Awards season hits Hollywood: winners of the ASC, ACE, VES and Tech Oscars - Special Report

Post, March, 2004 by Daniel Restuccio

HOLLYWOOD -- The motion picture community has been busy recently, formerly acknowledging those creative individuals who work on feature films and television projects. Recent award ceremonies were held by the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), the American Cinema Editors (ACE), the Visual Effects Society (VES) and the Scientific and Technical Achievement branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

ASC

First up were the ASC awards, where Seabiscuit cinematographer John Schwartzman won the feature film award. Schwartzman thanked the ASC and particularly Seabiscuit director Gary Ross and producing team Kathleen Kennedy and Gary Marshall.

The HBO series Carnivale won two awards: one for Tami Reiker, for the Carnivale pilot in the TV movie/miniseries/pilot category in the basic cable or pay television competition, and one for cinematographer Jeffrey Jur for the Carnivale episode "Pick A Number" in the regular series category.

Silent film historian/preservationist Kevin Brownlow received a special award for his achievements in restoring classic silent films and as an author and documentary film-maker of many seminal works on movies of the silent era.

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Visual effects pioneer Howard Anderson, Jr. received the ASC President's Award. Anderson's credits include visual effects for films such as Heaven Can Wait, Blazing Saddles, The Body Snatchers, Some Like it Hot, the 1960 version of Godzilla, Tobruk, Annie and Superman.

Keifer Sutherland presented Pierre Gill (CSC) with the ASC award for Hitler: The Rise of Evil (CBS) in the TV movie/miniseries/pilot category for network television. Said Gill, "I want to thank Fellini, Coppola, Ridley Scott, Milos Forman, Kubrick, Spielberg and many others who have filled my brain with dreams, magic and passion."

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Producer/director/writer Irwin Winkler (Rocky, Raging Bull, The Right Stuff, Goodfellas) received the Board of Governors Award from presenter Kevin Klein. The ASC Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Michael Chapman by David Duchovny, who just finished directing House of D, a feature film lensed by Chapman. Chapman's body of work consists of classics like Raging Bull, The Fugitive and Taxi Driver, and such diverse films as The Wanderers, The White Dawn, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Last Waltz, Doc Hollywood, Personal Best, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, Rising Sun and Primal Fear.

SCI-TECH AWARDS

At the 2004 Scientific and Technical Academy Awards, Oscar statuettes and Academy Awards of Merit went to Digidesign, for the design, development and implementation of the Pro Tools digital audio workstation, and to Bill Tondreau of Kuper Controls for his significant advancements in the field of motion control technology for motion picture visual effects.

The event was hosted by Alias star Jennifer Garner. Chairman of the Academy Sci-Tech committee Richard Edlund welcomed guests in "celebrating another year of excellence and accomplishment in the scientific and technical communities."

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Frank Pierson departed from his prepared remarks and said, "On behalf of the writers and directors and producers of the motion picture community, you in the scientific and technical branch in the last few years, you who create the tools with which we tell our stories, have so advanced the science and technology of filmmaking that I think you have gotten a little ahead of us. You've created tools that are so extraordinary and so powerful that there is nothing that the mind of a writer or director or producer can possibly conceive that we cannot now put on film and make look real and take the audience right through the experience."

Douglas Greenfield, senior director of the production services group at Dolby Laboratories, was presented with the John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation.

Scientific and Engineering Awards went to Kinoton GmbH for the engineering and development of the Kinoton FP 30/38 EC II studio projector; Kenneth L. Tingler, Charles C. Anderson, Diane E. Kestner and Brian A. Schell of Kodak for the successful development of a process-surviving antistatic layer technology for motion picture film; Christopher Alfred, Andrew J. Cannon, Michael C. Carlos, Mark Crabtree, Chuck Grindstaff and John Melanson for their significant contributions to the evolution of digital audio editing for motion picture post; and Stephen Regelous for the design and development of Massive, the autonomous agent animation system used for the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Technical Achievement Awards were given to Kish Sadhvani for the concept and optical design, Paul Duclos for the practical realization and production engineering and Carl Pernicone for the mechanical design and engineering of the portable cine viewfinder system known as the Ultimate Director's Finder (UDF); Henrik Wann Jensen, Stephen R. Marschner and Pat Hanrahan for their pioneering research in simulating subsurface scattering of light in translucent materials; and to Christophe Hery, Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri for their groundbreaking implementations of practical methods for rendering skin and other translucent materials using subsurface scattering techniques.