LOS ANGELES — The 9th Annual Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) awards were held last night at the Skirball Cultural Center to a packed house of over 500 industry post production professionals.
Leon Silverman, president of HPA, commented that this has been an amazing year for the HPA and the post industry, and that one of the most significant events is the merger of the HPA with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).
“HPA is excited about its partnership with SMPTE. Our two organizations compliment how we serve both the creative and technical communities. Tonight at the HPA Awards, as we celebrate the creativity and technical innovation within our community, we are proud to have our colleagues from SMPTE at our side.”
HPA president Leon Silverman
The HPA honored 12 craft categories and presented Engineering Excellence Awards to the 12G-SDI Chipset by Macom, which enables 4K post production; the Iray Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) by Nvidia that provides improved workflows for interacting with photo-real digital models; and the Tachyon Wormhole by Wohler/Cinnafilm, which re-times assets and allows for faster than realtime transcoding.
The HPA Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation went to the American Society of Cinematographers for their Color Decision List (ASC CDL), allowing directors and DPs to set the “look” of a shot on-set and carry it through the post workflow, and to DigitalFilm Tree for ProStack, their cloud based post workflow solution.
Silverman, commented earlier that, “The HPA Awards have become an important acknowledgement and celebration of creativity in content, technology and workflow innovation. This year’s awards for Engineering Excellence and Creativity and Innovation in Post Production represent significant and foundational new approaches. The HPA is proud to be able to recognize these outstanding achievements.”
Winners of the 2014 HPA AWARDS are:
Color Grading: Feature
Gravity: Steven J. Scott // Technicolor
Color Grading: Television
Reign – Pilot: David Cole // Modern VideoFilm
Color Grading: Commercial
Doosan Heavy Industries : Siggy Ferstl // Company 3
Editing: Feature Film
Captain Phillips : Christopher Rouse, ACE
Editing – Television
Breaking Bad – Felina : Skip Macdonald, ACE
Editing – Commercial
Nissan Juke Trigger : Doobie White // Therapy Studios
Sound – Feature
Gravity : Glenn Freemantle // Sound 24, Skip Lievsay // Warner Bros. Sound; Christopher Benstead and Niv Adiri // Warner Bros. De Lane Lea
Sound – Television
Toy Story OF TERROR! : Axel Geddes // Pixar Animation Studios & Tom Myers; Gary Summers, Michael Silvers and Dustin Cawood // Skywalker Sound
Sound – Commercial
Honda Europe Inner Beauty : Anthony Moore and Tom Joyce // Factory
Visual Effects – Feature
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, Erik Winquist, Keith Miller and Paul Story // Weta Digital
Visual Effects – Television
Game of Thrones – The Children: Joe Bauer // Fire and Blood Productions, Sven Martin // Pixomondo, Jörn Grosshans // Mackevision, Thomas Schelesny // Scanline VFX & Matthew Rouleau // Rodeo FX
Visual Effects – Commercial
GE Childlike Imagination: Benjamin Walsh, Dominik Bauch and Brian Burke // Method Studios
Heim and Roberts
Lifetime Achievement Awards were presented to Alan Heim, ACE, and Randy Roberts, ACE. Alan Heim, ACE is a native New Yorker whose credits and awards span feature films and television as a sound and picture editor. Some of his feature credits include The Pawnbroker, The Group, The Producers, The Sea Gull, The Twelve Chairs, Godspell, She’s Having a Baby, and Funny Farm. Heim won an Oscar, BAFTA, and ACE Eddie Award for All That Jazz and an Emmy for editing the miniseries Holocaust. He is currently president of both ACE and the Motion Picture Editors Guild.
“I learned to edit on the Moviola, then the Kem and Steenbeck and other venerable mechanical systems and have spent some years meeting with many of the people who have advanced the technologies that impact the editing room,” Heim recalls. “We are all in service to telling great stories. To be honored with this award from my peers in the post production community is extremely meaningful, and the recognition of my colleagues is deeply appreciated.”
Honoree Randy Roberts, ACE, has served the American Cinema Editors for nearly two decades as a member of the boards of directors, vice president, president and director of marketing. Starting in the film editing department at Warner Bros. his feature credits include, Greased Lightning, One from the Heart, and Players. His television credits include Chicago Hope, LA Law, The Agency and Tour of Duty. He is an ACE Eddie Award winner a Primetime Emmy Award nominee, and the recipient of the American Cinema Editors’ Heritage Award.
“My career in this industry is an incredibly important part of my life, coaxing stories into life, working with some of the greatest people I have ever known,” says Roberts. “To receive this award from my friends at the HPA is heartwarming and means the world to me. I am personally grateful, but also want to say thank you for recognizing the incredibly important role of editors in our industry.”
“The bonds between editors and other members of the post production community are amongst the most binding,” adds Silverman. “It is an honor to celebrate the work of these two wonderful men with this award, which is given in recognition of their creativity, dedication and service to our industry. I have been honored to have worked with both Randy and Alan in our professional roles as well as in the HPA’s collaboration with ACE for many years. I could not be more delighted to give these two men this award, which means so much to me personally and to the HPA.”