translation worked best (perhaps because it's actually more scientifically accurate than we think), and the team saved it for the finale. Players fly into the sky and, along with millions of others, light it up to form the painting. "So you become part of the beauty that you are witnessing," she says.

She credits the visuals, narrative, interaction and music working together, and says the stars and moon look amazing. It's an emotional scene for her. "I tear up for Vincent, such a talented artist who died at such a young age," she says, but she's also glad he had Theo and Johanna, and finds it striking to see so many players there and so many people recognising his work.

"There are so many different emotions wrapped into this masterpiece, Starry Night," she says. "I feel the art and design worked perfectly here."

Lu added two points, starting with production. Sky usually releases seasonal quests gradually, with something new every week or two, and a full season often needs two versions to complete. For Dear Van Gogh, the team delivered everything in a single version for the first time. The idea came from creative director Jenova Chen, and Lu says she believed in it and took ownership of making it work.

The problem was that "our existing workflow wasn't really designed to deliver an entire season within a single version." She worked with the teams to split production into smaller milestones, create more overlap between them and change how resources and dependencies were planned, so more of the experience could be built in parallel. She also tracked the schedule closely to address bottlenecks early. The result was a different way of producing a season, and a more efficient way of managing what she calls "a much more interconnected experience within a tighter timeline."

The team felt the format suited the story. Van Gogh's life is emotional, and they wanted that to flow from one period to the next rather than make players wait two weeks between chapters. Players could take it in one sitting, "almost like watching a movie," or go at their own pace. Lu says most players responded positively, and quest completion was higher than in previous seasons.

Bringing Johanna van Gogh-Bonger to life

Her second addition was about Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo's wife, whom Lu says she knew little about before the project. Theo died roughly six months after Vincent, leaving Johanna to raise their 11-month-old baby alone. She recognised and valued Vincent's work, as Theo had, and spent decades bringing it to the public. She also edited and published the letters between the brothers "so that people living today, like us, can get a glimpse into what the great artist was thinking and feeling back then." "She's one of the reasons we know Vincent van Gogh today," Lu says.

In the game, Johanna stays in the gallery and guides players through the stages of Vincent's life. At the end, players stand with her and witness the success she helped create. "We wanted her to be more than just a historical figure in the background," Lu says.

Lu says Johanna "has really inspired me, and I have so much respect for her," and that she admires her, as a woman herself, for her commitment, for recognising the value of Vincent's work ahead of her time, for her love for her family and for her perseverance. Learning about her, Lu says, showed her "there was another remarkable story behind Van Gogh's legacy, and I'm really glad we were able to bring a little bit of that story into the project."

Children of the Sky: Van Gogh Season is available now for Android, iPhone, Switch, PlayStation and PC (Steam).

“I am passionate about both stylised and realistic art, so I like making stuff of all sorts,” he says. That shows in the four examples he's chosen to share with us to showcase his work, for which he uses Blender, ZBrush and Substance 3D Painter (see our guides to the best 3D modelling software and the best laptops for 3D modelling).

Mermaid reimagined

“For this, I wanted to make my own mermaid design. My approach was mixing real-world references with key elements that make up a mermaid.”

Bubbly

“This little guy is my own design. The idea was to mix a couple of animals and come up with a ‘sidekick-like’ character for an animated feature.”

Metroid Stylised

“A stylised adaptation of Samus from Metroid. I wanted to explore making a suit that fits a human body and therefore could look a bit more functional.”

Realistic Stitch

“My take on one of my favourite characters of all time. It was also a great opportunity to make a complex character and push everything I’d learnt so far.”

You can see more of Juan's work on his ArtStation profile.

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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Back in June, I wrote about Alpes 2030's Winter Olympics logo, whose radiating lines converge into a glowing point. Lovely. Two months later, Vermont's hand-lettered wordmark smuggled a range of peaks into its 'm'. They join some memorable recent releases, including the NHL's Utah Mammoth and a newly mountainous Mountain Dew from 2025.

None of these designs, I should clarify, are at all alike. But whenever I see a designer reach for a mountain, it reminds me exactly why this symbol has such a hold on me.

A simple symbol

Part of the appeal is sheer simplicity. Yet for a shape that's little more than a triangle, it carries a huge amount of weight and meaning. The ideas of permanence, aspiration, adventure, reaching the top, are all nestled within its three sides.

No wonder, then, that the mountain has a long history of popping up in logos. The North Face's quarter-circle is an abstract homage to Half Dome in Yosemite. Patagonia's jagged, colourful skyline is modelled on Mount Fitz Roy in the southern Andes. Coors Light's mountain is Wilson Peak in Telluride, Colorado.

Paramount's star-ringed peak was reputedly inspired by Ben Lomond in Utah, where founder W.W. Hodkinson grew up. And Prudential has been selling financial stability via the Rock of Gibraltar for well over a century. (Yes, technically that's a massive rock rather than a mountain, but we all know what we mean).

Why specificity lands

By the way, have you noticed something? None of these mountains are generic, they're all specific. And for me, that's where the real magic lies.

The most famed example of this is Toblerone. For decades, its logo featured the Matterhorn, with a bear hidden in the negative space; a nod to Bern, "City of Bears". But then in 2023, the company moving some production out of Switzerland, and Swiss rules restrict the use of national symbols on products not made there. So the logo had to change.

As a result, the famous peak has been swapped for a more generic mountain. The new design is fine, but sadly, it's quite generic. Toblerone will no doubt coast on deep-rooted brand awareness for many years to come, but in the long term? I think it's a problem.

Why this matters

Those recent logos I mentioned earlier understood that lesson. The Utah Mammoth's primary logo, for instance, is wonderfully specific. The Wasatch Mountain Range and snow-capped peaks form the beast's crown, with the shape of Utah subtly embedded in the mountain silhouette.

Vermont's wordmark works in a similar way, just more loosely. The moon in its 'o' rises over Camel's Hump, a real peak you can go and stand beneath on any autumn evening. Meanwhile, Mountain Dew, after 15 years as 'Mtn Dew', has leaned into its heritage with a mountain backdrop that calls to mind 20th century travel posters.

Alpes 2030 is an exception, to be fair: as I noted at the time, this abstract logo could represent almost any peak on Earth. But even here, the colour palette pulls it back to a real place, with its pinks and reds drawn from the alpenglow that washes over the Alps at sunrise and sunset.

Why does this matter? I think it's because, in a world of AI generation, a mountain is one of the most tangible things you can put in a logo.

You can't fake the Wasatch Range. It's just there, and it's been there for a very long time. As the Japanese saying goes, kuni yaburete sanga ari – "the country may have fallen, but the mountains and rivers remain."

While Haaland has since parted ways with his iconic do, it remains a signature part of his identity. Certainly one of the more unconventional celebrity brands, it's clear the footballer is keen to protect his image from unwanted advertising.

The dispute centres around a Norwegian Air campaign which saw the airline posting a cheeky social post with the star's signature man bun photoshopped on a plane. Hopping on this year's FIFA World Cup Haaland hype, the image was accompanied by the caption “We’ve never looked more Norwegian."

Despite the virality of his image during this summer's World Cup, Haaland's team claimed the lighthearted social post unlawfully exploited his likeness, identity, and visual branding.

According to Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang, Eivind Hammer Myhre, duty media officer at Norwegian Airlines, said, "It is unfortunate that cheers of support were met with a lawsuit, but we hope for a sensible dialogue so that in the future we too will be allowed to continue supporting our shared sporting heroes."

For more design dispute news, take a look at why New Balance sued this rival athletics brand or check out how Louis Vuitton won this logo battle despite fiery backlash.

The name chosen for this unique astronomical phenomenon? Skydance – probably the least-recognised of all the brands the combined company owns.

The use of Titanic to open the launch video above feels like a strangely ominous choice. Only time will tell whether Skydance is an unsinkable giant.

For now, if it was hoping for a round of applause for the showreel, it should remember that people don't generally like monopolies. By showing how many big media and entertainment brands and IPs it's just brought under one roof, it's making people realise why there was so much controversy over the merger. "It's like Thanos collecting the infinity stones," one person comments on X.

The branding is doing the same thing. The new corporation's name comes from co-CEO David Ellison's former production company Skydance Media (formerly Skydance Productions). It's using the same logo too.

Skydance Media bought and was then reverse absorbed into Paramount a year ago to create Paramount Skydance. There's also Skydance Animation, which is behind the Ray Gunn movie coming to Netflix.

The logic is that it's a neutral name that avoids an awful mashup (ParaBros?), won't upset Warner Bros or Paramount shareholders and won't diminish either brand. The individual studios will keep their own identities, as will brands like HBO, DC and CNN, much like how Pixar and Marvel continue to exist within Disney.

Skydance's name came from Ellison's personal interest in aviation. Its first movie was 2006's Flyboys, in which Ellison, a licensed pilot, played a pilot. Bestowing this name on the newly combined company gives the merger the feel of a vanity project, like Elon Musk renaming Twitter as X after his spurned idea for an online bank.

That brings a risk. Emarketer analyst Ross Benes pointed out to Reuters: "The name is ego-driven. It reminds everyone that the most iconic Hollywood brands answer to Ellison and it is his company who won out". It also means that audiences have a visible culprit to call out over anything they don't like.

Ultimately, opposition isn't so much about the name but the concerns about consolidation, job cuts, debt, media independence and the increased concentration of ownership. The company's size has people comparing it to Skynet from the Terminator franchise. And guess who owns the rights to that.

This is a great value mid-range FDM printer that's suitable for beginners but provides the versatility to grow your craft. It offers native multicolour printing and larger print sizes than cheaper beginner-friendly 3D printers, reducing the chance of quickly outgrowing the machine.

The deal is part of Amazons' Early Big Deal Days. You'' need to be an Amazon Prime member, but you can sign up for a 30-day free Prime trial (you can always cancel within the month to avoid any subscription cost if you don't want the other benefits).

If you're not sure which type of machine is best for you, see our guide to the best 3D printers based on our own reviews.

• Browse 3D printer deals at Amazon

The best multicolour 3D printer for beginners?

There are two main families of 3D printers: resin and FDM.

For most beginners, FDM is the way to go. It's easier and safer to handle, has lower running costs, less clean up, and you can get larger print sizes for your money. The exception would be if you really need the extra detail that resin 3D printing can provide for miniatures like tabletop gaming figurines or small, detailed jewellery (see the two big Anycubic resin 3D printer deals at Amazon).

The Kobra X isn't the cheapest 3D printer for beginners, but we think it may work out as a better long-term investment for those who think they're going stick with the hobby and possibly develop professionally. A newcomer can start with it, but it's advanced enough that most users won't outgrow it quickly.

Auto levelling, app control and AI monitoring make it easy to use, while the native 4-colour printing – expandable to 19 – mixed-material capabilities and large build volume mean you can grow into the hobby without having to upgrade your machine a year or so down the line.

I'll start with the case, because I can't decide whether I like it, and it's the most divisive design aspect of Nothing's new earphones. The Headphone (1) Pro ships in a hard shell that wraps around the earcups and leaves the headband exposed, so it works as a carry case and a kind of handbag for your head. It's far smaller than the old one, closer to a large pill box, with loops for a strap, and there's a TPU lining inside. The footprint is a real improvement, as the original Headphone (1) came in a square, soft-touch PU leather case that matched the slightly 1980s industrial look of the headphones themselves, and I miss it. Nothing deserves credit for taking a risk here, but I keep looking at the new one and seeing a handbag.

The Headphone (1) Pro feels heavier than the original, though it isn't: 327g against 329g. What I'm really seeing is the chunkier construction and everything packed inside. Because there's a lot in here: a 40mm dynamic driver handles bass, a 13 x 8mm precision driver covers the mids, and a small solid-state xMEMS driver does the treble. Add ten microphones for ANC and calls, Bluetooth 6.1, LDAC, 24-bit/192kHz lossless over USB-C, head-tracked spatial audio and adaptive ANC rated to 46dB, and this is clearly a different class from Nothing's budget Headphone (a).

The new Headphone (1) Pro is both an everyday ANC earphone and a more serious listening tool, so the real question is: who is it for, and why should you upgrade?

Nothing Headphone (1) Pro takes a risk

The look is mostly unchanged, which is good news if, like me, you've bought into Nothing's bitty, retro-industrial design, here riffing on cassette tape and 1990s game console design. The transparent cups and exposed mechanical details return, with new depth: the layered tech behind the glass windows represents the three drivers powering the audio. It's bold and graphic and develops the ideas behind the original Headphone (1) nicely.

Back too, the rocker paddle for track selection and control and the roller switch for volume are still here. I use the previous model, the Headphone (1), daily, so I know how good those controls are, and it's a relief to have something your thumb can find without poking at a touch panel (though there is one slight niggle, the paddle is at just the perfect position to snag when leaning into a seat, meaning you're liable to nudge it).

Comfort is much the same for me, even with the extra heft. Nothing says the dual-layer cushions are 50% softer, the headband is 10% wider with 12% more padding, and I can feel it as I push them over my head, and immediately note the fit works better with glasses. I've worn them for long sessions without getting hot or feeling clamped, so the improvements are, for once, as good as the marketing blurb.

The sound is where the Headphone (1) Pro justifies its name, and while it's hard to pin down if Nothing's claim that its new bass driver has 15% more punch and 26% more sensitivity than the one in the Headphone (1) is accurate, in use the sound quality certainly feels improved. Splitting the frequency range across three drivers shows that, in busy tracks and quiet ones alike, it impresses. The bass has more authority without turning into a dead-end thump, vocals have more texture, and the top end has room to breathe. I pressed play on Jay Buchanan's Weapons of Beauty, and these lonesome desert poems found a new depth, a bolder, more rounded elegance that made the yearning sweep from Morrison to Cohen hit even harder. Just lovely.

Flat EQ is the feature that interested me most because it's the 'pro' technical aspect in the name. A physical switch on the earcup removes Nothing's added processing and gives you a neutral profile tuned with Metropolis Studios – the famed London recording studio that's hosted Queen, Yes, and Oasis – for reviewing tracks, comparing mixes and making critical listening decisions. Because it's a switch rather than an app preset, you can flip between normal listening and the flatter profile in a second. If you make music, edit video or just want to hear a recording with less interpretation, this is genuinely useful.

There's a trade-off, of course, and so turning on Flat EQ disables Transparency Mode, Spatial Audio and the EQ. That makes sense for a neutral mode, but you're stripping things away rather than adding another profile. For me, it's the strongest argument for buying the Headphone (1) Pro, particularly if you are, as the name suggests, a 'pro' working in audio daily and need that neutral sound.

For everyone else, the main features we all need from a good pair of headphones have been improved – ANC is particularly good, thanks to the ten-microphone setup, a new silicone sound seal and the 46dB claim. Transparency mode keeps voices sounding natural, making for a good office experience. While Nothing is new in this space, having made its name with the Nothing Phones, it's now getting close to matching the noise-cancelling of the big names like Sony, Apple and Bose.

Battery life is where Headphone (1) Pro drops slightly, as it manages 30 hours with ANC on, down from 35 on the Headphone (1), plus 68 hours with ANC off and 28 with LDAC and ANC both running. That five-hour gap doesn't really matter in practice. Thirty hours covers a long-haul flight door to door, and on an 11-hour flight with engine drone and screaming children around me, I want comfort, isolation and good sound, and the Headphone (1) Pro delivers all three.

Should you buy Headphone (1) Pro?

Price is the sticking point with the Headphone (1) Pro, as at £349 it's in serious premium territory. Having used them, I have no doubt about the improvements in sound and ANC, and Flat EQ is a feature pros and audiophiles will find invaluable; it's typically easy to implement, and Nothing-like, but the extra cost puts a question mark over tech that should be a no-brainer.

Why? If you're new to Nothing's headphones, I think the Headphone (1) Pro is an easy recommendation: the design and controls, strong ANC, capable three-driver sound, and a Flat EQ mode with a real reason to exist. If you already own a Headphone (1), the decision is harder. I can hear the improvements: the ANC is better, and Flat EQ has a clear use, but the original Headphone (1) is still a very good pair of headphones for the price, and the Headphone (1) Pro hasn't made those feel dated. The extra hardware makes sense for audiophiles, music obsessives and creatives who will use Flat EQ. Everyone else should think twice, especially if you already have a Headphone (1) on the desk.

As for the case, I'd still take the old one back, and I still wish the headband were covered, not least because that would mean there's room for the charging and audio cables, but I'd rather Nothing occasionally ship a strange hard-shell handbag than another anonymous black zip-up case that could have come from anyone. And that, in many ways, is Headphone (1) Pro in a nutshell: I'd rather it exists and asks questions, takes a risk, than not.

PSSR brings lower-resolution game graphics up to the standard of a high-definition 4K picture. It makes older games look sharper and more detailed... but $300 sharper? Now PS5 owners have at least one reason to be less envious. AI upscaling is coming to the standard PS5, making it clearly still one of the best game consoles.

The base PS5 isn't getting PSSR but a new tier of AI upscaling called QSSR: Quick Spectral Super Resolution.

For now, it's been added in patches for two games: Marvel's Wolverine and Ghost of Yotei (see the comparisons below).

How is PS5 AI upscaling possible on the standard console?

Sony Interactive Entertainment principal engineer of graphics R&D, Daniel Craig notes on the PlayStation Blog that the computational approach of PSSR, which analyses game images pixel by pixel and uses AI to upscale them with more detail and stability, was impossible to bring to the standard PS5.

QSSR was made possible by two innovations: a "streamlined neural network architecture" and "a hand-tuned implementation that maximizes performance on PS5". Together these work to provide "some notable improvements to both image detail and image stability".

Note that this is not the same kind of AI tech as Nvidia's DLSS 5, which has caused such a storm over how it appears to actually change a game's assets, lighting and the appearances of characters. PSSR and QSSR sharpen existing visuals without changing their basic appearance.

Mike Fitzgerald, head of technology at Insomniac Games, says that "QSSR adds more pixel-level clarity and stability to our environments, bringing out extra detail amidst the busy streets of Madripoor, the dense alleyways of Shinjuku, and many other areas across Logan’s epic journey".

It remains to be seen how soon QSSR will be adopted by other developers and to what extent it will be applied to the PS5's back catalogue, but for now PS5 owners can be optimistic that they no longer have cause to be too envious of the Pro.

People aren't going to forgive Sony for its decision to kill physical discs, but it's very welcome to see a manufacturer upgrade the features of a previous console almost six years after release when a newer, more expensive successor is already on the market.

Star Wars Galactic Racer bucks an unwanted trend. Over the decades, Star Wars games have earned a reputation for inconsistency: for every Knights Of The Old Republic or Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader, franchise superfans have also endured the mediocrity of games like Kinect Star Wars or The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes. Two factors explain that inconsistency: the enduring appeal of the Star Wars universe (recently expanded with several TV series) brings a steady stream of not always well-conceived games, and the sheer size and scope of that universe can overwhelm developers.

In that context, Star Wars Galactic Racer developer Fuse Games – a new British studio run by ex-luminaries of Criterion, Burnout, and Need for Speed fame – has taken a sensible approach by limiting its take on Star Wars to one particular scene from George Lucas’s vast universe: speeder and pod racing.

In Star Wars Galactic Racer, you play the role of Shade, a retired racer now scraping a living as a glorified courier, but drawn back into the Galactic Racer series by its organiser, Darius Pax, annoyed at how his much-loved spectacle has been hijacked by Kestar Bool, an insufferably entitled (and annoyingly quick) plutocrat whose family has essentially subjugated the planet from which he and Shade both hail.

Choose your speeder

That backstory provides plenty of friction and jeopardy in Galactic Racer’s single-player campaign, while interaction with the other characters involved in the Galactic Racer circus adds a surprising amount of depth and interest to the rollercoaster ride of first qualifying for and then competing in the Galactic Racer series.

Before jumping in, I had to make plenty of decisions, the primary one being which speeder to pilot. There are three types: Landspeeders, Speeder Bikes and Skim Speeders. The former are all-rounders: solid, with decent handling and, in their base state, not much comparative speed. The Speeder bikes are fast, narrow (which comes in handy in tight spaces) and manoeuvrable, but also delicate. The Skim Speeders are fast but handle twitchily; they tilt so one edge digs in as a pivot for tight turns, whereas the Landspeeders and Speeder Bikes can be made to drift in twisty situations.

No Star Wars racing game, of course, would be complete without Pod-racers, and they do feature in Galactic Racer, albeit in carefully controlled conditions, given that they are much faster and much more fragile than the Speeders. Timeline-wise, Galactic Racer takes place after the Empire has fallen, and Sebulba, the pod-racer featured in Phantom Menace, is in the game, albeit as something of a down-on-his-luck has-been, owed money by Kestar Bool. You have to race and beat him in a Speeder, but you also cleverly get to play through his memories of pod-racing. In which you will no doubt admire Star Wars Galactic Racer’s spectacular, Burnout-style slow-motion renderings of huge wipeouts.

Pimp that Speeder

For the single-player campaign, I chose the Landspeeder, mainly for its handling and robustness (an important factor in Galactic Racer), and soon learned how to go about upping its attributes to make it faster and better suited to my playstyle: a crucial element of the game brought about by the campaign’s very clever structure.

For each multi-planet chunk of the campaign, I could choose a different path, taking in a multitude of races and activities. Beyond the basic Races, which carry little jeopardy (though you will lose your race-series entry ticket if you crash too many times), there are Eliminators, where last-placed competitors are eliminated at regular intervals, and you must finish in the top three. To add variety, Races could take place over various laps or as point-to-points.

Then there were Field Tests, in which I was set various different tasks in unfamiliar machinery – Nik Skandaro, for example, was all about getting me to perform takedowns, while Soren Zaks was obsessed with making me use the ramjet: a speed-booster which blew up if redlined for too long. I also found many mystery encounters with random positive or negative outcomes, such as rendering upgrades cheaper, earning me more money, or losing either upgrades or my one triggerable ability.

Abilities, favours, ramjets and afterburners

Each racing run was all about upgrading my speeder as much as possible, which I could do in several ways. Like the ramjet, all the speeders had an afterburner, which gave a shorter speed burst; like every aspect of my speeder, it could be upgraded by winning and buying parts.

Parts could also develop faults, bringing specific debuffs, though they could be repaired the next time the Galactic racer circus moved to a new planet. Favours, meanwhile, provided useful perks, such as increasing the number of crashes I could sustain in a race or adding extra Galactic Racer entry-tokens. At the end of each planetary series of races, I could catch up with my mechanic, the four-armed, simianesque, Scouse-accented Hibi, to spend the money I had earned from races, from my chosen backers and from the side-bets I could make with my fellow racers.

Surprisingly structured and coherent campaign

That all sounds complicated, and it was at first, but it soon settled into a system I could game, setting up my Landspeeder to prevail in the tricky but invariably epic races that each long season culminated in.

The campaign structure, in which I progressed from planet to planet yet could choose my own route, was exemplary, with a roguelike feel amplified by the odd spanner thrown into the works, such as the ever-infuriating Kestar Bool once taking away my ability for the crucial end-of-tour eliminator. The abilities I could employ (with long cooldowns) were hugely varied – ranging from short autopilot periods (useful for negotiating twisty bits) to concussion mines and shields.

Even when I dropped the ball in the final race of the tour and had to start a new one, I felt rewarded rather than punished, as I could start the next one with upgraded vehicle attributes and Favours. And all the encounters with Star Wars characters along the way added a sense of narrative to what is a racing game – a genre not renowned for its narrative.

Multiplayer and arcade modes

Star Wars Galactic Racer’s 12-player, drop-in multiplayer (with any gaps filled by bots) was great, too: wisely, it felt like a compressed version of the campaign, with five races leading up to the season decider on Derven Acos, a planet pretty much dedicated to speeder racing. Multiple online runs let me level up and eventually unlock my favourite abilities, and the racing, while fierce, didn’t feel dominated by specific players. Indeed, taking down the most fancied competitors added extra satisfaction.

Galactic Racer also has an Arcade mode, where I worked through a vast store of scenarios, setting times my online friends could try to beat across a wide range of machinery. It served as a pretty voluminous store of extra activities when I wanted to explore beyond the campaign without committing to a full six-race multiplayer series.

Fuse Games' attention to Star Wars' detailed lore is magnificent. For example, the planets are mostly familiar from the films and spin-offs, and their distinctive natures play into the racing. There’s Jakku, the desert graveyard for Imperial Star Destroyers, which provides all manner of jagged metallic obstacles to avoid. On the frozen Ando Prime, I found my steering would freeze if I didn’t drive through heating tunnels, and on the industrially ravaged Sentinel I discovered that too much time spent skimming over chemical pools would corrode my speeder and cause it to disintegrate.

Galactic Racer doesn’t get involved in any of the political elements of the various Star Wars adaptations – it tends towards the whimsical end of the spectrum, but I did encounter plenty of priggish ex-Imperial types and more bearable ex-rebellion luminaries. And Galactic Racer looks fabulous: its meticulously authentic environments are rendered in high fidelity that mirrors the films, populated by beings and vehicles that could only exist in the Star Wars universe. Countless tiny touches will delight even the most obsessive Star Wars fans.

Is Star Wars Galactic Racer worth playing?

Overall, Star Wars Galactic Racer is by far the best Star Wars game released in recent years, almost certainly the best Star Wars racing game ever and is right up there with the best ever Star Wars games, full stop. It feels right from the moment it begins and is really fun to play, with just the right amount of forgiveness for players whose driving skills aren’t preternatural, a campaign with unexpected narrative depth, and multiplayer that embraces all skill levels.

Which is quite a triumph for the first game from a start-up developer. Although it feels like the game a bunch of racing specialists always wanted to make, it also feels like a labour of love for all things Star Wars. Anyone who considers themselves a proper Star Wars fan would do well to check it out.