Academy SciTech Awards Gets New Date; Winners Revealed

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed that 14 scientific and technical achievements, represented by 37 individual recipients, will be honored at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony, which has been rescheduled from Feb. 18 to April 29 amid the L.A. fires. The venue remains the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

This will include a presentation of an Academy Award of Merit – an Oscar statuette – which is handed out at the discretion of the Academy, to broadly recognize “all the individuals who have developed and supported captioning technology, whether open or closed, for film.” The statuette will reside at the Academy Museum.

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Developers behind eight advancements ranging from tech that addresses fire stunt safety to camera stabilization, will receive Technical Achievement Awards (which are presented as Academy Certificates), and those behind eight innovations will accept Scientific and Engineering Awards (which are presented as Academy Plaques).

“This year’s awards encompass a wide range of film production advancements, from fire stunt safety, stabilized hand-held camera operation, and animation to post-production innovations in dialogue capture and CG imagery rendering systems. These vital technologies have expanded the visual possibilities of cinema, creating new and compelling experiences for moviegoers.” Awards Committee co-chairs Darin Grant and Raymond Yeung said in a released statement.

Scientific and Engineering Award honorees include Jayson Dumenigo for the development of the Action Factory Hydrogels aimed at fire stunt safety; Thijs Vogels, Fabrice Rousselle, David Adler, Gerhard Röthlin and Mark Meyer, for the creation of Disney’s ML (machine learning) Denoiser, which has been adopted for animation and CGI; and Nir Averbuch, Yair Chuchem and Dan Raviv for Sound Radix’s Auto Align Post 2 for blending of multiple moving microphones during postproduction.

Scientific and Engineering Award recipients also include Curt Schaller for the concept, design and development of the Trinity 2 camera stabilization system, and Roman Foltyn for the software and hardware design of its motorized stabilized head; Steve Wagner, Garrett Brown, Jerry Holway and Robert Orf for Tiffen’s Steadicam Volt stabilization system; and Dave Freeth hand-held Stabileye three-axis motorized camera stabilization system.

Technical Achievement Awards will be bestowed on Essex Edwards, James Jacobs, Jernej Barbic, Crawford Doran and Andrew van Straten for the Ziva VFX system for creating muscles and skin for digital characters; Javor Kalojanov and Kimball Thurston for Wētā FX’s ML Denoiser; Neeme Vaino for the development of Fireskin360 Naked Burn Gel for fire stunts; Dustin Brooks and Colin Decker for the development of Fire for Hire’s naked burn gel; and Attila T. Áfra for the Intel Open Image Denoise, and Timo Aila for his work at NVIDIA applying U-Nets to denoising.

Rounding out the Technical Achievement Award recipients are Mark Noel for contributions to the NACMO series of transportable six-degrees-of-freedom motion base technology; Su Tie, Bei Shimen and Zhao Yanchong for the Ronin 2 gimbal system; and Tabb Firchau, John Ellison, Steve Webb, David Bloomfield and Shane Colton for Freefly Systems’ handheld Mōvi gimbals.

“As part of the Academy’s mission to celebrate artistry and innovation in filmmaking, we are honored to recognize the exceptional contributions of this year’s Scientific and Technical Awards recipients. Their work has powerfully driven advancements in our industry,” said Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy President Janet Yang in a released statement. “Also, we are deeply honored to present the Academy Award of Merit to the individuals who created and supported the development of captioning for films. This is an essential technology that plays a vital role in making the cinematic experience accessible to all.”

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