Traditionally held two weeks before the big Oscar ceremony, the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards recognize significant discoveries and advancements, as well as individuals, that have made an impact in the art of motion pictures. Patrick Stewart hosted the ceremony on Saturday night at the Beverly Wilshire, where the awards were handed out.
Stewart called the honorees “film magicians” and quipped, “I have to tell you, I wouldn’t know the difference between a warp-core breach and a space-time continuum if they got into bed with me!”
Although the ceremony wasnt televised, Digital LA was at the ceremony with a roundup of all the awards. Three Oscar statuettes and nine awards for innovation were handed out.
Two Oscars went to the developers of the Houdini animation system, a suite of tools that has been used in more than 600 films. Mark Elendt and Side Effects Software each received a statue, and four other Houdini collaborators went home with an academy plaque.
The Presto visual effects software, which helps animators create fluid animations, was also recognized. It’s been used in virtually all Pixar films including Inside Out and Coco. Premo from DreamWorks and Intel was another animation program that received a plaque. It was used in How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Boss Baby.
Another award went to the BlockParty procedural rigging system at Industrial Light & Magic. It was used in films like Thor, War for the Planet of the Apes, and the latest Star Wars film.
A rotating helicopter-mounted camera known as Shotover K1 was recognized for the stunning work in Revenant and Dunkirk. A telescopic underwater crane camera was another innovation that received an award. It was recently showcased in La La Land as well as several of the Harry Potter films.
The Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which recognizes extraordinary technological contributions to the film industry, was given to Jonathan Erland. The Hollywood veteran was a co-founder of the Visual Effects Society and his film credits include the original Star Wars and Star Trek films.
“I intend to work until I drop,” he said as he hoisted the statuette. “If we don’t get the science first, there ain’t going to be no art.”
After Erland accepted his award, Stewart said, “it occurred to me that another Englishman wrote something once which is perhaps appropriate for this event. He didn’t know it would be, of course, because he lived 400 years ago.”
The 77-year-old master thespian then ad-libbed by quoting Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended — That you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.”
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?