The Oscars of science and technology

The scientists and engineers who participate in developing the lighting, the special effects and the digitization and post-production processes of the best films of the year have received their respective statuettes this weekend during the ceremony of theAwardsOscartoscience and technology applied to the seventh art.

The success ofAvatar, candidate forbest film, it would not have been so successful if in each scene the blue color of the skin of its protagonists had changed. ? Computers have a different color space than film; we cannot always reproduce the colors we see on the computer screen on celluloid and vice versa “, says Mark Wilforth, an electrical engineer who has specialized in image with the companyFilmLight Limited. To overcome this difficulty Mark Wolforth and Tony Sedivy developedTruelight,? a color manager that maintains the same tones all the time and in any medium ?, which has earned them an Oscar.

PIXAR’s Per Christensen, Michael Bunnell and Christophe Hery have also received an Academy Award for developing forUp, another of the nominees for best picture, an indirect lighting system that provides “color effectsbleedingand realistic shadows for complex scenes in animated films. “

Other winners were the creators of different techniques used for scanning during the process ofDigital Intermediate(DI), which is done after a movie has been shot and consists oftransfer the image collected on celluloid to a digital support for later retouching, color correction, light effects, … These digitally transformed and manipulated chemical images are then transferred back to celluloid for projection in movie theaters. Among the awarded technologies stands out ARRISCAN, used in recent films such asnew MoonYTwilight.