By Carolyn Giardina
Avid Technology’s Daly City, Calif.-based Digidesign subsidiary was presented an Academy Award for the creation and development of the ProTools digital audio workstation, which has become a standard tool for feature and commercial audio production. The Scientific and Technical Academy Awards were bestowed on Feb. 14 during a gala ceremony in Pasadena.
Digidesign general manager Dave LeBolt accepted the award on behalf of the company and thanked ProTools users around the world, saying, "You’ve all made such a contribution to the innovation."
Audio execs agreed with the Academy’s selection for its highest honor. "ProTools is the standard by which we judge all other technologies," said Howie Schwartz, CEO of hsr/ny. "It is our connection to every type of audio business in the world. ProTools is like Kleenex, Xerox and Windex."
A second Oscar statue was awarded that evening to Bill Tondreau of Kuper Controls, Albuquerque, N.M., for his advancements in the field of motion control technology for motion picture visual effects, another development that has had a significant impact on the commercialmaking industry. "His efforts have aided motion control in becoming a core technology that has helped launch the renaissance of visual effects," said actress Jennifer Garner (Alias), who presented the SciTech Awards.
The Academy’s Board of Governors awarded the Oscars, as well as four Scientific and Engineering Awards (Academy plaques), and three Technical Achievement Awards (Academy certificates), based upon recommendations from the Scientific and Technical Awards committee.
Among the Scientific and Engineering Award recipients was Stephen Regelous for Massive, the autonomous agent animation system used for the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Massive takes a new approach in simulating behaviors of large numbers of CG extras (agents). Each agent contains a primitive software "brain" used to develop behavioral rules simulating a wide range of behaviors. Massive has been productized and has already been used in commercial applications at The Mill, London and New York (see Special Report story, p. 25).
Plaques were also presented to Kinoton GmbH for the Kinoton FP 30/38 EC II studio projector, used in postproduction; to Kenneth L. Tingler, Charles C. Anderson, Diane E. Kestner and Brian A. Schell of the Eastman Kodak Company, for the development of a process-surviving antistatic layer technology for motion picture film; and to Christopher Alfred, Andrew Cannon, Michael C. Carlos, Mark Crabtree, Chuck Grindstaff and John Melanson for their contributions to the evolution of digital audio editing.
Technical Achievement Awards recipients included Christophe Hery (at Industrial Light + Magic [ILM], San Rafael, Calif.), Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri (at WETA Digital, Wellington, New Zealand) for their implementations of practical methods for rendering skin and other translucent materials using subsurface scattering techniques, which were used to create realistic-looking skin on digitally created characters, including Dobby in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (ILM) and Gollum in The Lord of the Rings (WETA).
Certificates were also awarded to Kish Sadhvani, Paul Duclos and Carl Pernicone for the portable cine viewfinder system Ultimate Director’s Finder; and to Henrik Wann Jensen, Stephen R. Marschner and Pat Hanrahan for their research in simulating subsurface scattering of light in translucent materials.
Also, the Gordon E. Sawyer Award was presented to 3-D innovator Peter D. Parks. And Douglas Greenfield, senior director of Dolby Labs, received the John A. Bonner Media of Commendation.
Review: “His Three Daughters” From Writer-Director Azazel Jacobs
Death isn't like it is in the movies, a character explains in "His Three Daughters." Elizabeth Olsen's Christina is telling her sisters, Katie (Carrie Coon) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), a story about their father, who became particularly agitated one evening while watching a movie on television in the aftermath of his wife's passing.
It's not exactly a fun memory, or present, for any of them. This is, after all, also a movie about death.
The three women have gathered in their father's small New York apartment for his final days. He's barely conscious, confined to a room that they take shifts monitoring as they wait out this agonizingly unspecific clock. But even absent the stresses of hospice, tensions would be high for Christina, Katie and Rachel, estranged and almost strangers who are about to lose the one thread still binding them. Taken together, it's a pressure cooker and a wonderful showcase for three talented actors.
Writer-director Azazel Jacobs has scripted and filmed "His Three Daughters," streaming Friday on Netflix, like a play. The dialogue often sounds more scripted than conversational (except for Lyonne, who makes everything sound her own); the locations are confined essentially to a handful of rooms in the apartment, with the communal courtyard providing the tiniest bit of breathing room.
Jacobs drops the audience into the middle of things, dolling out background and information slowly and purposefully. Coon's Katie gets the first word, a monologue really, about the state of things as she sees it and how this is going to work. She's the eldest, a type-A ball of anxiety, the mother of a difficult teenage daughter and the type of person who can barely conceal either disappointment or deep resentment. Katie also lives in... Read More