Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal presented the first Oscar statuette of the year to Ray Feeney when the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences presented him with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award at the Scientific and Technical Awards on Feb. 10, 2007, at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills.
Feeney, a multi award-winning vfx and technology pioneer, told the gathering that since most post-production has gone digital, digital production is the next step. He said that transition will be, "as important a change as the introduction of sound or the shift from black-and-white to color cinematography." Feeney serves as vice chairman of the scientific and technical wards committee and Donald Rogers is its chair.
The brainy Hollywood gathering that honors the unsung heroes of show business who make the gadgets that make people and things look and sound so good always comes a few weeks before the primetime televised Oscars, which allots a few minutes of the event to the telecast.
A special award recognized the industry wide effort to shift from silver-based to cyan-dye analog soundtracks on release prints, resulting in a significant environmental impact. The conversion took 13 years to develop and have theaters implement the redlight scanners for the new track.
One of the 12 honorees, Ioan Allen of Dolby told the group that the new process saved 40 million gallons of water a year and prevented the use of 750 tons of chemicals annually.
Longtime committee chief Richard Edlund received the John A. Bonner medal for service to the Academy. Edlund had been the Academy's guiding force for the awards and ceremony for many years. On a leadership sabbatical, he's busy as vfx supervisor on Charley Wilson's War for director Mike Nichols.
A large contingency was present from Industrial Light and Magic, for its two awards, as were Austrians for the two awards given to Arri. Dr. Anil Kokaram, one of the four recipients for creating the Furnace software tools quipped he, "never thought he would receive an award for making dirty pictures," since part of the toolset is often used to add particles and grain.
Academy president Sid Ganis said he was happy the kudofest had returned to the Beverly Wilshire and put in a plug for the Academy's upcoming museum, which will showcase many of the achievements recognized by the sci/tech committee.
Each year the Academy recruits an actress to host and present all of the awards, a daunting task with the technical jargon presented on a distant teleprompter. "I suspect this is a joke you sci/tech guys play on an unsuspecting actress," Gyllenhaal said, joining the ranks of fellow presenters such as Scarlett Johansson, Rachel McAdams, Jennifer Garner, Selma Hymack, Kate Hudson and Charlize Theron.
She faired better than most. When describing the work of winner Florian Kainz, for the design of OpenEXR, a system, the star said, "engineered to meet the requirements of the visual effects industry by providing for lossless and lossy compression of tiered and tiled images. There's a reason the Academy recruits smart actresses for this event -- you wouldn't entrust Jessica Simpson with words like "lossy."
Colin Davidson, one of the four honored for his work on ILM's image-based modeling system, echoed the sentiment of most gathered there. "An award like this is a rare and beautiful thing," he said. "An award like this to a geek is a rare and beautiful thing squared."
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