Mark Kimball.

This Saturday night the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will honor a technology expert who has helped the film business move into the digital age. Mark Kimball, who co-chairs the Digital Imaging Technology Subcommittee of AMPAS' Science and Technology Council, has been named the recipient of the 2008 John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation. Kimball, a 30-year industry veteran, has been a technology contributor to such films as Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Pocahontas, The Rescuers Down Under, Fantasia/2000, Dinosaur and Tron.

The Bonner medal, bestowed at the annual Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards dinner at the Beverly Wilshire, was first awarded in 1977. Kimball joins a list of honorees that includes luminaries like special effects pioneer Linwood Dunn and John Whitney Sr., the father of computer graphics. "I'm thrilled to be included in such a group," admits Kimball. "I'm completely dumbfounded to be singled out."

Kimball's career traces an arc from the traditional 2D animation that Disney was producing when he joined that studio in 1980, to the work with digital cinema and stereoscopy that has occupied him in the last four years as an independent consultant. Kimball has served as one of Disney's representatives to the Digital Cinema Initiative, the consortium of six studios tasked with developing specifications for digital standards. "So much work went into that," he recalls.

Kimball received his first award from the Academy in 1991 for the CAPS system. © A.M.P.A.S.

"Everyone came in with ideas about the way it should be, and as a group everyone had the right ideas. Which is not to say all the problems have been solved, but over the long run the equipment will get more cost-effective and the problems will be worked out."

The Bonner Medal isn't Kimball's first honor from the Academy. He previously received a Scientific and Engineering Award in 1991 for the design and development of the CAPS production system for feature film animation, an award that was shared by a team of technologists from both Disney and Pixar. During his 20-year Disney tenure, Kimball served as the CAPS logistics system lead, a senior software systems specialist, a consulting engineer and finally chief technologist. "I headed the infrastructure part of the project," he explains modestly. "I focused on how to track and manage the millions of files that were being generated, and to make sure that they got to the workstations quickly."

Multiplane camera effects used in 1940's Pinocchio were revived with the CAPS system that Kimball helped design. © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

The significance of the CAPS system to Disney animation, Kimball notes, "Was that we regained a lot of the traditional capabilities that we'd lost over the years due to costs -- like multiplane camera effects. Think about the multiplane effects in Pinocchio, where the camera is zooming in on Pinocchio. That was a 25-second sequence. I knew how much work it was to shoot a single frame of multiplane. So to be able to again see long sequences of multiplane in dailies was a thrill."

Through the technology that was developed at this time, he adds, "The Rescuers Down Under could be 100% digitally produced. Artists still drew the artwork, but from beginning to end it was all scanned in and colored on computers and composited."

Kimball recalls that among his many technology responsibilities at Disney was putting computers on the animation cameras for the studio's exposure control systems. "It allowed for a lot of automation for setting lights and making sure that you turned over the shutter the proper number of times." This technology was used to create Disney's in-house contributions to Tron, the first feature containing significant 3D-CGI. The film's CG work was subcontracted to such fledgling companies as MAGI, Robert Abel & Associates and Digital Prods., because, as Kimball observes, "For Disney to have even imagined it could do that itself would have been like saying they could land on the moon!"