The Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) has announced the recipients of the 2015 HPA Engineering Excellence Award. The award was created to spotlight and reward companies and individuals providing services for the professional media content industry including, but not limited to media, content production, finishing, distribution and archive, for their outstanding technical and creative ingenuity. The coveted honors will be bestowed during the HPA Awards gala on November 12, 2015 at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the HPA Awards.
The winners of the 2015 HPA Engineering Excellence Award, sponsored by NAB Show, are:
Canon, 4K Cine Zoom Lens
The Canon Super 35mm 4K cinema zoom lens offers a 20:1 zoom range with a 1000mm telephoto capability. Its compact body is less than 16 inches long and weighs less than 15 pounds.
Dolby Laboratories, Dolby Vision Projector
The Dolby VisionTM projector displays high dynamic range HDR images with a contrast ratio greater than 100,000:1 and projects a color gamut of Rec2020.
Panasonic, 4K Camera Imagers
Panasonic’s Super 35mm 4K DCI imager, used in the Panasonic VariCam35 4K, features high dynamic range, high speed 4K 120fps, low noise and dual native ASA technology, resulting in switchable 800/5000 ISO.
Quantel, Pablo Rio 8K
Quantel’s Pablo Rio performs real-time 8K 60p editing, color correction and finishing. Its benchmark is set to work with uncompressed, full size 8k graphic files.
Sony Electronics, BVMX300 Monitor
Sony’s BVMX300 30 inch 4K OLED monitor displays full 4K (4096×2160) images as normal range or as high dynamic range at color gamuts exceeding DCI P3.
In addition, Colorfront will receive an Honorable Mention citation for its Interactive HFR Frame-Blending, which features real-time, interactive HFR frame-blending with a simple slider interface to control the amount of motion blur of a moving object.
Joachim Zell, chair of the Engineering Excellence Awards Committee, commented, “Every year, the HPA Engineering Excellence Awards attract the most interesting and intriguing submissions from a wide variety of companies. This year we saw a particularly diverse and compelling array of entries, and the judging was difficult and close across the board. It is a testament to the incredible ingenuity of the engineering community that we saw such a competitive field. We congratulate the winners, and we want to thank all who entered; this was an entirely impressive and record group of entries. Congratulations to the winners and to their worthy competitors.”
In addition to the Engineering Excellence Awards, the HPA Awards will recognize excellence in 12 craft categories, including color grading, editing, sound, and visual effects. The HPA Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation will be announced shortly. As announced earlier, Leon Silverman has been named the recipient of the HPA 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More