Canadians honoured at sci-tech Oscars

Technical awards recognize film industry’s contributions to science

Martin Scorsese has nothing on Toronto-based graphics researcher Jos Stam.

Where The Departed director has one Oscar, Stam is about to receive his third on Saturday, for work on an operating system for 3D graphics and special effects that’s been used on major blockbusters including the Lord of the Rings films.

He’s one of two Canadians getting an award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at what’s considered the Oscars for the scientific and technical worlds.

The other is Derek Bradley, a research scientist from Smiths Falls, Ont., who is being honoured for a technology that can reconstruct the 3D shape of actors’ faces in full motion and at a high resolution.

For Bradley, it’s an honour he’s been longing for since he became interested in film and onscreen visual effects.

“It was really my life goal,” Bradley said from Zurich, where he works for Disney Research.

Stam — along with Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull and the animation studio’s senior scientist Tony DeRose — will receive a Scientific and Engineering Award academy plaque for their pioneering work on a technology used by digital artists in most production houses to model and animate through a method known as subdivision surface.

“What I do is I create the brushes, sort of. I hide the math through the animator,” said Stam.

“What you see on the screen is essentially the work of the production house and we just gave them the tools with which they could create these effects.”

Bradley — along with Thabo Beeler, Bernd Bickel and Markus Gross — will receive a Technical Achievement Award academy certificate for the conception, design and engineering of the Medusa Performance Capture System, developed for Disney.

Medusa captures detailed, 3D versions of actors’ faces and tracks their motions, without the traditional motion-capture dots or makeup, for the purpose of visual effects in film.

The technology has been used in films including Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, The Jungle Book, Avengers: Infinity War and Solo: A Star Wars Story.