Amerykańska Akademia Filmowa ogłosiła laureatów dorocznych nagród naukowo-technicznych. To może nie są najcenniejsze z Oscarów, a media rzadko poświęcają
im miejsce, ale zdecydowanie to te nagrody pokazują jak rozwija się kino do
strony technicznej. W tym roku doceniono 21 wynalazków i 58 jego twórców.
Oto oficjalny komunikat o tegorocznych laureatach (w oryginale). Nagrody
zostaną wręczone 7 lutego.
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 destruction effects with
minimal simulation time.
To Brice
Criswell and Ron Fedkiw for the development of the ILM PhysBAM Destruction
System.
This system
incorporates innovative research on many algorithms that provide accurate
methods for resolving contact, collision and stacking into a mature, robust and
extensible production toolset. The PhysBAM Destruction System was one of the
earliest toolsets capable of depicting large-scale destruction with a high
degree of design control.
To Ben Cole
for the design of the Kali Destruction System, to Eric Parker for the
development of the Digital Molecular Matter toolkit, and to James O’Brien for
his influential research on the finite element methods that served as a
foundation for these tools.
The
combined innovations in Kali and DMM provide artists with an intuitive,
art-directable system for the creation of scalable and realistic fracture and
deformation simulations. These tools established finite element methods as a
new reference point for believable on-screen destruction.
To Magnus
Wrenninge for leading the design and development of Field3D.
Field3D
provides a flexible and open framework for storing and accessing voxel data
efficiently. This allows interchange between previously incompatible modeling,
simulation and rendering software.
To Robert
Bridson for early conceptualization of sparse-tiled voxel data structures and
their application to modeling and simulation.
Robert
Bridson’s pioneering work on voxel data structures and its subsequent
validation in fluid simulation tools have had a significant impact on the
design of volumetric tools throughout the visual effects industry.
To Ken
Museth, Peter Cucka and Mihai Alden for the creation of OpenVDB.
OpenVDB is
a widely adopted, sparse hierarchical data structure that provides a fast and
efficient mechanism for storing and manipulating voxels.
SCIENTIFIC
AND ENGINEERING AWARDS (ACADEMY PLAQUES)
To lain
Neil for the optical design, and to Andre de Winter for the mechanical design,
of the Leica Summilux-C series of lenses.
Incorporating
novel telecentric multi-element aspherical optics, these camera lenses have
delivered unprecedented optical and mechanical performance.
To Brad
Walker, D. Scott Dewald, Bill Werner, Greg Pettitt and Frank Poradish for their
contributions furthering the design and refinement of the Texas Instruments DLP
Cinema projection technology, whose high level of performance enabled
color-accurate digital intermediate preview and motion picture theatrical
presentation.
Working in
conjunction with the film industry, Texas Instruments created a
high-resolution, high-quality digital projection system that has replaced most
film-based projection systems in the theatrical environment.
To Ichiro
Tsutsui, Masahiro Take, Mitsuyasu Tamura and Mitsuru Asano for the development
of the Sony BVM-E Series Professional OLED Master Monitor.
These
precise, wide-gamut monitors allow creative image decisions to be made on set
with confidence that the desired images can be accurately reproduced in
post-production.
To John
Frederick, Bob Myers, Karl Rasche and Tom Lianza for the development of the HP
DreamColor LP2480zx Professional Display.
This
cost-effective display offered a stable, wide color gamut, allowing
facility-wide adoption in feature animation and visual effects studios.
ACADEMY
AWARD OF COMMENDATION (SPECIAL PLAQUE)
To Steven
Tiffen, Jeff Cohen and Michael Fecik for their pioneering work in developing
dye-based filters that reduce IR contamination when neutral density filters are
used with digital cameras.
The Tiffen
Company identified the problem and rapidly engineered a series of absorptive
filters that ameliorated infrared artifacts with lenses of all focal lengths.
These widely adopted filters allow cinematographers to work as they have done
with film-based technology.
ACADEMY
AWARD OF MERIT (OSCAR STATUETTE)
To Dr.
Larry Hornbeck for the invention of digital micromirror technology as used in
DLP Cinema projection.
The Digital
Micromirror Device (DMD) is the core technology that has enabled Texas
Instruments’ DLP Cinema projection to become the standard of the motion picture
industry.
GORDON E.
SAWYER AWARD (OSCAR STATUETTE)
David W.
Gray
Given to an
individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions
have brought credit to the industry.
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