Sci-Tech awards honor tech storytellers

The storytellers behind-the-scenes in Hollywood received their recognition Saturday night at the Scientific and Technical Awards.

Actors Miles Teller and Margot Robbie hosted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences event which featured 59 cutting edge sci-tech awards.

"Tonight's story is about 59 individuals who have advanced the art and science of motion pictures and we honor them in recognition of their work," said Robbie.

Added Teller: "At the core of what you do when you are working countless hours typing code, testing the hardware and connecting the hydraulics, you are helping to tell the stories."

Awards were distributed for innovations ranging from the DLP Cinema digital projection technology to the development of the ILM PhysBAM Destruction System.

But, as Richard Edlund, the chair of the academy's Scientific and Technical Awards committee, said from the podium, the impact of the advancements was simple for Hollywood.

"They wouldn't be able to make movies without us," said Edlund. "This is your night."

The complete list of winners:

Academy Award of Merit (Oscar Statuette)

Dr. Larry Hornbeck
For the invention of digital micromirror technology as used in DLP Cinema projection.

Gordon E. Sawyer Award (Oscar Statuette)

David W. Gray

Given to an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.

Academy Award of Commendation (Special Plaque)

Steven Tiffen, Jeff Cohen and Michael Fecik

For their pioneering work in developing dye-based filters that reduce IR contamination when neutral density filters are used with digital cameras.

Technical Achievement Award (Academy Certificate)

Peter Braun

For the concept and development of the MAT-Towercam Twin Peek, a portable, remote-controlled, telescoping column that smoothly positions a camera up to 24 feet vertically.

Robert Nagle and Allan Padelford

For The Biscuit Jr. self-propelled, high-performance, drivable camera and vehicle platform.

Harold Milligan, Steven Krycho and Reiner Doetzkies

For the implementation engineering in the development of the Texas Instruments DLP Cinema digital projection technology.

Cary Phillips, Nicolas Popravka, Philip Peterson and Colette Mullenhoff

For the architecture, development and creation of the artist-driven interface of the ILM Shape Sculpting System.

Tim Cotter, Roger van der Laan, Ken Pearce and Greg LaSalle

For the innovative design and development of the MOVA Facial Performance Capture system.

Dan Piponi, Kim Libreri and George Borshukov

For their pioneering work in the development of Universal Capture at ESC Entertainment.

Marco Revelant, Alasdair Coull and Shane Cooper

For the original concepts and artistic vision (Revelant) and for the original architectural and engineering design (Coull and Cooper) of the Barbershop hair grooming system at Weta Digital.

Michael Sechrest, Chris King and Greg Croft

For the modeling design and implementation (Sechrest) for the real-time interactive engineering (King), and for the user interface design and implementation (Croft) of SpeedTree Cinema.

Scott Peterson, Jeff Budsberg and Jonathan Gibbs

For the design and implementation of the DreamWorks Animation Foliage System.

Erwin Coumans, Nafees Bin Zafar and Stephen Marshall

For the development of the Bullet physics library (Coumans), and for the separate development of two large-scale destruction simulation systems based on Bullet (Zafar and Marshall).

Brice Criswell and Ron Fedkiw

For the development of the ILM PhysBAM Destruction System.

Ben Cole, Eric Parker and James O'Brien

For the design of the Kali Destruction System (Cole), for the development of the Digital Molecular Matter toolkit (Parker), and for his influential research on the finite element methods that served as a foundation for these tools (O'Brien).

Magnus Wrenninge
For leading the design and development of Field3D.

Robert Bridson

For early conceptualization of sparse-tiled voxel data structures and their application to modeling and simulation.

Ken Museth, Peter Cucka and Mihai Aldén

For the creation of OpenVDB.

Scientific and Engineering Awards (Academy Plaque)

lain Neil and André de Winter
For the optical design (Neil), and for the mechanical design (Winter), of the Leica Summilux-C series of lenses.

Brad Walker, D. Scott Dewald, Bill Werner, Greg Pettitt and Frank Poradish

For their contributions furthering the design and refinement of the Texas Instruments DLP Cinema projection technology, whose high level of performance enabled color-accurate digital intermediate preview and motion picture theatrical presentation.

Ichiro Tsutsui, Masahiro Take, Mitsuyasu Tamura and Mitsuru Asano

For the development of the Sony BVM-E Series Professional OLED Master Monitor.

John Frederick, Bob Myers, Karl Rasche and Tom Lianza

For the development of the HP DreamColor LP2480zx Professional Display