The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that 15 scientific and technical achievements, represented by 27 individual award recipients, will be honored at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony in April. This year, AMPAS is recognizing technical innovation by certain individuals in the areas of stop-motion animation, sound restoration, materials, shading, and others.
(Source: AMPAS)
The Academy Awards have long honored the year’s best motion-picture actors, directors, cinematographers, films, original songs, scores, animated projects, casting, sound, screenplays, production design, editing, makeup/hairstyling, and costume design. It also steps into the technical realm with an Oscar for best visual effects, and since 1931 has taken a giant leap further with the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards, honoring the individuals and companies whose discoveries and innovations have contributed in significant and lasting ways to motion pictures.
This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) will honor 15 scientific and technical achievements to 27 individuals for their extraordinary achievements that continue to shape the art and craft of filmmaking. “Their innovation, dedication and technical excellence have had a profound impact across our industry, enabling filmmakers to bring powerful stories to audiences around the world,” said Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor.
These awards focus on innovators who solve the industry’s most complex technical challenges—whether through enhancing the safety of practical effects with lead-free bullet hits or pushing the limits of stop-motion animation and sound restoration. As Darin Grant and Rachel Rose, co-chairs of the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards Committee point out, these technologies are now fundamental to the craft, and those behind the tools continue to elevate the moviegoing experience.
This year’s class of SciTech award recipients are:
TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS (Given annually for those achievements with an outstanding contribution to the progress of the motion picture arts and sciences; honorees receive an engraved plaque.)
Brent Bell for the research and development of safe, reliable, and effective small lead-free pyrotechnic devices used extensively in motion-picture productions throughout the world. Brent Bell at De La Mare Engineering, Inc. successfully modernized the industry standard for bullet hits by engineering a high-output, lead-free product line through extensive chemical research and the development of specialized and precise manufacturing processes.
Josef Köhler for developing the first small lead-free pyrotechnic devices available at scale. Josef Köhler Pyrotechnics set a critical precedent by overcoming significant chemical engineering hurdles to provide the film industry with a non-toxic, low-flash alternative that preserved the use of practical bullet hits while meeting rigorous new European safety and environmental standards.
Ian Medwell for developing small lead-free pyrotechnic devices used extensively for motion-picture production throughout the UK. Sterling Pyrotechnics’ high-performance, lead-free alternative to traditional squibs provides the film industry with a non-toxic, repeatable solution for practical bullet effects that maintains technical compatibility with legacy devices.
Andrea Weidlich for her research on layered materials and implementation of the layering operators and BSDFs in Wētā FX’s Manuka renderer. Weidlich’s research and the methods underlying Manuka’s layered material system have been influential across the visual effects industry and have allowed Wētā FX to raise the bar for photorealism.
Luca Fascione for the initial design and development of the layered materials system at Wētā FX. The Manuka renderer’s efficient and flexible system for layering materials has unlocked workflows that have allowed Wētā FX to scale to ever-larger productions while giving artists both creative freedom and physical accuracy.
Vincent Dedun and Emmanuel Turquin for the design, architecture, and engineering, and Jonathan Moulin for the design and creative vision, of MaterialX Lama at Industrial Light & Magic. Lama provides an artist-friendly approach to composing materials built from layers representing distinct physical phenomena. Its modular, carefully curated design allows look development artists to create unique, physically plausible appearances without writing shader code. Its ease of use has expanded and accelerated shading workflows at Industrial Light & Magic and led to broader industry adoption via its inclusion in Pixar’s RenderMan.
Josh Bainbridge and Nathan Walster for the design, architecture, and engineering of the layered shading system at Framestore. Framestore’s layered shading system was among the first to enable its users to generate novel, realistic appearances in a modular workflow by combining material layers in a physically plausible fashion. Its development has enabled Framestore to deliver diverse looks across a broad creative catalog of filmmakers’ requirements.
Bret St. Clair and Marc-Andre Davignon for the design and engineering of the suite of brushing and patching tools, and Pav Grochola and Edmond Boulet-Gilly for the design and engineering, of the Superdraw and Kismet linework tools. These tools at Sony Pictures Imageworks enabled the large-scale application of a wide variety of custom artistic styles across animated features that inspired the industry.
Baptiste Van Opstal, Jeff Budsberg, Michael Losure, Jon Lanz and Eszter Offertaler for their contributions to the stylized animation toolset at DreamWorks Animation. From linework authoring and animation to novel brushing and stamping methods, this toolset facilitates the wide range of unique art styles and painterly effects seen across DreamWorks Animation films while providing artistic control at every stage of production.
Benjamin Graf for the design, engineering, and development of dxRevive Pro. dxRevive Pro has transformed modern dialog restoration practices, combining noise reduction, layered separation and resynthesis to achieve results that maintain the realism, continuity and the emotional fidelity of on-set performances, thereby reducing the need for ADR in the postproduction process.
John Ellwood for the innovative rules and heuristics underlying the metadata and timecode matching, and Jeff Bloom for the groundbreaking waveform matching, in the Titan auto-assembly software for digital audio. Titan pioneered the auto-assembly of digital audio, eliminating the need for sound editors to manually align their sessions, and stood as the benchmark for many subsequent systems.
Marc Joel Specter for the design and development of the Kraken Dialogue Editors Toolkit, enabling precise audio assembly. With an intuitive user interface and transcription utility that provides audio asset management, enabling direct access to edit decision lists and audio session files, Kraken expedites the assembly of audio files while providing visual aids to find and resolve issues.
Justin Webster for the design and engineering of Matchbox, a system for audio and video matching that enables auto-reconform. Providing detailed insight into differences between audio and video files, even in the absence of metadata, Matchbox enables rapid application of changes in post-production while preserving previous creative work.
Paul Debevec for his pioneering work in high dynamic range, image-based lighting techniques. Debevec demonstrated the advantages of high dynamic range image-based lighting, and, through advocacy of the approach, led the industry to embrace new workflows. This has enabled artists to work more productively and improved the realism of computer graphics imagery in feature films.
SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING AWARD (Given for achievements that exhibit a high level of engineering and are crucial to the progress of the motion picture arts and sciences; honorees receive a specially designed trophy.)
Jamie Caliri and Dyami Caliri for the design, engineering, and continuing development of the Dragonframe software suite. Dragonframe represents an expertly designed suite of integrated tools that has transformed stop-motion animation, eliminating fragmented, error-prone methods while enabling precision at scale.
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