Advances in theatrical exhibition will be among 16 achievements that will be recognized during the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Scientific and Technical Awards presentation on Feb. 23 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
“This year, we honor 16 technologies for their exceptional contributions to how we craft and enhance the movie experience, from the safe execution of on-set special effects to new levels of image presentation fidelity and immersive sound to open frameworks that enable artists to share their digital creations across different software and studios seamlessly,” summed up SciTech Awards committee chair Barbara Ford Grant.
Those receiving Scientific and Engineering Awards (Academy Plaques) during the ceremony will be the creators of the Dolby Atmos object-based immersive cinema sound system. The Academy will recognize Charles Q. Robinson, Nicolas Tsingos, Christophe Chabanne, Mark Vinton and the team of software, hardware and implementation engineers of the Cinema Audio Group at Dolby Laboratories.
Digital cinema has also advanced through the use of laser projection systems. The Academy will honor Peter Janssens, Goran Stojmenovik and Wouter D’Oosterlinck, for the development of the Barco RGB laser projector; Michael Perkins, Gerwin Damberg, Trevor Davies and Martin J. Richards, for the Christie E3LH Dolby Vision Cinema projection system (a collaboration between Dolby Cinema and Christie Digital engineering teams); and Steve Read and Barry Silverstein the IMAX Prismless laser projector.
Scientific and Engineering Awards will also be presented to Ken Museth, Peter Cucka and Mihai Aldén for the creation of OpenVDB, an open source software library; Jaden Oh for the Marvelous Designer clothing creation system; and F. Sebastian Grassia, Alex Mohr, Sunya Boonyatera, Brett Levin and Jeremy Cowles for Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) open source framework.
During the evening, Technical Achievement Awards (Academy Certificates) will be presented to Bill Beck for his “pioneering utilization of semiconductor lasers for theatrical laser projection systems;” Gregory T. Niven for his “pioneering work in using laser diodes” for laser projectors; and Yoshitaka Nakatsu, Yoji Nagao, Tsuyoshi Hirao, Tomonori Morizumi and Kazuma Kozuru for their development of these laser diodes.
Technical Achievement recipients include Arnold Peterson, Elia P. Popov and John Frazier for the initial concept of the Blind Driver Roof Pod for safe stunt driving; and Jon G. Belyeu for Movie Works Cable Cutter devices for suspension cables. They also include James Eggleton and Delwyn Holroyd for the High-Density Encoding lossless compression algorithm within the Codex recording toolset; Oliver Castle, Marcus Schoo and Keith Lackey for the Atlas scene description and evaluation framework; Jeff Lait, Dan Bailey and Nick Avramoussis for the expansion of the feature set of OpenVDB; and Lucas Miller, Christopher Jon Horvath, Steve LaVietes and Joe Ardent for open source Alembic’s caching and interchange system.
Summed up Academy CEO Bill Kramer, “The Academy recognizes and celebrates all aspects of the film industry and the diverse, talented people who make movies. Our Scientific and Technical Awards are a critical part of this mission, as they honor the individuals and companies whose discoveries and innovations have contributed in significant and lasting ways to our motion picture industry.”
