Eight years is all it took for FilmLight to grow from a very small start-up to the brand leader in digital film technology. The reward for this has now arrived—an unprecedented sweep of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Sci-Tech awards, recognising the achievements of ten of FilmLight’s founding engineers in every one of the company’s three main product lines. This is the first time in the history of the Sci-Tech awards that as many as four out of the fifteen awards are going to the engineers of a single company, let alone a company as small as FilmLight.

Technology is transforming the production, post-production and viewing experience in the feature film sector, and FilmLight’s founders could not have played a more definitive role in this development. As the movie experience advances, the business model and boxoffice receipts are changing too, making Hollywood’s acknowledgement of the technical heroes in this change all the sweeter.

“These four awards represent the culmination of many years of commitment and hard work on the part of FilmLight staff to develop tools to support filmmaking in the 21st century,” said FilmLight Founder Wolfgang Lempp. “We feel honoured and humbled and wish to express our sincere gratitude to the Academy and its members. These awards will serve as inspiration and commitment in our ongoing effort to provide filmmakers with new tools to create incredible imagery.”

Two of the awards are related to the development of Truelight, which is used to manage colour representation between film and the wide range of electronic displays. Truelight has become an essential part in the process of providing accurate colour in digital intermediate environments, visual effects pipelines and other digital production workflows worldwide. A Technical Achievement award is going to Mark Wolforth and Tony Sedivy for the development of Truelight’s real-time, 3D look-up table hardware system. Dr. Richard Kirk receives a Scientific and Engineering award for the overall design and development of Truelight.

Wolfgang Lempp, Theo Brown (posthumous), Tony Sedivy and Dr. John Quartel also receive a Scientific and Engineering award for the development of the Northlight scanner, whose ability to perform high-resolution, pin-registered scanning of film at the highest quality has made it the industry reference for capturing the full detail of all the information recorded on film.

The third Scientific and Engineering award will be presented to Steve Chapman, Martin Tlaskal, Darrin Smart and James Logie for the development of Baselight, one of the industry’s first digital colour correction systems. Baselight has contributed to the rapid development of the digital intermediate process by greatly expanding the toolset available to digital colourists. It has also helped to democratize digital post production by making high quality colour grading tools accessible to users worldwide.

The awards will be presented at the Sci/Tech Awards Dinner and Ceremony in Los Angeles on the 20th of February.

FilmLight products are employed by leading post production facilities and broadcasters worldwide, and have been used in the production and remastering of hundreds of films, including Casino Royale, The Godfather Trilogy, Minority Report, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and each of the films in the Harry Potter series, as well as countless television shows and commercials. FilmLight is a two-time recipient of Queen’s Awards for Enterprise, the UK’s most prestigious award for business performance. Additionally, FilmLight founders Wolfgang Lempp and Steve Chapman were awarded a Technical and Scientific Achievement Award in 2005 by the British Kinematograph Sound & Television Society (BKTS).

Contact – Steve Chapman ([email protected]); Wolfgang Lemmp ([email protected]); +44 20 7292 0400

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