As the year comes to a close, here are our informal, fun and relaxed favourite things of 2025: tech, films and gadgets.
TV or streaming episode: USS Callister
There are so many great shows – leaving out VFX, the UK’s Celebrity Traitors was brilliant, but it is hard to go past The Pitt as the best show of 2025. But as this is fxguide, we should focus on sffects heavy shows, here Foundation Season 3, (especially the start of the season), was brilliant VFX as was Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. But for a single episode Black Mirror : USS Callister wins. Sorry, it just does.
VFX feature film: too close to call
We review and write about loads of great films in a year, with brilliant VFX – 2025 had so many, here is the short list for this year’s VFX Oscars.
In alphabetical order by title, are
- Avatar: Fire and Ash
- The Electric State
- F1
- Frankenstein
- Jurassic World Rebirth
- The Lost Bus
- Sinners
- Superman
- Tron: Ares
- Wicked: For Good
Nominations voting begins on Monday, January 12, 2026, and concludes on Friday, January 16, 2026.
We don’t get to vote for VFX but if we did it would be hard to decide between the facial fidelity and performance capture of Avatar, especially seen in Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully, the driving realism of F1 or the joy of Wicked: For Good. But we know for many of you it will be Sinners.
* Special mention for most underrated VFX film of the year- especially in the USA: Better Man.
Cool gadget: meta glasses
We have been having fun with the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses. Generally, these glasses allow you to film video, capture images, play music and get answers with Meta AI, directly from your glasses. Our good friend Alex Fry (@ ILM Sydney) has been filming while we have been sail racing around Sydney Harbour. Trust me when you are holding on for grim life, you cant get a phone out, yet alone a regular camera. Having the ability to film anything, anytime – hands free – is just fun. Do you need them? That’s not the point now is it?
https://youtube.com/shorts/500IFiZZB3U
The new Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses works with Garmin smartwatches and films ultra-wide 122° field of view, with a 12 MP camera and 3K UHD recording. Meta has completely re-energised the wearable gadget product category.
Useful tool: Apple AirPods Pro 3 Live Translation
The Apple AirPods Pro 3 powerful Live Translation feature is a cracker, using Apple Intelligence on an iOS 26 iPhone Pro16 , these allow live translation of conversations in real-time. While the beta had issues and at times setting them up was annoyingly complicated, now that the software is fully released these allow you to hear foreign speech translated in your ears and see translations on your screen, we have set it up with Japanese, based on the English version Siri. Other options include French, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese.
VFX tech: Gaussian Splats
While not new to 2025, 3D Gaussian Splats moved to centre stage. From its use in Superman, or it’s applications in UE5, to the new Nuke v17; 2025 was the year that all eyes moved from NeRFs to splats.
At a technical level, Gaussian Splatting offers a scene representation that sits between traditional polygonal meshes and neural radiance fields (NeRFs). Instead of dense geometry or slow volumetric inference, scenes are reconstructed as millions of anisotropic 3D Gaussians with colour and opacity, which can be rendered in real time using any good GPU.
Making splats
Gaussian Splats are so significant for our industry because they fundamentally change how real-world environments, scenes, and performances are captured, represented, and rendered, shifting the balance among fidelity, speed, and creative control.
Below are some examples of splits we made using SMART, a new paper published in December 2025. This produces Gaussian Splats from a single input image. We’re then displaying them here in the Supersplat application.
Link to the original Machine Learning SMART paper (Dec 2025)
Editing Splats
For VFX, it appears this will be transformative with environments, props, and even actors captured rapidly from photogrammetry-style image sets and viewed interactively at cinematic quality. Compared to NeRFs, splats are far faster to train and render; compared to meshes, they preserve subtle view-dependent detail, translucency, and lighting nuance without heavy retopology or texture baking.
Best use of AI: The Wizard of Oz at Sphere
There have been countless impressive applications of AI this year, alongside intense debate about its implications for jobs and for the visual effects industry more broadly. Yet The Wizard of Oz at Sphere demonstrates that when AI is used thoughtfully and in close collaboration with traditional VFX workflows, it can deliver content that is technically extraordinary, immensely entertaining, and commercially successful.
The immersive presentation of The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is screened at an ultra-high 16K resolution. Led by the team at Magnopus, the original 1939 feature, shot on 35mm film, underwent a two-year transformation using AI-assisted techniques to enhance and extend the imagery for the venue’s vast 160,000-square-foot wraparound LED screen. Far from replacing craft, the project supported hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs – while proving that audiences will pay for great content, delivered by dramatically breathtaking technical innovation.
Industry podcast or YouTube 2025
One of the most insightful talks on the state of the broader VFX industry was the keynote at AI on the Lot in May 2025 – The Next Great Disruption of Media. Doug Shapiro dissects the state of the industry with an insightful and hype- free analysis of the forces currently in play in Media and Entertainment.
Most annoying thing of 2025
Labubu