Academy to Honor Sci-Tech Achievements

LOS ANGELES - The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that 21 scientific and technical achievements represented by 58 individual award recipients will be honored at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation on Saturday, February 7, at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills.

In addition, veteran sound engineer and Dolby Laboratories Executive David W. Gray will receive the Gordon E. Sawyer Award (an Oscar statuette), presented to an individual in the motion-picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry. Gray's career has encompassed the design, refinement, and implementation of groundbreaking cinema sound technologies, including stereo optical soundtracks, digital sound on film, and most recently, Dolby Atmos. He has served for many years on the Academy's Science and Technology Council and its Theater Standards Committee, among others, as well as chaired the audio study group of SMPTE's pioneering DC28 technology committee, from which the first two SMPTE Digital Cinema standards were published.

Our honorees represent an enormous range of technologies, from camera rigs to software systems, with names as colorful as Biscuit Jr., Barbershop, and PhysBAM, said Richard Edlund, Academy Award-winning visual effects artist and chair of the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee. They exemplify the phenomenal creativity of professionals in the scientific and technical community, and the invaluable contributions they make to what is arguably the most creative industry in the world.

Unlike other Academy Awards to be presented this year, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards need not have been developed and introduced during 2014. Rather, the achievements must demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures.

The Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievements are:

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS (ACADEMY CERTIFICATES)

To Peter Braun for the concept and development of the MAT-Towercam Twin Peek, a portable, remote-controlled, telescoping column that smoothly positions a camera up to 24 feet vertically. This small cross-section system from Mad About Technology can operate from above or below the camera, achieving nearly impossible shots with repeatable movements through openings no larger than the camera itself.

To Robert Nagle and Allan Padelford for The Biscuit Jr. self-propelled, high-performance, drivable camera and vehicle platform The Biscuit Jr.'s unique chassis and portable driver pod enables traveling photography from a greater range of camera positions than previously possible, while keeping actors safe and the rig out of frame.

To Harold Milligan, Steven Krycho, and Reiner Doetzkies for the implementation engineering in the development of the Texas Instruments DLP Cinema digital projection technology. Texas Instruments' color-accurate, high-resolution, high-quality digital projection system has replaced most film-based projection systems in the theatrical environment.

To Cary Phillips, Nico Popravka, Philip Peterson, and Colette Mullenhoff for the architecture, development, and creation of the artist-driven interface of the ILM Shape Sculpting System. This comprehensive system allows artists to quickly enhance and modify character animation and simulation performances. It has become a crucial part of ILM's production workflow over the past decade.

To Tim Cotter, Roger van der Laan, Ken Pearce, and Greg LaSalle for the innovative design and development of the MOVA Facial Performance Capture system. The MOVA system provides a robust way to capture highly detailed, topologically consistent, animated meshes of a deforming object. This technology is fundamental to the facial pipeline at many visual effects companies. It allows artists to create character animation of extremely high quality.

To Dan Piponi, Kim Libreri and George Borshukov for their pioneering work in the development of Universal Capture at ESC Entertainment. The Universal Capture system broke new ground in the creation of realistic human facial animation. This technology produced an animated, high-resolution, textured mesh driven by an actor's performance.

To Marco Revelant for the original concepts and artistic vision, and to Alasdair Coull and Shane Cooper for the original architectural and engineering design, of the Barbershop hair grooming system at Weta Digital. Barbershop's unique architecture allows direct manipulation of full-density hair using an intuitive, interactive and procedural toolset, resulting in greatly enhanced productivity with finer-grained artistic control than is possible with other existing systems.

To Michael Sechrest for the modeling design and implementation, Chris King for the real-time interactive engineering, and Greg Croft for the user interface design and implementation of SpeedTree Cinema. This software substantially improves an artist's ability to create specifically designed trees and vegetation by combining a procedural building process with the flexibility of intuitive, direct manipulation of every detail.

To Scott Peterson, Jeff Budsberg, and Jonathan Gibbs for the design and implementation of the DreamWorks Animation Foliage System. This toolset has a hierarchical spline system, a core data format and an artist-driven modeling tool, which have been instrumental in creating art-directed vegetation in animated films for nearly two decades.

To Erwin Coumans for the development of the Bullet physics library, and to Nafees Bin Zafar and Stephen Marshall for the separate development of two large-scale destruction simulation systems based on Bullet. These pioneering systems demonstrated that large numbers of constrained rigid bodies could be used to animate visually complex, believable

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