14 Scientific & Technical Achievements in Consideration

As you all know, the Academy Awards on March 2nd is not the only big shindig on the Academy’s calendar. On February 15th, bang in the middle of the campaigns, the Scientific and Technical Awards will be presented at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, and earlier today the Academy announced 14 achievements that are currently in consideration. The following achievements will be discussed and scrutinized, and this list is made public to allow individuals and companies with similar devices or claims of prior art the opportunity to submit achievements for review. In December the committee will meet and vote on recommendations which will be put to the Board of Governor’s who will determine the winners.

Now please help me because the following list of things make almost zero sense to me. I’m not the most technical person. Here are the 14 achievements in consideration for a Scientific and Technical Oscar:

Neutral density filters that remove infrared contamination.

• Prompted by the submission of the Infrared Neutral Density (IR ND) Filter Technology (Tiffen Co.)

Untethered HD video assist devices.

• Prompted by the submission of Meridian (Boxx TV Ltd.)

Software tools for accelerated simulation and rendering of smoke, fire and explosions.

• Prompted by the submission of Plume (ILM) and Flux (DreamWorks Animation)

Physically based shading and lighting techniques for digital rendering.

• Prompted by the submission Efficient Physically Inspired Shading (Pixar Animation Studios)

Software tools for integrated sculpting and painting of digital models.

• Prompted by the submission of Mudbox (Autodesk) and ZBrush (Pixologic)

Pre-computation techniques for visibility and lighting in rendering applications.

• Prompted by the submission of Weta’s Spherical Harmonics Lighting (Weta Digital)

Compositing systems using per-pixel “deep” depth information.

• Prompted by the submission of Deep Compositing (Weta Digital)

Software frameworks for integrated and extensible VFX and animation applications.

• Prompted by the submission of Zeno (ILM)

Integrated software tools for performance capture, visualization and manipulation.

• Prompted by the submission of MotionBuilder (Autodesk)

Non-explosive car flipping devices.

• Prompted by the submission of the Pneumatic Car Flipper (Fxperts, Inc.)

Helicopter-based camera motion-control platforms.

• Prompted by the submission of Flying-Cam 3.0 SARAH (Flying-Cam)

Digital workflow specifications for managing color.

• Prompted by the submission of ASC CDL (D-Cinema Consulting)