Vancouver-based inventors nab Oscar for green screen
DELTA — As Godzilla rises from the ocean depths and attacks the Golden Gate Bridge, movie audiences suspend disbelief at the captivating onscreen spectacle.
But strip out the immense monster that’s clawing apart cables and what’s left is a group of actors in military fatigues and one gargantuan, inflatable green screen.
The unique screen, stretching more than 200 metres for the 2013 Godzilla film shoot, has garnered its Vancouver-area inventors Hollywood’s highest honour — an Academy Award.
Four partners — David McIntosh, Steve Smith, Mike Branham and Mike Kirilenko — have been named Oscar winners for engineering and developing the cutting-edge green screen, called the Aircover Inflatables Airwall.
The Technical Achievement Award will be presented Saturday at the annual Scientific and Technical Award ceremony in Los Angeles.
“We took a huge risk. We built these units without knowing if they’d ever work. We all believed it was a good idea, but we didn’t know,” said Smith, CEO of Aircover Inflatables, based in Delta. Some other major motion pictures that used the visualeffects tool include Tomorrowland, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, X-Men: Apocalypse and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.
The invention was the brainchild of McIntosh, who wanted to lessen the dangers of another device — an overhead frame — used by lighting and rigging technicians during filmmaking.