Scientific and Technical Achievements to Be Honored with Academy Awards®

January 04, 2007 - Beverly Hills, CA — The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the 15 winners of Scientific and Technical Academy Awards, which will be presented at the Beverly Wilshire hotel on Saturday, February 10.

Awards Administration Director Rich Miller said that unlike other Academy Awards, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards do not have to have been developed and introduced during 2006. “The achievement can be a device or a discovery, a formula or a method, but it must demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures,” Miller said.

Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical achievements for 2006 are:
Technical Achievement Awards
(Academy Certificate)

To Joshua Pines and Chris Kutcka of Technicolor Digital Intermediates for the design and development of the TDI process for creating archival separations from digital image data.

The TDI process is based on the production of digital separation negatives creating archival elements that can be scanned and digitally recombined in the future.

To Bill Feightner and Chris Edwards of E-Film for the design and development of the E-Film process for creating archival separations from digital image data.

The E-Film process is based on the production of digital separation negatives creating archival elements that can be scanned and digitally recombined in the future.

To Albert Ridilla, Papken Shahbazian, Ronald Belknap and Jay McGarrigle for the design and development of the Hollywood Film Company Brumagic MPST Densitometer.

The Brumagic MPST was designed specifically to measure density in the motion picture soundtrack and has become the densitometer of choice for reading soundtrack negative and positive densities worldwide.

To Klemens Kehrer, Josef Handler, Thomas Smidek and Marc Shipman Mueller for the design and development of the Arriflex 235 Camera System.

Designed for handheld photography, the features of this small, lightweight MOS camera also allow it to be used as a secondary production camera.

To Florian Kainz for the design and engineering of OpenEXR, a software package implementing 16-bit, floating-point, high dynamic range image files.

Widely adopted, OpenEXR is engineered to meet the requirements of the visual effects industry by providing for lossless and lossy compression of tiered and tiled images.

To Walter Trauniger and Ernst Tschida for the design and engineering of the Arri WRC wireless remote lens control system.

This highly modular system permits accurate and reliable wireless control with multiple hand controls of all lens functions.

To Christian Tschida and Martin Waitz of cmotion for the design and engineering of the cmotion Wireless Remote System.

The graphical user interface of the cmotion system eases the difficult task of following focus and the unique lens tag system recalls the calibration for each lens.

To Peter Litwinowicz and Pierre Jasmin for the design and development of the RE: Vision Effects family of software tools for optical flow-based image manipulation.

A unique user interface and relatively low cost have made these tools ubiquitous in the visual effects community.

Scientific and Engineering Awards
(Academy Plaque)

To Phillip J. Feiner, Jim Houston, Denis Leconte and Chris Bushman of Pacific Title and Art Studio for the design and development of the Rosetta process for creating digital YCM archival masters for digital film restoration.

With elements that may be recombined either digitally or optically, the Rosetta separations process offers a uniquely great versatility in achieving high quality results for digital YCM archiving.

To Steve Sullivan, Colin Davidson, Max Chen and Francesco Callari for the design and development of the ILM Image-based Modeling System.

This highly integrated system facilitates interactive construction and editing of 3D models from digital photographs and addresses the three-dimensional scanning needs of motion pictures in unique and innovative ways.

To Dr. Bill Collis, Simon Robinson, Ben Kent and Anil Kokaram for the design and development of the Furnace integrated suite of software tools that robustly utilizes temporal coherence for enhancing visual effects in motion picture sequences.

The Furnace toolset’s modularity, flexibility and robustness have set a high standard of quality for optical flow-based image manipulation.

To Howard Preston and Mirko Kovacevic for the design and engineering of the Preston Cinema Systems FI+Z wireless remote system.

Pioneering unprecedented reliability and flexibility in wireless lens and camera operation, the FI+Z has continued to be a leader in innovation since its introduction in 1994.

Award of Commendation
(Special Award)

To Ioan Allen, J. Wayne Anderson, Mary Ann Anderson, Ted Costas, Paul R. Goldberg, Shawn Jones, Tom Kuhn, Dr. Alan Masson, Colin Mossman, Martin Richards, Frank Ricotta and Richard C. Sehlin for their contributions to the environmentally responsible industry conversion from silver-based to cyan dye analog soundtracks.

John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation
(Medallion)

To Richard Edlund for his “outstanding service and dedication in upholding the high standards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”

Gordon E. Sawyer Award
(Oscar® Statuette)

To Ray Feeney for his “technological contributions, which have brought credit to the motion picture industry.”

Contact Information

Teni Melidonian

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Contact via E-mail