Ed Catmull to Receive Gordon E. Sawyer Award
Pixar Co-Founder Helped Develop CGI RenderMan Software
Jan 7, 2009
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has voted to give this year's Gordon E. Sawyer Award to Disney Animation president and Pixar Animation Studios co-founder Edwin "Ed" Catmull Ph.D. The award honours "his lifetime of technical contributions and leadership in the field of computer graphics for the motion picture industry."
“Ed is one of the rare individuals who can bridge the space between science and art,” said Academy President Sid Ganis in a statement on the AMPAS site. “His vision, ingenuity and groundbreaking designs have made the impossible possible – for filmmakers and movie audiences around the world.”
Catmull is best known as the computer graphics genius who co-founded Pixar Animation Studios along with Apple CEO Steve Jobs and director John Lasseter. At Pixar, he helped produce an unbroken line of hit animated movies that included Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles and Cars. Catmull also helped found the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, and the computer division of Lucasfilm Ltd.
In addition to being a president at Pixar, he is also the president of Disney Animation. He received the job in 2006 when Disney CEO Robert Iger asked him and Lasseter to resurrect the storied animation studio.
But Catmull's contributions to computer graphics in film date all the way back to 1976, when a digitized image of Catmull's left hand was used in a scene from the sci-fi movie Futureworld.
Gordon E. Sawyer Award Catmull's 5th Oscar
This is Catmull's 5th Academy award for his work in CGI development. In 1993, he received his first Scientific and Engineering Oscar for "the development of PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which produces images used in motion pictures from 3D computer descriptions of shape and appearance," which he shared with fellow Pixar staffers Loren Carpenter, Rob Cook, Thomas Porter, Pat Hanrahan, Anthony A. Apodaca and Darwyn Peachey.
The RenderMan software, which translates 3-D computer descriptions of shape and appearance into images usable for film, has been used in 45 of the last 50 movies nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Visual Effects.
In 1996, Catmull received his 2nd Scientific and Engineering Oscar "for pioneering inventions in Digital Image Compositing," an outgrowth of his work on the first feature-length CGI animated movie ever made, Pixar's Toy Story. He shared this one with Alvy Ray Smith, Porter, and Tom Duff.
Catmull, along with Cook and Carpenter, received an Academy Award of Merit in 2001, "for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar's RenderMan," and a 2006 Technical Achievement Award (shared with Tony DeRose and Jos Stam) for "the original concept and the scientific and practical implementation of subdivision surfaces as a modeling technique in motion picture production."
What's The Gordon E. Sawyer Award?
This honorary Oscar is named for the former Head of the Sound department at Samuel Goldwyn Studio and three-time Academy Award winner. Sawyer, who also served as a member of the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee from 1936 to 1977, once claimed that a listing of past Academy Awards, arranged both chronologically and by category, represented a history of the development of motion pictures.
After Sawyer's death in 1980, an Honorary Oscar statuette was established in his name to recognize “an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.”
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