Friday, January 08, 2016

Tech Awards!

Ten technical innovations were recognized today by the Motion Picture Academy, two of them to ...

Richard Chuang and Rahul Thakkar for the groundbreaking design, and to Andrew Pilgrim, Stewart Birnam and Mark Kirk for the review workflows and advanced playback features, of the DreamWorks Animation Media Review System. Over its nearly two decades of development, this pioneering system enabled desktop and digital theater review. It continues to provide artist-driven, integrated, consistent and highly scalable studio-wide playback and interactive reviews. ...

Brian McLean and Martin Meunier for pioneering the use of rapid prototyping for character animation in stop-motion film production. LAIKA’s inventive use of rapid prototyping has enabled artistic leaps in character expressiveness, facial animation, motion blur and effects animation. ...

Technical advances get recognized by the Academy on a regular basis, which is good. Without tech development, there's no sound, no wide screen, no color, no 3-D, no digital effects, and on and on.

The bad part is, the technical awards ceremony is always boiled down to quick video-taped snippets that get shunted to the edges of the prime time awards telecast when actors, directors, and screenwriters are getting their due.

But the tech achievements are important, even if they get short shrift. Hell, without technical research and development, there would never have been movies in the first place.

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