B.C. special effects wizards to be honoured with Oscars
Scenes from Gravity, Man of Steel and Star Trek among winners
TORONTO — The space station fire in Gravity. Man of Steel’s Smallville battle. The volcano eruption in Star Trek Into Darkness.
Three Canadians behind special effects technologies that helped create those scenes will be feted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this weekend.
Robert Bridson of Richmond, Vancouver’s Ben Cole and Andre de Winter of Penetanguishene, Ont., will receive separate honours at the academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Saturday.
Actors Margot Robbie and Miles Teller will host the event, which will present 21 awards to 58 recipients.
“I hear it’s a great party because everyone knows in advance that they’re winning, so the mood is upbeat,” Bridson said. “I’ll take my wife down. I think this is probably the best date I’ll ever take her on.”
Bridson is getting a technical achievement award certificate for what he described as “the early work in figuring out how to efficiently store volume data” for film and commercial studios.
For instance, if a movie scene requires a coastline with a wave crashing in, the software for which he “helped write the guts” will “store, in detail throughout, the volume of water information about how fast it’s moving, what direction it’s moving, how much air is dissolved in it and so on.” The St. John’s native said he and his partner started making the software, called Naiad, 13 years ago.
Back then big studios had inhouse tools “that were difficult to use and had some issues, but there wasn’t anything off the shelf that people could use to do the really impressive, big work.”
The first adopters of the technology were Weta, a New Zealand design and effects facility that worked on Lord of the Rings, and creative studio Framestore in England.
Since then, Naiad (which was acquired by Autodesk) has been used to create major movie scenes including the aforementioned Gravity and Star Trek Into Darkness sequences, as well as the coastline shot in Avatar. Cole is also getting a technical achievement award certificate, for the design of MPC’s Kali Destruction System. Colleagues Eric Parker and James O’Brien are being recognized alongside him for their work on tech components that support Kali.
Cole said their work has provided a new way of doing a wide range of high-scale, high-quality destruction effects in film.
Examples include the Man of Steel battle scene as well as the slow-motion destruction of a Japanese-style pagoda in 2011’s Sucker Punch and the rendering of a boat that gets ripped to pieces in X-Men: First Class.
“Most of the movies that MPC has worked on in the last five years have had this technology in there somewhere,” said Cole, 40, who was born in England and has lived in Vancouver since 2008.
De Winter is getting a scientific and engineering award plaque for the mechanical design of the Leica Summilux-C series of lenses. He’s being recognized alongside lain Neil, who did the optical design for the lenses.
The lenses have been used in films including X-Men: The Last Stand, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Birdman.
“It still astonishes me to this day, when you get a chance to peek behind the scenes, at how a movie was constructed,” said Bridson, 38. “It’s just flabbergasting how much is now routinely done fully computergenerated. I think the really exciting thing is that we’re getting towards the point where you don’t necessarily need to be a giant studio to make a really compelling film.”