Eight years is all it took for FilmLight to grow from small start-up to brand leader in digital film technology. The reward for this has now arrived – an unprecedented sweep of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Sci-Tech awards, recognizing the achievements of ten of FilmLight’s founding engineers in each of the company’s three main product lines. This is the first time in the history of the Sci-Tech awards that as many as four out of the 15 awards are going to the engineers of a single company, let alone a company as small as FilmLight.
“These four awards represent the culmination of many years of commitment and hard work on the part of FilmLight staff to develop tools to support filmmaking in the 21st century,” said FilmLight Founder Wolfgang Lempp. “We feel honored and humbled and wish to express our sincere gratitude to the Academy and its members.”
Two of the awards are related to the development of Truelight, which is used to manage color representation between film and electronic displays. A Technical Achievement award is going to Mark Wolforth and Tony Sedivy for the development of Truelight’s real-time, 3D look-up table hardware system. Dr. Richard Kirk receives a Scientific and Engineering award for the overall design and development of Truelight.
Wolfgang Lempp, Theo Brown (posthumous), Tony Sedivy and Dr. John Quartel also receive a Scientific and Engineering award for the development of the Northlight scanner, whose ability to perform high-resolution, pin-registered scanning of film at the highest quality has made it the industry reference for capturing the full detail of all the information recorded on film.
The third Scientific and Engineering award will be presented to Steve Chapman, Martin Tlaskal, Darrin Smart and James Logie for the development of Baselight, one of the industry’s first digital color correction systems. Baselight has contributed to the rapid development of the digital intermediate process by greatly expanding the toolset available to digital colorists.
The awards will be presented at the Sci/Tech Awards Dinner and Ceremony in Los Angeles on February 20th.
About FilmLight
FilmLight is a manufacturer of film scanning, color grading and color management systems that are helping to transform film and video post production and setting new standards for quality, reliability and performance. For more information visit www.filmlight.ltd.uk.
